Black Wealth Hardly Exists, even when you include Lebron, Beyonce and Oprah

Attorney Antonio Moore discusses his new piece “Black Wealth Hardly Exists, Even When You Include NBA, NFL and Rap Stars”

Excerpt: I don’t care if Odell Beckham Jr. scores another NFL touchdown this year while wearing the rapper Drake’s OVO cleats. I don’t care if Stephen Curry gets along with Kevin Durant this NBA season… What I do care about deeply is… why there is so little black wealth in America, and the decadent veil being of celebrity used to cover the tragedy. Yvette Carnell Bob Lord Zo Williams Dr. Umar Ifatunde Boyce Watkins Roland Martin Tariq Nasheed Boyce Watkins Oprah Winfrey JAY Z Beyoncé Stephen Curry LeBron James Cameron Newton Odell Beckham Jr Chuck Collins Dedrick Asante-Muhammad NFL NBA ESPN

 
#Blackwealthmatters, I have written extensively on the subject on sites from Inequality.org and beyond. Today we stand at a place where African Americans own little if any of America’s land, produce little if any of the country’s resources and possess negligible amounts of this nation’s immense wealth. This is all while they still project aspiration based on a blind faith in the American Dream.
 
We see the effect of the fallout from Chicago to Baltimore, as the police march into rioting black communities starved of resources. Yet no one is talking about the state of black life as the economic catastrophe which it has become in a substantively consistent way.
 
We’re not hearing anything from President Barack Obama, not the Congressional Black Caucus, and definitely neither Clinton nor Trump. Not even black families themselves are dealing with the financial realities of these times. It is as if there is a belief all this economic tragedy can exist, and black Americans can still buy homes, pay off student loans and save for retirement, despite all the current data showing otherwise. As an example, the National Association of Real Estate Broker’s 2016 report, “The State of Housing in Black America” recently stated, that the current home ownership rate for blacks is at a twenty year low of 41.7 percent. To give that rate context, it is lower than the national home ownership rate was during the Great Depression of the 1930s.
 
In fact, when you deduct the family car and other depreciating assets from their worth of the total 14.5 million African American homes, half of all black American households accounting for over 7 million families of three, have a total net worth of less than $1,700. While the net worth of the median white family remains near $100,000 using the same method of accounting. Yet African Americans dream on. Even the white poor have more money than most black families. Princeton University sociologist Dalton Conley has found that even white families living near the poverty line have a net worth exceeding $10,000.
 
Going even further into the data, a recent study by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) and the Corporation For Economic Development (CFED) found that it would take 228 years for the average black family to amass the same level of wealth the average white family holds today in 2016. All while white families create even more wealth over those same two hundred years. In fact, this is a gap that will never close if America stays on its current economic path. According to the Institute on Assets and Social Policy, for each dollar of increase in average income an African American household saw from 1984 – 2009 just $0.69 in additional wealth was generated, compared with the same dollar in increased income creating an additional $5.19 in wealth for a similarly situated white household. Read More Here