History proves structural causes of racial and gender disparities – multiple warrants

[Jhumpa, “Exploring Guaranteed Income Through A Racial And Gender Justice Lens,” Roosevelt Institute, June 2019 https://rooseveltinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/RI_UBI-Racial-Gender-Justice-brief-201906.pdf, accessed June 26, 2023, GDS-LL]

THE DRIVERS OF WEALTH INEQUITIES BY RACE AND GENDER

When designing any policy—including a guaranteed income—to ensure that it promotes racial and gender wealth equity, it is imperative to understand the history of wealth accumulation in the US. Specifically, we must acknowledge and account for who has been given access to wealth building opportunities and who has been, and continues to be, denied.

Historical Policies and Practices

Our nation has a troubled and lengthy history of rules that have driven today’s racial and gender wealth disparities. It is not, as we are too-often led to believe, personal behavior or individual choices that are the root causes of the economic stratification we see today; rather, it is a result of the systemic exclusion of wealth building opportunities for women and people of color. These exclusions can best be seen through specific time periods, including our nation’s founding, the Reconstruction and Jim Crow periods, and the New Deal era, but they are also reinforced through present-day policies or lack of policies that ensure equity (Flynn et al. 2017).

America’s legacy of stealing land from Indigenous communities and enslaving Black people from other parts of the world underpin present-day wealth inequities: The denial of humanity to Black and Indigenous communities from the earliest days of our nation, and the systematic blocking and stripping of wealth from these communities, led to the accumulation of wealth for white people—and for the country more broadly.

The end of the Civil War brought forth the Reconstruction era that moved the needle on racial equity, albeit for a fleeting period of time. Reconstruction was met with a fierce backlash that ushered in the Jim Crow era and a wave of new rules that systematically and legally excluded Black people—along with other people of color including Native Americans—from many social and economic opportunities, all while sanctioning separate and superior public facilities for white Americans. Notably, Black people were not allowed to live in white neighborhoods and were often denied voting power. This allowed for white communities to have access to well-funded schools and neighborhoods along with bank loans and other public and private aide institutions; inferior, underfunded, and sometimes no such facilities were offered to Black Americans. This reality further entrenched economic separation between white people and people of color in the US.