The Whiteness of Wealth Part Two
Jill on Money with Jill Schlesinger
Audacy
4.6 • 1.9K Ratings
🗓️ 18 June 2023
⏱️ 10 minutes
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Summary
In honor of the Juneteenth holiday, this weekend we're re-running an interview we did with Dorothy A. Brown, who as a young black girl growing up in the South Bronx, saw how racism limited the lives of her family and neighbors. In her book, The Whiteness of Wealth, Brown draws on decades of cross-disciplinary research to show that tax law isn’t as color-blind as she’d once believed.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Jill on Money Show. It's Sunday, June 18th. It's Father's Day. Happy Father's Day to fathers out there or any parents out there. Hope you have good celebrations. Today we're continuing our conversation with Dorothy Brown. She is the author of a book called The Whiteness of Wealth. Now, this is an interview |
| 0:21.8 | that we aired a while back when the book first came out, but I thought as we are approaching |
| 0:27.8 | Juneteenth, it might be helpful to understand how the United States tax system does disadvantage |
| 0:35.9 | black Americans. And importantly, Dorothy provides the ability for us to |
| 0:41.3 | figure out how we can fix that very same system. I think that she's dynamic. She's awesome. I could |
| 0:48.6 | listen to her just for hours on end. Truly, she is a real treasure. So anyway, we are going to go into the tax code, |
| 0:57.0 | but also go into wealth disparity in this part of the interview. So here is the second part of my |
| 1:03.5 | interview with Dorothy Brown. If you just look at the idea that each side of a black couple |
| 1:10.0 | tends to contribute more equally to the overall |
| 1:14.1 | income. So they get penalized there. They often would get penalized because they couldn't actually |
| 1:20.1 | buy a home. They didn't have enough money to do that. And they were not able to grab the home |
| 1:25.9 | mortgage interest deduction or all the other property |
| 1:28.6 | tax deduction, etc. Where else did you go to try to understand how come the wealth disparity |
| 1:37.3 | persisted beyond the tax code? Homeownership is a big driver of white wealth. So looking at the returns to home ownership, |
| 1:48.2 | so I looked at sociology research that showed that when you had more than 10% of your neighbors are |
| 1:54.4 | black, the value of the home declines. And if it's more than 20%, it declines even more. So the greater the percentage of black |
| 2:02.3 | neighbors in the neighborhood, the lower the value of the home. So you could see in sociology research |
| 2:08.4 | that goes back decades that shows the racial disparity in homeownership. And you have so many |
| 2:15.1 | people saying, well, if we just had more black people |
| 2:18.2 | owning homes, we'd be able to make a dent in the racial wealth gap. I will say this. Equity or |
| 2:25.6 | net worth of black homeowners is significantly higher than the net worth of renters. But there will |
| 2:32.5 | always be a racial wealth gap associated with |
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