Thomas M Shapiro

Over a hundred years after the end of slavery, more than thirty years after the passage of major civil rights legislation, and following a concerted but prematurely curtailed War on Poverty, we harvest today a mixed legacy of racial progress. We celebrate the advancement of many blacks to middle-class status. [...] An official end to "de jure" housing segregation has even opened the door to neighborhoods and suburban residences previously off-limits to black residents. Nonetheless, many blacks have fallen by the wayside in their march toward economic equality. A growing number have not been able to take advantage of the opportunities now open to some. They suffer from educational deficiencies that make finding a foothold in an emerging technological economy near to impossible. Unable to move from deteriorated inner-city and older suburban communities, they entrust their children to school systems that are rarely able to provide them with the educational foundation they need to take the first steps up a racially skewed economic ladder. Trapped in communities of despair, they face increasing economic and social isolation from both their middle-class counterparts and white Americans. [...]

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, essential workers continuously put themselves in harm’s way to keep the United States running. We are deeply grateful for the labor of all essential workers over the past year, and recognize that their contributions kept so many other Americans safe, fed, and healthy. These contributions, and the short- and long-term consequences of the sacrifices that essential workers made during the COVID-19 pandemic differed by race, gender, industry, and occupation.

This report examines employment trends for essential workers over 12 months, beginning at the start of the pandemic. In particular, we highlight racial and gender inequities in the healthcare workforce and the experiences of Black women. Key findings include:

• While all essential workers suffered through the pandemic, Black women faced higher unemployment and lower wages than almost every other group.

• In health care, the occupations with a larger proportion of Black women had the highest unemployment and the lowest wages.

• While white healthcare workers were able to see rewards from their work through career advancement, Black women’s career standing more often stagnated or fell.

In this policy brief, we first critically examine the existing evidence and theories pertinent to cash transfers and wealth-generating programs, highlighting bold promises, evidentiary foundation, and challenges. The next section builds upon what we know about cash transfers and wealth accumulation to design a realistic Just Futures Fund policy proposal. We model the estimated impacts for this bold policy design with racial justice and equity as our North Stars. Spoiler Alert: [the results are incredibly impressive, transformative, disruptive, popular, and doable].

The current higher education financing regime sediments and exacerbates inequality, and student loans adversely affect the Black-White racial wealth gap. Black students—and students at for-profit universities, who are more likely to be students of color—often face the greatest challenges as they try to finance their degrees with student loans. They take on more loans, amass higher amounts of loans, and experience greater difficulty in paying off loans. Frequently without family financial wealth to support repayment and facing ongoing discrimination in the labor market,8 Black borrowers are much more likely to experience longterm financial insecurity due to student loans. Would anybody knowingly design a system where, two decades after starting college, many Black borrowers still are paying on virtually all of their student loans, while for the typical White borrower, a minimal debt burden remains? Would anybody knowingly design a system whereby 38 elite colleges have more students who come from families in the top 1 percent than students who come from the bottom 60 percent? Elite colleges, to be sure, historically served upper-class White males, yet access gained by
women and students of color has created only a lukewarm diversity in the context of today’s higher education financing regime.
This report highlights how student loans often create a long-term debt burden that blocks wealth accumulation, rendering mobility more fragile and impeding long-term security, particularly for young Black borrowers. While the crisis has grown nationally for all groups in recent years, the data below underscore that Black students are particularly harmed by the current student loan system. The role of higher education financing in contributing to the racial wealth gap and its widening are detailed in this report.

Occupational segregation results in racialized patterns in which people are distributed unequally across jobs in the labor market. The impact of this inequality goes far beyond paychecks. With incomes making up just about two-thirds of employee compensation, it is benefits that complete the entire employee compensation package. Historical legacy and contemporary employment practices concentrate Black and Latino working people disproportionately in jobs and industries stripped of or lacking in benefits that connect work to wealth and better livelihoods. For many employees, the workplace can be a crucial access point for asset-building opportunities through quality jobs that provide comprehensive employee compensation packages. However, Black and Latino workers face ongoing discrimination in hiring, higher unemployment rates, fewer sick days, and less workplace flexibility compared to White workers, which severely diminishes workplace stability and access to wealth-building benefits. To understand the institutional and policy mechanisms by which wealth is distributed and inequality worsened at the workplace, it is imperative that we identify and recognize how the total employment package—from income to benefits to additional workplace resources— contribute to growing inequality and the racial wealth gap. This report examines the impact of benefits disparities on the asset security of households of color. Our investigation results in a deeper understanding of the impacts of occupational segregation on access to workplace benefits, the racial wealth gap, and workers’ economic security.