17
Feb
Has the recession hurled African-Americans backwards in time?
“There came a time when, after the twin pressures of the Great Migration from the rural South to northern cities and civil rights movement of the 1960s, blacks were able to enter jobs, schools, and neighborhoods previously denied them and began the slow crawl toward closing the gap. By the turn of the twenty-first century, it had narrowed significantly—although white Americans still had a median net worth ten times that of black Americans. Then came the Great Recession, which wiped out the precarious gains that had been made and hurled African Americans back to the lowest point since economists began measuring the wealth gap three decades earlier.”
—Isabel Wilkerson, “Race to the Bottom”
