Wealth and the Black Middle Class

[Music] well good evening everyone um my name is sanders adu duke class 1994 and i have the honor of serving as co-chair for duke black alumni along with tadina simpson class of o5 dba represents over 10 000 black lives matter from the undergraduate graduate professional schools from around the world and we currently have 11 active chapters in the united states welcome to part two of our lecture series on black history and culture in this profound moment of change in the united states and around the world tba is pleased to partner with douglas association daa and the aaas department to bring you a powerful lecture series that we hope will inform empower and engage you both at duke and in your local communities we have an awesome speaker today and professor sandy darity and i will now turn over to my friend and colleague dba co-chair-elect harry jones class of oa to introduce professor darity thank you thanks so much sanders and thank you to the entire duke alumni community for tuning in tonight throughout the next several weeks we'll explore various aspects of black life as well as issues that are critical to the black community worldwide tonight we dive deep into one of the most crucial and long-standing the wealth gap we are incredibly lucky to have one of the formal scholars in the world shed light on this topic for us this evening professor sandy darity is the director of the sami du bois cook center on social equity at duke university and served as the chair of the department of african and african american studies he is the founding director of the research network on racial and ethnic inequality at duke i would now like to turn it over to my former professor and current mentor and friend professor sandy dairy thank you thank you so much harry uh and thank you uh sanders and uh and harry and the team for inviting me to participate on this this this program um i'm i'm quite quite thrilled to be here and to try to share some work with you all that uh i have been doing in collaboration with uh two co-authors uh finaba adu who is a duke alum and a professor at the university of wisconsin at madison and imari smith who is also a duke alum and who is currently working on a phd in public policy and sociology in combination so i'd like to request that we start the slideshow please so the first slide indicates what the title of the talk is the second slide is the one that uh is is pertinent to what i'm going to say in this in these opening remarks so uh i'd like to begin by sharing a story with you that was related by benjamin mays the former president of uh of morehouse college in atlanta uh and and one of the the figures who's viewed as a giant of the the 20th century he served as president of morehouse during a period that we might view as its most glorious years uh and he was president of morehouse when uh uh dr samuel samuel cook who for whom uh my distinguished professorship is named and the research center that i had is named when he was an undergraduate simultaneously with martin luther king jr so i'm just going to relate a passage with you i'm going to read a passage for you that's from dr may's's autobiography so here we go dr mays writes while at mysore in india i was invited by the headmaster of an untouchable school in a neighboring village to speak to his students i asked him why since there were 13 u.s delegates he had chosen me he replied that he wanted a negro and when i told him that channing tobias was also a negro he answered that tobias was too fair of complexion to do what he wanted him to do i want you i accepted his invitation and on leaving mysore went to his school where i dined with his untouchable students after dinner i was introduced as an untouchable who had achieved distinction the headmaster told them that i had suffered at the hands of white men in the united states every indignity that they suffered from the various caste in india and that i was proof that they too could be somebody worthwhile despite the stigma of being members of a depressed class at first i was horrified puzzled angry to be called and untouchable but my indignation was short-lived as i realized as never before that i was truly and untouchable in my native land especially in the southern united states in my country i was segregated almost everywhere i went always in the south and often in the north i was i was not permitted to sleep in or eat in white hotel hotels and restaurants and was banned from worship in white churches i had been slapped about almost blind because i was black and had been driven out of a pullman car with pistols at my back uh i just thought further that indeed i was an untouchable in the united states and i i want to i want to address this phenomenon of black untouchability in the context of thinking about the black middle class i would like to argue that middle class status must be distinct for members of a social group that is marginalized so we refer to this type of a middle class as a subaltern middle class it's the middle class from a community that is subjected to subordinate status and there are particular characteristics that this type of middle class possesses that are unique to its position among these are the fact that it in some way performs a buffer role between the dominant social group and other members of its social group who do not share a similar class position in traditional research in the social sciences there's a tendency to think about the middle class in a couple of different ways i'd like to begin with the marxist view of a middle class as those individuals who lie between two social classes that define a mode of production so for example under capitalism the middle classes are those individuals who are neither members of the capitalist class nor the working class uh so frequently we might identify them in the modern context as people who have uh professional and managerial positions in the society but economists frequently define middle class in a less colorful and less interesting way they typically define it empirically they narrow the terrain to those individuals who belong to the three middle quintiles of the income distribution so the middle class becomes those individuals who literally have a middle income in addition there is a tendency among sociologists to place a greater focus on uh educational attainment and occupational status as criteria for identifying the middle class in work that chris marsh led uh there was an attempt to identify the middle class on the basis of uh four standards home ownership educational status occupational status and and income but uh what i want to argue today is that we can really alter our picture of the middle class position particularly of members of a subaltern community if we use an entirely different standard for evaluation of middle class position and that is the standard of wealth and it's important to make a distinction between wealth and income so i know a significant number of you have probably done economics at duke and are probably familiar with this distinction but uh i i would like to to re reemphasize it again income is a flow concept uh a flow of resources in a given period of time usually we think about annual income uh but it's also uh a flow of resources that's most closely connected with people's earnings as opposed to other types of sources of resources very wealthy people may have additional income that comes from the interest that they earn on on their assets and very poor individuals may receive transfer payments from the federal government of course there are transfer payments that go to very affluent people if you think about uh the mortgage interest deduction in the tax system uh but nevertheless uh when we start thinking about uh about social transfers usually our focus is on individuals at the lower end of the of the income distribution uh but income is quite distinct from wealth where wealth is the net value of our personal property it's the difference in the value of what you own and what you owe it's the difference in the value of your assets and your debts and it is the particular measure of personal resources that captures to the largest extent possible your degree of economic security and well-being what's very significant about wealth is that it can substitute for income if an individual a family or a household suffers a a major emergency that results in a loss of income such as the loss of a job or a catastrophic medical illness if that family is wealthier they're better able to weather the storm a wealthier household has the capacity to purchase its way into high amenity neighborhoods have high quality housing have access to high quality education for their children at all stages of the schooling process in fact a wealthier family would have the capacity to provide their sons and daughters with a college education that they could uh that they could complete in a debt-free fashion uh wealthier households also have a greater political clout they also have the capacity to leave bequest for subsequent generations to ensure their economic security and well-being and so uh from from the perspective that i want to advance in this work that i've done uh with finivado and imari smith we want to start with the premise that actually wealth is more important than income and so we propose in the course of our our our study to suggest that we should look at middle class status from the standpoint of wealth rather than income and that this is particularly important to do if we are concerned about subaltern middle classes that is to say middle classes that are from communities that are subjected to marginalization and so uh so in this first slide we want to give you a sense of what the income distribution looks like by income quintile by race so what's the uh what's what's the differential in income by race as we look at each 20 group of the income distribution and and while there are differences and the differences are most pronounced in the fifth quintile the most affluent quintile uh these differences do not look visually as dramatic as the differences that you're going to observe i think in the next slide please so here's the wealth distribution by wealth quintile by race and here are some notable dimensions of this so if we look at the bottom quintile in wealth we'll observe that actually the median level of wealth among black uh black net worth holders is negative a negative eleven thousand nine hundred dollars in contrast white median wealth is is quite low but it's certainly not negative it's four hundred and twenty dollars uh whites in the bottom two quintiles of the white wealth distribution have a higher median wealth than all black americans taken together uh and indeed if you look at the uh the third quintile where we get the uh the average in terms of the median expressed we find that the white median wealth level is 171 000 the black median wealth level is 17 300 so essentially white americans at the middle of the wealth distribution have ten times as much wealth as uh black americans in the middle of the wealth distribution uh so these two wealth distributions are quite different uh and they're reflective of some other other facts that that i can provide you with about about the nature of wealth so if you look at the fifth quintile the white median wealth level is 1.6 million dollars whereas the black median wealth level does not actually approach three hundred thousand dollars uh and so as a consequence if we think about the percentage of each social group that has a net worth of a million dollars that proportion is vastly different it is one quarter and we'll come back to the statistic it's one quarter of white uh white households but it's only uh four percent of black households and so if we're starting to talk about black affluence it's a phenomenon that has a very very different set of characteristics from white affluence especially when we start looking at wealth may have the next slide please so here in contrast with the income distribution diagram that i showed you a moment ago the wealth distribution diagram shows or displays far stronger disparities uh in each of the quintiles but in particular in quintiles three through five where you get uh you know drastically different uh levels of wealth between whites uh blacks and latinos uh if you look at that first quintile that's the quintile where white median wealth is 420 dollars and black median wealth is negative eleven thousand nine hundred dollars so it doesn't look very different but that's because black wealth in the first quintile is actually below zero so may i see the next slide please so here we look at the percentage of black and white households in each wealth quintile once we establish a common average wealth quintile across the entire population and here we can see the the point that i was making a moment ago that uh 25 of whites have a net worth in excess of one million dollars where whereas it's only four percent of uh of blacks uh and you can see that by looking at the fifth quintile uh the only quintile in which uh the black the only two quintiles in which the black proportion or the black share is uh significantly larger than the white share is the uh is it are the bottom two quintiles the bottom uh 40 of the of the wealth distribution they are similar proportions in the third quintile and then after that in the fourth and fifth quintiles the the disparity rises sharply uh in in favor of of white households uh next next slide please okay so this is just a slide that indicates the disparity in net worth with respect to households or families having a net worth in excess of a million dollars next slide please here uh we attempted to compare black and white wealth levels by income quintiles so the horizontal axis is giving you income quintiles the vertical axis is giving you median levels of wealth within each of those income quintiles and we wanted to demonstrate that you actually can get some slightly different results depending upon which data set you use so the left the left side of the diagram represents data from the survey of income and program participation that was collected in 2014 the right side of the diagram represents data that was collected in 2016 from the survey of consumer finances the 2016 survey of consumer finances is the most recent data we have although there has been a 2019 survey but it has not yet been reported what is striking here is that once again the evidence demonstrates that the real sharp differences in uh in wealth by by quintiles really emerges more rapidly than it does when we're looking at wealth quintiles so here uh this reinforces the notion that income disparities are not as sharp as wealth disparities if we start thinking about wealth disparities as a basis for trying to identify who the black middle class is it becomes considerably smaller than a middle class that we might identify by taking the middle three quintiles of the income distribution it in fact it's it's vastly smaller next diagram please okay so here we have a breakdown of differences between non-housing wealth and financial assets by race uh and what is is very important to recognize here is when you start looking at uh home ownership as the sole source of wealth you are coming up with a very misleading picture and in fact even with respect to home ownership i believe the black homeownership rate is is 30 percentage points lower than the white home ownership rate and the equity value in homes that whites possesses is is is more than twice the level of equity that blacks possess in their homes among those individuals who are actual homeowners uh but the disparities in terms of non-housing wealth and financial assets are quite dramatic as well uh the only thing that is really missing here from the analysis are differences in real estate ownership where my understanding is that ted turner alone owns one quarter of the land that is owned by black americans collectively so uh the real estate actually is very disparate in terms of of of wealth ownership and there's another indicator that the black middle class in some sense or blacks who are in the middle class or higher are a much much smaller proportion of the total black population than uh than folks who could be identified by the wealth standard as middle class among white americans next slide please okay so here we display what the wealth distribution is within each uh within each social group the left diagram shows or displays the wealth distribution among white americans and the right uh diagram displays the wealth distribution among black americans you can see that for both groups the upper 10 of wealth holders hold 75 percent of of the total amount of wealth that's distributed across each of the groups what's significantly different here is that the proportionate amount of wealth that is held by blacks that's distributed as unequally as the distribution among whites the proportionate amount is much much much smaller so if we were to think about this in terms of proportionate shares of wealth in the united states black wealth holders uh constitute about 13 percent of the nation's population but only have about 2.5 percent of the nation's wealth on the other hand white wealth holders constitute approximately 70 percent of the nation's population but they possess in excess of 90 of the nation's wealth so even though the distributions look much the same the distributions are calibrated on proportionately very very different total amounts of wealth okay next slide please and indeed one of the most important things to be able to recognize is the extent of white wealth holding above the middle of the distribution for white so if you were to examine the median level of wealth that is held by whites in the united states 171 thousand dollars according to the survey of consumer finances in 2016 97 of white wealth is held by households with a net worth above that white median that is to say 97 of white wealth is held by households with a net worth that is greater than 171 thousand dollars that is how unequal the wealth distribution is now as you note from the previous diagram the black wealth distribution is also quite unequal but you do not have this drum as dramatic a rise in the share of wealth that's visual here uh that's associated with uh with the black distribution of wealth that that that's apparent with the the white distribution of wealth next slide please so i want to turn next to a set of policies that people have proposed for combating the wealth gap and the list includes the following a federal job guarantee the lyft act that was introduced by kamala harris universal basic income that was introduced by andrew yang uh trump's opportunity zones proposal as well as representative clyburn's 10 20 30 formula elizabeth warren introduced an ultra ultra millionaire tax warren also proposed student debt relief and warren has proposed an american housing and economic mobility act the first thing i want to say about these is that a number of these are not at all wealth-centered for example the federal job guarantee is an income support through the provision of an assurance of employment for uh for all american citizens who are adults uh universal basic income as as its title indicates is uh is an income payment that goes to every american it's as if uh the cares act twelve hundred dollar provision had been provided or was provided on a continuous basis a continuous monthly basis uh to all uh to all americans uh uh and and uh and and has done so for all american adults uh and without without having any kind of selection criteria about who who receives it and who doesn't uh the lyft act is an act that supplements income for the middle classes uh now the other proposals could have wealth implications uh i did a report about a year ago evaluating these proposals a report called running the numbers on closing the racial wealth gap and and i argue that however desirable they may be from the standpoint of improving uh the economic status of uh of all americans or disproportionately benefiting black americans in some cases they don't do much about addressing the enormous racial wealth gap uh and and for example the uh american housing and economic mobility act if it worked to full effect uh to eliminate differences in homeownership rates between blacks and whites equalization of home ownership rates between blacks and whites would increase black net worth by about 28 thousand dollars or so which would be a marginal or modest increase relative to the 800 000 disparity in black and white household wealth on average or at the mean uh so uh so that's that's a very wealth oriented proposal because it's directed at home ownership but it's not really going to have much of an effect on uh racial wealth differences um and of course uh if we think about kamala harris's middle class act we're talking about middle classes black and white that are quite different in terms of their wealth position and her proposal does very little to address those kinds of wealth disparities may i see the next slide please okay so here's the uh the the bottom line in this case while most of these policies boost incomes for black americans we must remember black white wealth inequality is not a matter of income poverty next slide please so this is my thank you slide uh you know i'm very very glad to have had the opportunity to share this with you and i'll be glad to elaborate on any dimension of the presentation and i i will say this at the conclusion of the paper we say that you know what what's really needed is a program of reparations for black american descendants of u.s slavery and uh i have a new book that just came out uh that's written with my life partner kirsten mullen called from here to equality reparations for black americans in the 21st century uh but i think that we'll do a dedicated discussion to that book at a different time but i do want to say that i do believe there is a solution to these kinds of wealth disparities and i think it's embodied in a reparations program for black american descendants of u.s slavery professor dary thank you so much for an enlightening uh lecture just wanted to take a few minutes and um you know gather a couple of questions from the audience and um yeah like i definitely wanted to to build on some of the things that we talked about um you know as you mentioned we are definitely going to explore the issue of reparations economic reparations in more detail um through your book at a later time but if you were to give us a brief synopsis of that argument um can you you know just elaborate a little bit on what that would look like yeah so uh one of the central themes of the book is that we have to think about the case for reparations as being associated with the cumulative intergenerational effects of three phases of atrocities in the united states so the first phase obviously is slavery but the second phase is nearly 100 years of legal segregation uh that that period of legal segregation that is associated with uh the comments that uh that that dr benjamin mays uh offered about saying that he was indeed an untouchable in america uh what most of my talk is about is about the dimensions of untouchability that have to do with financial deprivation um and how how pervasive that is across the entire black population uh so as a consequence uh we we are concerned about not only slavery but also the jim crow period but in addition to that we're concerned about ongoing atrocities which would be inclusive of mass incarceration uh inclusive of police executions of unarmed blacks the persistence of discrimination and employment housing and credit markets as well as ultimately the indicator of the uh the the joint effects of all of these atrocities on black economic well-being the immense racial wealth disparity and as i said you know as i indicated if you look at the median difference it's about 153 000 but if you look at the mean differential it's about eight hundred thousand dollars per per black and white household and that differential is uh is the differential that that we argue needs to be bridged by a reparations program and so uh so we then estimate that a reparations program would have to constitute uh an amount in the vicinity of 10 to 12 trillion dollars to move the black share of wealth from 2.6 to at least a proportion that's consistent with the black share of the national population how um does the disparities in wealth um compare in today's time relative to 25 30 50 100 years ago where are we in terms of that uh kind of spectrum so i think the estimate that i've seen about the uh the proportion of national wealth that blacks owned at the point of emancipation uh 1865 or so was about one percent of the nation's wealth so today uh 155 years later uh you know from from a a percentage standpoint you could claim that there's been an immense increase in the proportionate share but if you look at the raw number it's 2.5 percent or so and so over the course of 155 years the black share of the nation's wealth has risen from 1 to 2.5 outside of um the black and white race what if we would kind of extend it further how does that picture look as well when we're extending it to whom please so other races other than than blacks and whites so if we were to think about latino wealth if we were to think about asian wealth etc in the united states how does that economic picture compare to black and whites so to a large extent that's really contingent on which particular national origin community you're looking at so if you're looking at the asian community uh the wealth position that we've been able to isolate in some of the metropolitan level studies we've done the wealth position of say japanese americans or asian indians is actually uh is actually relatively high you know anywhere from a median of three hundred thousand to five hundred thousand dollars in the cities that we we examined uh on the other hand if we're thinking about the filipino population or the cambodian population uh those wealth levels are not markedly higher than uh than than black than black wealth levels in the united states and in the latino community uh puerto ricans have on average have wealth levels that uh in in in the cities that we've examined like boston have wealth levels that are actually lower than the the black median and the black median in boston is actually eight dollars and so uh so if you look at the puerto rican median it's about zero uh so so that's a community that has a very low comparative wealth level uh latinos who are originally from the countries of the southern cone of south america actually have a a far better uh wealth position particularly if they are white latinos got it got it if we were to think about the percentage of wealth that is passed down generationally how does that picture look by race well it looks substantially different in terms of uh two kinds of transfers that are actual movements of financial resources uh it looks quite different in terms of the proportion of blacks and whites who receive inheritances as well as the amount so in any given year i think approximately 25 to 30 percent of whites may receive an inheritance of some sort whereas the number is uh is is closer to 10 for black americans uh and then if we talk start talking about what we call in vivo transfers transfers that take place while the donor is still living the black proportion is is is considerably lower but also what's significant about in vivo transfers is their timing it's not just their size so for example if parents provide a a a son or daughter with resources to go to college that permits them to leave college as i said without a debt in hand it's the timing of the delivery of the resources that becomes quite critical or if a young couple is about to purchase a new home and their parents or grandparents provide them with the sort assistance and in making the the down payment on a mortgage uh that's that's not just a question of the importance of the amount but it's also uh importance in terms of the timing which influences their capacity to be successful wealth accumulators subsequently in their lives as well so yeah there there are significant differences both in terms of receipt of inheritances as well as in terms of receipt of in vivo transfers and i would add further that black black families members of black families who might have higher incomes uh may find themselves in greater in greater proportion supporting other family members who are in very difficult situations and so that affects adversely their capacity to to accumulate wealth out of their personal savings although it's not personal savings that's really decisive in determining your wealth position it is uh it is the transmission of resources across generations from parents and grandparents to the younger generation and that's why we observe these enormous wealth differences because uh uh blacks in the united states have not had the opportunity to transfer uh the magnitude of the same resources across generations are there any policy makers currently um who you feel like have really kind of got it right or are close to getting it right in terms of entire conversation you know around reparations um probably not not quite let me let me say something positive though which is uh during the previous year 2019 there was more attention drawn to reparations by political candidates than i had ever observed in my lifetime and my suspicion is uh you know based on the work that kirsten mullen and i've done for from here to equality that it was the largest or most uh extended conversation about reparations on the national political scene that had taken place since the reconstruction era and so you actually had a candidate like marianne williamson explicitly say she was in favor of reparations she even named an amount i think her her maximum amount was 500 billion dollars uh that that falls far short of the 10 to 12 trillion dollars that would be required to eliminate the racial wealth gap uh but it was refreshing to actually hear a political candidate say reparations is a credible and important step for the nation to take uh julian castro also endorsed reparations but he did so without any specifics and i think tom steyer during his brief foray into the campaign world also said he was in favor of reparations but again didn't offer any specifics the other candidates who made any kind of overture in the direction of reparations uh endorsed uh house resolution 40 which is a bill that was first introduced by representative john conyers some 30 years ago for the purposes of establishing a commission to study reparations and provide proposals for reparations i think that hr 40 is uh is is is is quite flawed in the way in which it's currently been written and so i think it should either be revised or replaced but but the idea of having a study commission as a prelude to a reparations program makes tremendous sense to me the prelude to the provision of 20 thousand dollar compensatory payments to japanese americans for their unjust incarceration during world war ii was a congressional commission it was called the uh commission on wartime relocation and internment of civilians it did two things first it um it it was a commission that established that u.s officials knew quite well that japanese americans were not a national security threat but nevertheless put them in confinement camps around the country uh and then the second thing it did was it sketched or outlined a plan for restitution that could be translated into legislation so similarly i think we do probably need a commission to address reparations in the united states that would first make the detailed case for reparations for black american descendants of u.s slavery and second provide a legislative road map uh but unfortunately i don't think that the existing uh legislation h.r 40 would do a satisfactory job of accomplishing that and financial aid is most commonly determined is it by wealth is it by income is it kind of um a mix of all of these factors and how do you feel that i guess generally that it has accomplished you know thinking about uh the gap between um you know blacks and whites and other races so uh you know i i'm very much of an advocate of extended access to education i mean as as a college professor of course you know i have a certain passion for the educational enterprise but i think we have to be very careful about thinking that that's going to have a significant impact on wealth differentials uh so certainly we should try to make financial aid something that permits as many people to go to college and university as have a desire to do so but we also have to recognize that a college degree is not something that is going to uh eliminate racial wealth differentials uh and and that's in large measure because they are so heavily driven by intergenerational transmission effects um but you know one of the statistics that you know i continuously repeat that i think is really compelling in terms of making clear that uh increased educational attainment on the part of blacks is not something that's going to eliminate the racial wealth gap is the fact that black heads of household with a college degree have two-thirds of the net worth of white heads of household who never finished high school wow how um if we were to dive a level deeper in thinking about um the black wealth distribution by um country of origin in terms of thinking about you know the dispersion of black americans that are first or second generation from africa from the caribbean etc um versus families who have had several generations um dating back uh pre-slavery to the united states how does that picture i guess look if you could paint that a little bit for us well i'm not sure i know about the pre-slavery families i guess you're talking about virginia in the early 17th century yeah when when when all the forms of bondage were really in dentureship uh but uh but i i can say something about post-1776 when the republic formed okay um so we actually do not have very good national data on the wealth position of uh more recent immigrant black uh black black americans the the most we have is some of the work that we've done uh with the national asset scorecard for communities of color project where we surveyed uh we surveyed a number of communities throughout the united states and six metropolitan areas uh to get information about their wealth position at the detailed national origin level so instead of trying to inquire about the wealth position of asians collectively we wanted to know more about what specific national origin groups among the asian group had and we also tried to break apart the black uh population uh by by nativity also and um and in two of the cities where we had the most data that we could collect comparing more recent immigrant blacks with blacks whose ancestry dates to the period of slavery in the united states we found that in los angeles the black immigrant population had a much higher level of wealth than the native black population but in washington d.c there really wasn't as uh as a significant difference we're not sure exactly why we speculate that perhaps the wealth position of east africans is considerably lower than the wealth position of west africans who have come to the united states and the east african population is is far more present in washington dc than it is in uh in in los angeles california so that might be a partial explanation but i will say this kind of the historical processes that underlie the position of black americans who are descendants of persons enslaved in the united states are quite different from the historical processes that underlie the experiences of folks who are more recent immigrants even though we're all subjected to police brutality but but those differences are reflected in the fact that the more recent immigrant population is can be described as being hyper hyper-selected so hyperselectivity means that an immigrant community consists of persons who are more highly educated more affluent than uh than the average members of their uh of their nation of origin um and so they're they're hyperselective population and i would add that many of the west african immigrants in particular are more highly educated than all americans upon arrival in the united states and so uh so it's a very different historical backdrop to the experiences of the more recent immigrant black community and and and and the uh the community that is descended from american slavery um questions around mixed race families how are they characterized um in some of the studies that we've gone through this evening the studies that we did with the national asset scorecard communities of color identified people on the basis of their self-identification and we actually did not have very many people who identified themselves as having more than one racial or ethnic identity particularly once we were asking people about national origin uh so in in the in the census data though i think people who select more than one uh one one race in the most uh in in the in the 2010 census we don't know what's in the 2020 census yet but in the 2010 census it was still less than 5 of all americans and so it really was a very small share still the predominant portion of that group are are individuals who are uh are are self-report themselves to be white and asian uh so there's actually a smaller proportion that are are white and black but uh white and asian i think is the largest share of of of the mixed race population in the census data can you talk a little bit about the work that you're um i guess some of the other work that you're doing at the same du bois cook center on some of the other students that you're involved with that are related to duke um so we've got a number of projects and i think some of them will be of great interest i hope to to the audience uh one of the projects is uh comes under the label of the we we popularly call it race religion and health uh and it's an examination of the relationship between spirituality religious affiliation and health outcomes it was it was provoked by the finding that seventh-day adventists have the best health outcomes in the united states and although whites white seventh day adventists have better health outcomes than black seventh-day adventists black seventh-day adventists appear to have the best health outcomes among all black americans we don't think that this is a consequence of uh scriptural practices or beliefs we think it it's probably because the seventh-day adventists have adopted an extremely austere diet in comparison with most other americans whether they're black or white so you have a significant portion of seventh-day adventists who are either vegans or vegetarians and uh you know i personally i don't have that kind of self-discipline but it's very clear that that type of diet is associated with better health outcomes um and so uh so we were curious as to whether or not there were other religious affiliations that might be associated with better health outcomes or uh the other side of the coin which religious affiliations are associated with the worst health outcomes and and why so that's one of the projects that we've undertaken a second major project is associated with looking at black entrepreneurship and we've done a couple of studies one for the asset funders network another for jpmorgan chase where we examine questions like what are the conditions and resources that black entrepreneurs have when they first enter into business ownership what are the resources that they perceive that they'll need as they try to maintain and sustain their business operations um uh and and i think one of the key findings that comes out of that is that the entry uh the entryway to ownership business ownership for blacks is somewhat different from the the entry way to ownership among whites whites are far more likely to have been given a business as a gift or have been able to purchase an existing business whereas for black entrepreneurs it's invariably a question of starting up a new business in the first place yeah uh i'm trying to think of other projects we've got a number of them going uh there was a fascinating project that was undertaken by our documentary filmmaker uh at this at the at the cook center uh bruce orenstein uh that's called the film is the film is called the shame of chicago and it's an examination of the practice of contract selling of homes uh in in chicago and uh and the uh extraction of essentially the robbery of i think uh approximately four billion dollars in wealth from black chicago black chicagoans through through that mechanism of of contract selling of homes we're also trying to start uh or extend the project that looks at the history of black wall street in in durham and this has included an exhibit that is now complete that we showed at a conference uh last fall and uh and it also uh includes a major research paper that's being prepared by one of the postdoctoral fellows at the cook center uh on on on black wall street so uh i i'm sure there are others but those are the things that come to mind immediately that's amazing work for sure and uh professor dardy thank you so much for uh the talk this evening and all the work that you're doing from someone who's known you for uh i guess almost half my life now um well that tells me how young you are and how old i am thank you so much for tonight and you know we do look forward to partnering with you again and having a broader discussion on economic reparations uh so thank you for everything i'm now going to turn it back over to sanders to close us out well hello everyone um again thank you so much for for joining us um what a powerful lecture um i looked at the chat there were lots of great questions that we did not get a chance to to answer um i did see questions about whether baby bonds would be helpful in closing the wealth gap a little bit about sort of free education um and there were just really really really powerful um questions as well that i know wouldn't get to answer so in that vein um please continue to engage with us um send us your ideas send us your your thoughts to uh duke black alumni at duke.edu um and we'll definitely make sure we respond to you and then one thing i've been thinking about in this whole kind of lecture series all the discussions around around race and justice after george floyd is you know what what can individuals do to to try to you know push push the um the envelope and really try to get justice and i said just one thing you can do is look in your own local communities maybe it's mentoring a minority youth or investing in minority owned banks that do business with minority small businesses or volunteer in your local community or or faith-based organization but we obviously all can't boil the ocean but if we can just think of one thing we we all can do to make this a more perfect union i think we'll be uh we'll be successful i do want to close but i did want to mention that next thursday join us for part three of our lecture series thursday july 16th our professor carl carla holloway and mark anthony neal we're going to be exploring the issue of color and colorism on both within the black community and also between communities um the title lecture is going to be called the color codes where and when they matter so again thank you all 750 of you for for joining us tonight thanks to all duke black alumni and duke alumni for joining um i do want to put a quick plug in for for the black line on the on the line you should have received a survey request uh from duke from daa please fill that survey request out um it's individual to you and um the date uh due date of that is july 31st so thank you all again and we'll see you next week appreciate it

Channel: Duke Alumni Lifelong Learning

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Id: U-SroZm_L4g

Length: 57min 11sec (3431 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 16 2020