Speaker 1: When I was growing up, East Texas might as well
Speaker 1: have been another planet. I grew up in Phoenix. There
Speaker 1: was me, my dad, my brother Dan, and the Catholic
Speaker 1: schools where we were often the only black kids. In
Speaker 1: my mind, Texas was big hats rodeos that showed Dallas,
Speaker 1: and the only thing that connected me to the state
Speaker 1: was a chunk of land my family owned there. My
Speaker 1: dad's land was in a tiny town called Gilmour, near
Speaker 1: Mount Pleasant, where we have a lot of distant relatives.
Speaker 1: We drove through there once, but I don't remember meeting
Speaker 1: any relatives. I do recall sleeping in the car and
Speaker 1: arguing with my brother. After Arizona, I moved to California
Speaker 1: and then France, about as far as you get from Phoenix.
Speaker 1: Sometimes my dad would call me and talk about the
Speaker 1: Texas property. How would buy a better life for him
Speaker 1: and my brother, who has a disability, How there might
Speaker 1: be oil on the land or some kind of rare timber.
Speaker 1: I was never sure how seriously I should take him,
Speaker 1: but sometimes I'd like to fantasize that this could be
Speaker 1: my retirement. I also like to brag to my French
Speaker 1: friends about being a Texan landowner. It sounded kind of cool.
Speaker 1: Years went by. My dad talked less and less about
Speaker 1: the land, but he never gave up on it, and
Speaker 1: one email I got from him, he says, I'm certain
Speaker 1: of one thing. If that property ever pays off in Texas,
Speaker 1: we are out of here to someplace other than Mexico.
Speaker 1: I have no idea what he meant by Mexico, and
Speaker 1: I never got a chance to ask. He got cancer,
Speaker 1: and while sick, a cousin reached out to see whether
Speaker 1: I could get him to sell some of the land.
Speaker 1: I tell the cousin how busy I was with kids
Speaker 1: and work and living abroad, sort of code for I
Speaker 1: really can't be bothered with this right now. Dad died
Speaker 1: in early twenty six and for the next four years
Speaker 1: I completely forgot about Texas. But during the pandemic and
Speaker 1: after George Floyd was killed, I got to thinking about family.
Speaker 1: While digging around my closet, I came across a bright
Speaker 1: red folder called Dad's Stuff. I opened it and I
Speaker 1: was floored by what I saw. The data shows that
Speaker 1: the median white family has ten times more wealth than
Speaker 1: the average black family. One of the drivers of that
Speaker 1: wealth gap is redlining. When it comes to understanding financial
Speaker 1: inequality in this country, Economists often point to the absence
Speaker 1: of African American generational wealth see the black Page. It's
Speaker 1: a trend propelled not just by economic forces, but by
Speaker 1: white racism in local white political and economic power. It's
Speaker 1: much easier to enter rate a lunch comment than it
Speaker 1: is to guarantee an annual income, for instance, to get
Speaker 1: rid of positive Welcome back to the paycheck. I'm Rebecca
Speaker 1: Greenfield and I'm Jackie Simmons. In our last two seasons,
Speaker 1: we looked at all the reasons for and efforts to
Speaker 1: fix the gender pay gap. This time we're switching gears.
Speaker 1: We were starting to think about our third season when
Speaker 1: the pandemic hit. It quickly became clear there was another
Speaker 1: economic inequality demanding our attention, the racial wealth gap. I
Speaker 1: got to talking about it with my colleague Jackie. I'd
Speaker 1: recently moved back to the States after two decades overseas.
Speaker 1: I came back to a country dealing with its racist
Speaker 1: past in a way it never had Black Lives Matter
Speaker 1: protest politics. All this on top of a pandemic that
Speaker 1: got me thinking about how my own experience with race
Speaker 1: was shaped by my family's past, and it took me
Speaker 1: back to Texas in the land. I started asking questions,
Speaker 1: which led to more questions, and as I went deeper,
Speaker 1: I wondered how unique our story was. How did black
Speaker 1: people build wealth in America? How did they keep or
Speaker 1: fail to keep it? That's what Jackie and I will
Speaker 1: be exploring for the next eight weeks. The US is
Speaker 1: the richest nation in the world and has been for
Speaker 1: a long time. All told, American households have about one
Speaker 1: sixteen trillion dollars in wealth, most of that owned by
Speaker 1: white people. Black people make up around the population, but
Speaker 1: have just three point eight percent of the wealth. The
Speaker 1: US passed civil rights laws meant to remove barriers for
Speaker 1: black Americans nearly sixty years ago. Some things have changed
Speaker 1: a lot, but not the wealth gap and real terms.
Speaker 1: Here's what that means. When you count up how much
Speaker 1: the average American household is worth, including stuff like property, investments, savings,
Speaker 1: and anything else worth a dime minus any liability is
Speaker 1: like student debt or mortgage. White households have almost seven
Speaker 1: times more than Black households. There are a lot of
Speaker 1: reasons for that, mostly America's legacy of slavery and racism,
Speaker 1: and that shows up in all kinds of ways that
Speaker 1: contribute to economic inequality. Black people are in less pay
Speaker 1: higher taxes, have more student debt than white people, and
Speaker 1: so on. Over time, this has made it harder for
Speaker 1: black people to accumulate wealth and pass it on to
Speaker 1: their children. As much as Americans love the Racks to
Speaker 1: Richest story, the reality is most people acquire wealth from
Speaker 1: their parents or their parents parents. By one measure, Americans
Speaker 1: wealth came from inheritance. It's hard to overstate how important
Speaker 1: that is. William Daretty, who also goes by Sandy, is
Speaker 1: a professor at Duke University, and it's one of the
Speaker 1: nation's leading scholars on race and economics. If there are
Speaker 1: certain families that have a greater capacity to provide gifts
Speaker 1: to the next generation than others, they're also providing that
Speaker 1: next generation with a greater range of opportunity and a
Speaker 1: greater likelihood of having a more economically secure future. For
Speaker 1: all the reasons we'll talk about this season, white people
Speaker 1: have had and continue to have huge advantages when it
Speaker 1: comes to building wealth. Among the five hundred richest people
Speaker 1: in the world that Bloomberg tracks, there are one hundred
Speaker 1: fifty five American billionaires, and just one of them, Robert Smith,
Speaker 1: is black. Yes, having money means you can buy bigger
Speaker 1: houses and nicer cars, but it's much more than that.
Speaker 1: Here's Sandy Daretty again. Wealth can protect you from income
Speaker 1: losses in emergencies where you might lose a job, where
Speaker 1: you might be confronted with catastrophic illness. Wealth provides you
Speaker 1: with a certain kind of personal insurance, and having that
Speaker 1: safety net it creates different kinds of opportunities and power.
Speaker 1: The possibility of moving your family into a high amenity neighborhood,
Speaker 1: the opportunity of trying to ensure that your children receive
Speaker 1: a high quality education. It gives you access to the
Speaker 1: political process. It allows you to leave resources for subsequent generations.
Speaker 1: The racial wealth gap tells us a lot about the
Speaker 1: economy as a whole. Who has security and economic mobility,
Speaker 1: and this is really important. Whose children gets set up
Speaker 1: for success later on. So that land my family owned
Speaker 1: in Texas, my dad hoped it would set us up
Speaker 1: for success or at least provides some financial security. And
Speaker 1: when he inherit the lend from his mother, she wanted
Speaker 1: this aimed for him and her other children it didn't
Speaker 1: quite work out that way. Anyone dealing with passing down
Speaker 1: land knows how expensive and messy that process can be
Speaker 1: and always has been. But historically, white families and black
Speaker 1: families have faced different challenges. In My family's story typifies
Speaker 1: some of them. The story begins with Will and Barbara Brotus.
Speaker 1: Barbara was born in eighteen seventy six. She's my great
Speaker 1: great aunt and was married to Will. They were farmers
Speaker 1: and had nearly eighty acres in Gilmer, Texas, about two
Speaker 1: hours east of Dallas. The thumb was between the school
Speaker 1: in their home. That's sunny and like me, she has
Speaker 1: relatives who were raised by the Brotus and they raised
Speaker 1: peace cord beings okrah Amish, peace onion, wallomelon camel, of theories,
Speaker 1: everything they could. People thought of the protest as strict,
Speaker 1: god fearing people, but they were also kind. They took
Speaker 1: an abandoned or orphaned children, including my grandmother Jewel. They
Speaker 1: cared for at least half a dozen kids over the years.
Speaker 1: For a time they lived off the crops they raised
Speaker 1: on those seventy seven acres. Then Will died and Barbara
Speaker 1: divided the land between children and family friends. She died
Speaker 1: in nineteen sixty four. I searched high and low trying
Speaker 1: to uncover exactly how Will and Barbara originally came into
Speaker 1: the land. I went through public records, I made phone
Speaker 1: calls to family members across multiple states. I called county officials.
Speaker 1: What experts and historians do know is that black farmers
Speaker 1: were often gifted land from a white landowner or possibly
Speaker 1: even a former slave master. My family records only date
Speaker 1: to the time when the Brotess split up their land.
Speaker 1: Let me let me check. Let me check one of
Speaker 1: my documents here. Okay, that's my cousin Ples. He has
Speaker 1: all of the records. Uh. Jules Simmons two point five
Speaker 1: two acres, Mildred's Shop three point five acres, Florida, May
Speaker 1: Phillips two point five acres, Katherine Young two five acres.
Speaker 1: By the time the Brotus died, the children they raised
Speaker 1: had moved on and out of Gilmour. They wanted their
Speaker 1: children to go to college and were professional jobs, which
Speaker 1: usually took them to bigger cities. And that's exactly what happened.
Speaker 1: But while our families commitment to the land declined, one
Speaker 1: thing did not property taxes. They went up and up,
Speaker 1: and the land that should have been an asset became
Speaker 1: a liability. I looked at it. It seemed like a headache.
Speaker 1: My cousin Noel, who lives in Atlanta, sold the last
Speaker 1: of his family's personal in two thousand nine. All I
Speaker 1: heard about the land was distress. My mother didn't concern
Speaker 1: herself with it for the most part. Other than giving
Speaker 1: money to help pay all property taxes. There are other
Speaker 1: reasons not to hold onto the land. LANDA Davis is
Speaker 1: another cousin and lives in Dallas. At one point, she
Speaker 1: considered using the Gilmer Land as a retreat center for
Speaker 1: her youth mentoring group, so she went to Upshurre County
Speaker 1: to deal with taxes. But when she got there, she says,
Speaker 1: a white man overheard her talking about her plans, and
Speaker 1: he said, I don't want to deter you or any
Speaker 1: of that, but I don't think you, being black, this
Speaker 1: will be a good place for you all. And we're like, okay,
Speaker 1: he said, I have some good black friends, but there's
Speaker 1: a lot of white people out around here. This not
Speaker 1: really wanting X to be in this area. Llana sold
Speaker 1: most of her parcel in we would never live in Gilmer,
Speaker 1: or even developed that land in Gilmer. We need to
Speaker 1: let that go back to my dad's land. Remember when
Speaker 1: I was digging around my closet over a weekend during lockdown, Well,
Speaker 1: I had to catch my breath when I found an
Speaker 1: offer letter from my dad's land from a man I'd
Speaker 1: never heard of. Turns out Dad agreed to sell his
Speaker 1: piece of land a long time ago. I had no
Speaker 1: idea he sold it or why. The man who bought
Speaker 1: the land was named Shane Mayn, so I called him
Speaker 1: up to find out more. Okay, so are you are
Speaker 1: you from like that vicinity or are you from a
Speaker 1: different part of Texas. I'm actually from gilmur originally. Shane's
Speaker 1: white and has spent his entire life in Gilmour. He
Speaker 1: works as a home inspector, he's a deacon in a church,
Speaker 1: and he's been buying land in the area since he
Speaker 1: was seventeen. He eske to meate he's got around sixty
Speaker 1: or seventy acres now, including my dad's two point five. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I remember when we bought that property. We've been kind
Speaker 1: of like buying pete piece and here and there we
Speaker 1: were going we were actually gonna be aild a house
Speaker 1: on it, if we got enough accumulated in there. Uh,
Speaker 1: but we never have. We've just got trees up there.
Speaker 1: At the moment. In the files I was searching through,
Speaker 1: I saw Shane offered my dad about six thousand dollars
Speaker 1: for the property. That figure felt really low to me.
Speaker 1: And then I saw paperwork in that same file cabinet
Speaker 1: showing the county had to praise the land at almost
Speaker 1: six times that amount. I asked Shane about that. He
Speaker 1: didn't agree the land is worth that much. I was
Speaker 1: told that every acre in ups Your county is valued
Speaker 1: at twelve thousand, five hundred dollars and no matter what
Speaker 1: it is, and that's the base pride. It can go up,
Speaker 1: but it won't go below twelve thousand five night and
Speaker 1: every piece of land on that no matter why. Really,
Speaker 1: I couldn't disagree more because like Yolanda's half an acre,
Speaker 1: I'd be glad to send you a picture of it.
Speaker 1: It is a swamp. I mean a swamp. I reached
Speaker 1: out to the up Sture Appraisal Office for the record
Speaker 1: an official. They're said, valuations vary and not every property
Speaker 1: starts at twelve thousand five an acre. I've never been
Speaker 1: to Gomer, I've never seen the land. The county said
Speaker 1: it was valued at more than thirty thousand dollars, which
Speaker 1: would help explain why the taxes were so high. But
Speaker 1: when it came time to sell, it was only worth
Speaker 1: six thousand dollars. That still didn't make sense to me.
Speaker 1: But when you start to add up the history of
Speaker 1: how we got the land, the multiple slivers that were
Speaker 1: parceled out to family owners who were impossible to track down,
Speaker 1: the inadequate record keeping, the nature of the land itself,
Speaker 1: and high taxes, you start to get a sense of
Speaker 1: how black families in the US have a hard time
Speaker 1: passing on wealth. Before I hung up, I asked Shane
Speaker 1: what he planned to do with the land. Everything my
Speaker 1: son to give them something another flip. And when I
Speaker 1: get older, Black Americans have been trying to shore up
Speaker 1: their economic futures for over a hundred fifty years, We're
Speaker 1: going to spend a lot of time looking at how
Speaker 1: those efforts have been boarded time and time again. But
Speaker 1: there are also places in the US that are seen
Speaker 1: as havens for black people, places where ambitious young professionals
Speaker 1: are finding community and upward mobility, and there's one in
Speaker 1: city that tops that list, Atlanta. I've been a journalist
Speaker 1: at Bloomberg for twenty four years. I started in Paris
Speaker 1: as a retail reporter. These days, I manage our bureaus
Speaker 1: across the America's, among other things. And just over a
Speaker 1: year ago, one of our reporters, Jordan Holman, told me
Speaker 1: she wanted to leave New York City. I pitched to
Speaker 1: you that I should be going to Atlanta, um, which
Speaker 1: I remember you were surprised about and said you did
Speaker 1: not expect that from me. Oh did I say that?
Speaker 1: Because you figured that I would want to stay in
Speaker 1: New York and that I was super happy there, So
Speaker 1: why did you want to go to Atlanta? I was
Speaker 1: imagining Atlanta just being super fun, you know. When I
Speaker 1: would bounce the idea off my friends, like what if
Speaker 1: I moved to Atlanta? They were like, if I would
Speaker 1: move to any other city, it would be Atlanta because
Speaker 1: there's so much entertainment and culture here, lots of good food,
Speaker 1: and then the element that there's so many black people
Speaker 1: there who are thriving. I was like, Okay, I can
Speaker 1: make that work too, I can be part of that.
Speaker 1: So moved and now you're in Atlanta, I am, and
Speaker 1: it's been really eye opening. I think the idea of
Speaker 1: Atlanta as this black mecca have been so deeply ingrained
Speaker 1: in me growing up. I had cousins who graduated from
Speaker 1: more House and Spellman, and when we visit it, we
Speaker 1: went to the King Center and all of that. So
Speaker 1: I was really surprised when I read the stats. There
Speaker 1: are a lot of successful black people in Atlanta, but
Speaker 1: the income inequality is also off the charts. The median
Speaker 1: household income for a black family in Atlanta is about
Speaker 1: twenty eight thousand dollars, compared to about eighty four thousand
Speaker 1: dollars for white family living in the city. I was
Speaker 1: reading the biography of Maynard Jackson, the first African American
Speaker 1: mayor as you know in Atlanta. He was elected in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy three, and in his biography he talks about
Speaker 1: the need for affordable and worked for its housing in Atlanta.
Speaker 1: So it's been fascinating to me that this is still
Speaker 1: a challenge for us. That's Atlanta's current mayor, Keisha Lance Bottoms,
Speaker 1: speaking at a Clinton Foundation event in the fall. She's
Speaker 1: the city sixth black mayor, but she's talking about the
Speaker 1: first one Maynard Jackson. He was elected in nineteen seventy
Speaker 1: three when he was just thirty five years old. Atlanta
Speaker 1: was a center of black political power during the Civil
Speaker 1: Rights Movement. Dr Martin Luther King Jr. Grew up here,
Speaker 1: went to more House, preached from Aberneze or Baptist and
Speaker 1: by the end of the nineteen sixties you had a
Speaker 1: highly motivated, engaged black community here and they elected Jackson.
Speaker 1: I talked to Tiffany Bussey about this. She's the director
Speaker 1: of the Entrepreneurship Center at more House and she's been
Speaker 1: in Atlanta for thirty years. I think we we cannot
Speaker 1: have this conversation without really giving thanks and looking at
Speaker 1: the work and building on the shoulders of the work
Speaker 1: from Maynard Jackson in the first Black man of Atlanta.
Speaker 1: He used his political power to lay the groundwork for
Speaker 1: what would become generations of black wealth. And he did
Speaker 1: it with this very unsexy thing government contracts. The city
Speaker 1: was expanding its airport to become an international hub. It
Speaker 1: was the largest construction project in the South at the time,
Speaker 1: and everyone wanted a piece. Jackson decided that a full
Speaker 1: of the contracts we're going to go to minority owned firms.
Speaker 1: Prior to that, they got in just one percent. By
Speaker 1: giving folks a chance and stating a certain percentage to
Speaker 1: let them in, not to lord a bar, not to
Speaker 1: change the quality of what needs to be done, but
Speaker 1: just saying we're going to give them an opportunity to
Speaker 1: get a piece of this pie. UM, I think really
Speaker 1: really cropped the door in UM started the whole movement.
Speaker 1: The idea of giving minority groups preferential treatment for city
Speaker 1: contracts was new, controversial, and immediately effective. Within five years,
Speaker 1: about city contracts went to minority on firms in other
Speaker 1: cities started to implement similar programs, but the set asides
Speaker 1: or affirmative action was not universally popular. In Atlanta and elsewhere.
Speaker 1: They were almost immediately challenged in court, kicking off decades
Speaker 1: of legal battles that slowed everything down. By the time
Speaker 1: the airport gets done. Reagan's in the White House. The
Speaker 1: culture shifts in Atlantis, growing black middle class kids are
Speaker 1: going to college to become lawyers or doctors, or to
Speaker 1: work in consulting or head to Wall Street. And that's great,
Speaker 1: But what happens in Atlanta, and this is happening everywhere
Speaker 1: else in the US is that money leaves the poor
Speaker 1: and working class black neighborhoods and heads to the suburbs
Speaker 1: or neighborhoods with bigger houses, better schools, nicer supermarkets. Latresa
Speaker 1: mclaughharn Ryan is another long time Atlanta resident who's watched
Speaker 1: some of these trends unfold. She has the Atlanta Wealth
Speaker 1: Building Initiative, which raises awareness about income inequality in the city.
Speaker 1: When people do have greater options, or the greater options
Speaker 1: that began to develop as a result of the policies
Speaker 1: that were put into place in the in the seventies,
Speaker 1: um over time, they moved to where those amenities are
Speaker 1: easier to harness. It's not just about the amenities, it's
Speaker 1: also about community, who your neighbors are. Before I moved here,
Speaker 1: I didn't realize just how clicky Atlanta could be. So
Speaker 1: where do you go to college? Where do you go
Speaker 1: to church? Are you in a sorority? On one hand,
Speaker 1: those kind networks built a lot of social and political capital,
Speaker 1: but they also leave a lot of people out. Here's
Speaker 1: Professor Bussy again. I'm afraid that some of what I
Speaker 1: see happening in Atlanta is exactly that you have the
Speaker 1: group that is making it, and then they go off
Speaker 1: into their own little social clubs and repeat what the
Speaker 1: majority community has done. And we know that we did
Speaker 1: not like what they did. Well, we have some of
Speaker 1: that happening also, and we have to find a way
Speaker 1: to break that and not repeat the same mistakes that
Speaker 1: we saw there. There's definitely a lot working for some
Speaker 1: black folks in Atlanta. For example, the median income for
Speaker 1: black families in the city grew about from that was
Speaker 1: faster than for white households, and it was a bigger
Speaker 1: jump than for black families in New York, Los Angeles
Speaker 1: and Chicago. In the last decade, the number of black
Speaker 1: households in Atlanta making at least two hundred thousand dollars
Speaker 1: a year is up by a hundred and that rising
Speaker 1: tide hasn't lifted all boats, at least not enough to
Speaker 1: put it in in black poverty or the racial wealth
Speaker 1: gap in Atlanta. There's a new generation of activists and
Speaker 1: politicians who are ready to leverage the city's political power
Speaker 1: to change that, and they're acknowledging that the issues we're
Speaker 1: seeing today we're never fully dealt with in the past.
Speaker 1: Here's Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms again. My husband is a
Speaker 1: corporate corporate executive. I am the mayor of Atlanta. I
Speaker 1: live in a neighborhood that has not recovered from the
Speaker 1: two thousand and eight crisis. I still owe more on
Speaker 1: my home um than its value, and my schools in
Speaker 1: my neighborhood right pretty much at the bottom of all
Speaker 1: of our public schools. We can't address one or the other.
Speaker 1: We have to address it comprehensively. So, Jordan, does Atlanta
Speaker 1: feel like a black mecca in the same way it
Speaker 1: did before you moved? I think Atlanta is definitely still
Speaker 1: a black mecca, but I am just realizing that there's
Speaker 1: a lot of forces working against it. For example, Atlanta
Speaker 1: has this affordable housing crisis, there's this shrinking black middle class,
Speaker 1: and it's just just taking a lot of efforts make
Speaker 1: sure it lives up to its reputation of being a
Speaker 1: black mecca and making sure that every black person can
Speaker 1: benefit from some of, you know, the great opportunities that
Speaker 1: the city affords. Atlanta story is complex and layered and
Speaker 1: doesn't give us all the answers. What it does tell
Speaker 1: us about the racial wealth gap in the US is
Speaker 1: that even small political decisions can have big impacts. Next
Speaker 1: week on The Paycheck, we'll be going deep on just that,
Speaker 1: the political history of the racial welcap and how moments
Speaker 1: both big and small, led to the inequalities we see today.
Speaker 1: You needed to break up the plantations and distribute the
Speaker 1: land for two reasons. This was the only way that
Speaker 1: African Americans would avoid being economically dependent on their former owners.
Speaker 1: They wouldn't really then be free. They did not know
Speaker 1: accidentally leave out people of certain races. It did so
Speaker 1: explicitly um methodically. Where the civil rights movement didn't succeed
Speaker 1: was in any significant way addressing uh economic inequality between
Speaker 1: blacks and whites in the United States. Thanks for listening
Speaker 1: to The Paycheck. If you like the show, please rate, review,
Speaker 1: and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was
Speaker 1: hosted by Me Rebecca Greenfield and me Jackie Simmons. This
Speaker 1: episode was edited by Janet Paskin and reported with the
Speaker 1: help of Jordan Holman, Brett Polly, Maria, Eloisa Capuro, and
Speaker 1: Katarina Surviva. Our producers are Lindsay Cratowell, Magnus Hendrickson, and
Speaker 1: Ethan Brooks. Our original music is by Leo Sedgrin. Francesco
Speaker 1: Levi is Bloomberg's head of podcasts. We'll see you next time.