Public policies can either fuel or ease racial disparities in wealth. This report marks the first-ever systematic analysis of the impact of different policies, highlighting the policies that could help erase the racial wealth gap.
Why a Massachusetts Partnership Bank will generate new revenue for Massachusetts, save local governments money, and make our small businesses, farms and consumers less vulnerable to cutbacks in lending in our state.
A Washington Investment Trust will generate new revenue for Washington, save local governments money, and make our businesses less dependent on the Wall Street banks that have cut back on lending to small businesses and consumers in our state.
A Hawaii Partnership Bank will generate new revenue for Hawaii, save local governments money, and make us less dependent on big offshore banks that are dramatically reshaping life for families and businesses in Hawaii.
A Maryland Partnership Bank will generate new revenue for Maryland, save local governments money, and make our businesses less dependent on the Wall Street banks.
To fairly evaluate any higher education reform proposal, we must understand the ways that these dual burdens—less wealth and more debt—lead to worse outcomes for Black students than white students.
Without the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, lenders preying on communities of color would continue to pull in windfall gains, while widening the racial wealth gap and undermining the precarious financial stability of vulnerable households.
Rather than try to dismantle one of the few tools we have to keep this problem from getting worse, this administration should take a more nuanced and comprehensive approach toward making our campuses more reflective of our society, particularly for the most diverse generation of students ever.
The Congressional Black Caucus budget should be implemented because it calls for racial equity in future infrastructure and investments; improving public transit infrastructure, noting that people of color are heavy users of it; and school infrastructure, saying that modernized buildings held reduce achievements gaps.
Even before the Equifax breach, the integrity of credit reports was murky at best. A Federal Trade Commission report found that as many as one in five consumers had a credit error from one of the top reporting agencies (Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion). But the fundamental problem isn’t data integrity—it’s economic justice. According to a survey by the think tank Demos, declining credit was associated more with misfortunes and unforeseeable crises than with a lack of financial responsibility.
A 2013 survey by Demos, a public policy organization that combats inequality, showed that 10 percent of respondents who were unemployed had been informed that they would not be hired because of some facet of their credit history. The same survey indicated that 1 out of every 7 job applicants with “blemished credit histories” had been told they were not hired because of their credit history. [...]
The Black Census Project is intended to “give us a better sense of who black people are, where we are, and what we hope and dream for,” says Alicia Garza who also helped start the Black Lives Matter movement.