In Discussing the "Middle Class," Don't Forget the Racial Wealth Divide

(Photo: Thomas Barwick / Getty Images / DigitalVision)(Photo: Thomas Barwick / Getty Images / DigitalVision)

Janine Jackson: The lead of the Washington Post storyreads:

The incomes of middle-class Americans rose last year to the highest level ever recorded by the Census Bureau, as poverty declined and the scars of the past decade’s Great Recession seemed to finally fade.

The piece ends with a source’s comment that this is “unambiguously good news.” Somewhere in between, you might catch the notes that “inequality remains high” and “yawning racial disparities remain,” but the story’s framing encourages you to see those as asterisks.

Much media coverage presents the economic well-being of non-white Americans as an afterthought, or a tangent from an overall picture. And if those groups’ fortunes are out of step with those of white people, the implication is that they’ll catch up with time. Whatever positive trends there are will naturally “trickle down” to them at some point. But this implication is wrong, and it would be important to understand why it’s wrong, even if black and Latinx people were not on course to be the country’s majority.

A new report helps us see what’s happening. It’s called The Road to Zero Wealth: How the Racial Wealth Divide Is Hollowing Out America’s Middle Class’s Middle Class. It comes from the groups Prosperity Now and the Institute for Policy Studies, and we’re joined now by one of its authors. Dedrick Asante-Muhammad is Senior Fellow, Racial Wealth Divide, at Prosperity Now. He joins us now by phone from somewhere near Washington, DC. Welcome to CounterSpin, Dedrick Asante-Muhammad.

Dedrick Asante-Muhammad: Thanks for having me.

The Census report is about income, of course, money from wages or capital gains, and this new report looks at wealth, which is the amount of assets someone has after you subtract their debts. Can you tell us why you think it’s important to focus on racial disparities in wealth, and then give us a sense of what that gap looks like?

Yes. I think wealth as a foundational economic…

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