Now I know. Our “Undoing Racism” trainer, Diana, taught us that whites inherit twenty times as much wealth as blacks. I don’t have her references, but United for a Fair Economy reports:
Four decades after the Civil Rights movement, Blacks still earn only 57 cents and Latinos earn 59 cents for each dollar of White median family income. The contrast is even starker for net wealth; that is, the total value of investments, savings, homes and other property minus any debt. Blacks hold only 10 cents of net wealth and Latinos hold 12 cents for every dollar that Whites hold.
Indeed, Diana said that while the median income, including debt, for a white single woman today is $42,000, for a black single woman it’s five dollars. But the important thing to grasp here, I think, is how much more wealth white people have access to. Using herself as an example, as she often did, Diana explained that she was able to return to New Orleans relatively quickly after Katrina because a parent of hers provided the downpayment on a new house.
Now, where did my mother’s money come from?
- From the sale of her small New Jersey condo.
- From the money she herself inherited from my grandmother and didn’t live to use up.
How did she manage to buy that condo? Her brother lent her the money and held the mortgage.
Where did that money in turn come from? From my grandparents. Where did my grandparents’ money come from? From the house in East Brunswick where my mother grew up. From their pension-paying jobs as a chemist and a public-school teacher. From their parents.
Where did their parents’ money come from? From the opportunities they (or perhaps their parents) had to amass wealth as immigrant Jews who eventually became white.
White privilege paid me money. And in trying to minimize and rationalize away the wealth it has given me, I was trying to repudiate my own privilege. Which can’t be done, and (to paraphrase Diana again) until I understand the truth of that in my heart, my own divorce from racism can’t really begin.