Opportunity: Not equal among different races

When I was a little kid, my cousin Andre was the first person I’d met who traveled outside of North America. I had not even left the country and I wanted to know how he managed to leave the continent.

His advice: Join the military and don’t have kids.

So I was pretty surprised when I got to college and heard story after story about childhood trips to every continent besides Antarctica.

For me traveling to another continent was a life goal; for my new classmates it was summer vacation.

National census data from 2015 charts out the median net worth of households of different demographics. It reported that white households had a median net worth of $110,500 while Black, “Hispanic Origin” and “other (residual)” each had a median net worth of $12,780, $19,990, and $30,000 respectively.

It’s apparent that many people in this country believe those figures are either accidental or indicative of personal shortcomings in the latter communities.

But how were black and brown people supposed to accumulate wealth, pursue economic opportunities or even develop a community during slavery, reconstruction, segregation and mass incarceration?

This story was originally published June 20, 2020 at 9:07 AM with the headline "Opportunity: Not equal among different races."