Recommended: Wealth as the basis of social stratification
For this week 's current events I an article read on the Huffington post that talks about the vast wealth gap between Black and White America. According to the post the gap got a bit smaller in the years leading upto the Great Recession but in the past 30 years has exploded as the black and Latino communities have been hit by foreclosures and job cuts. There 's a lot of reasons why there are enormous wealth gaps between minorities and whites in America. The most simple answer is, it takes money to make money. Part of the reason that there 's this enormous gap is because whites have long had higher wages and wealth to pass on from generation to generation.
As outlined in chapter 10 of the course text, inequality in housing and wealth is a major problem. The United States is described to be the most unequal countries in the western hemisphere. But with the inequalities when it comes to wealth, the United States is one of the richest countries in the world. Wealth is the sum total of a person’s assets. These assets include, cash in the bank and value of all properties, not only land but houses, cars, stocks, and bonds, and retirements savings.
Past research indicates that there has been racial and income inequality in Los Angeles for decades. More specifically, there has been racial and income disparities in quality of life and access to resources. Blacks and Latinos have a lower quality of life and access to fewer resources than Whites. The income level of Blacks and Latinos is also lower than that of Whites. The purpose of this research was to investigate how race and income impact such factors as quality of life, access to resources, education, and personal beliefs.
Chamber of Commerce, there is an estimated 140,918 U.S. businesses with majority Black/African American ownership, which comes up to only 9.4% of business owners in the United States being Black/African American. Although the number of black entrepreneurs in the country have steadily risen throughout the past few decades, there’s still a number of struggles that come with being a black business owner in the United States, from negative financial capital to deep rooted stigmatized stereotypes. Black-owned non-employer businesses are less than half as likely to get financing as other firms; as a result, black entrepreneurs are nearly three times more likely to have business growth and profitability negatively impacted by a lack of financial capital. This is not okay, and everyone regardless of race should be able to start a business at the same rate as everyone
Education, wealth and assets, and labor and market opportunities has always been unequally divided between Caucasian and African Americans. African Americans do not amass huge sums of money, they own less property and receive unequal educational opportunities. These disparities have landed African Americans in the low socio-economic class. Trying to narrow the economic gap between White and Black Americans, policies such as the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and Welfare Policies were implemented. This essay will highlight how education, wealth and assets and labor market opportunities contribute to the economic gap in America.
Inequality is often associated with racial injustice, but actually goes beyond that and has created new ways for social inequality to exist among various circumstances in our country. It affects millions in terms of their way/ quality of life. In the United States and around the world, civilians struggle to receive adequate health care at the expense of their day jobs, hindering them from this as they cannot afford it. The middle has been struggling for decades over the same issues, yet permanent action has yet to transform the country. The issue of inequality has recinfoced itself in health care and income and continues to manifest itself in our society today leading to social problems in which we cannot escape making it an institutional
This social class categorizes the rich, the poor and the “one percent “on a wide spectrum. In the United States, the blacks and whites are at both ends of the distributed wealth throughout the country. Caucasians remain at the “rich, privileged” side of the spectrum while the blacks remain at the “poor, unprivileged” end. In between both groups lies the latinos, which seem to fall closer to African American side of the spectrum. It is believed that this wealth gap had been formed due to the saying “it takes money to make money” (Conley).
However, wealth is inherited and relates to property. Sadly, there is a huge number of black families that are in debt. In the article, “Reparations Would Help Close Wealth Gap in America” by Eric Cooper, Cooper gives facts from Pews Research Center stating that Blacks are not able to earn wealth than whites. “Approximately 35 percent of African American households have a zero or negative net worth, according to Pew. A few months
Racial equalities are when people of tied to poverty and tied to race, possibly even more than in other Eastern North Carolina rural communities where blacks and Latinos typically experience higher rates of poverty than their white counterparts. Overall, black and Latino residents of North Carolina are much more likely to live in poverty than white North Carolinians. In the state, 27.7 percent of African-Americans live in poverty, while 34 percent of Latinos do, according to an analysis by the N.C. Budget and Tax Center. Less than 12 percent of the state’s white population lives in poverty. Those rates go up even higher for children
Through this reading and the documentary movie that we have watched, it is not hard to figure out how both external and internal factors that formed his personalities. The external factor definitely took a vital part of this formation, since the environment back into that time was hard for African American musicians to gain their rights, and there were so many inequalities existed in the society. It affected his personality for sure by having those experiences. Since he had seen those inequalities happening everywhere to his friends and him, he wanted to fight for their rights, and therefore, it shaped his personality in this way as well. However, as the article has talked about how hard it was for African American musicians only play for love
Another important aspect in closing the racial wealth gap that exist between African households in comparison to white households is income. According to the article, The Roots of the Widening Racial Wealth Gap: Explaining the Black-White Economic Divide: “national, state, and local levels, including raising the minimum wage, enforcing equal pay provisions, and strengthening employer-based retirement plans and other benefits.”(). Increasing minimum wage allow individuals to increase their disposable income which will also encourage individuals to save more. Also, enforcing employer-based retirement plans and benefits can allow individuals to have an income to sustain themselves when they are exiting the work force. Also, bring back and funding
Crime and Punishment have been the main symbols of the existing racial disparities in the United States for a long time now. In the earlier days, the criminal justice systems mostly entailed executions, prosecutorial and judicial prejudice, and chain-gang style penal practices. The judicial systems saw the minority groups being tried in all white court rooms by all-white juries. The highest number of offenders consisted of individuals from the black communities who were subjected to harsh punishments. Blacks who victimized the whites faced harsh and racially discriminative sentences.
“The greatest predictor of whether Americans are poor is not geography, however; the greatest predictors are race-ethnicity, education, and the sex of the person who heads the family.” (Henslin, 2013, p. 212). Race-ethnicity is one of the strongest factors of poverty. There is a common stereotype that Latinos and African Americans are the most poor; however, the Caucasians in America are the most poor. There are a smaller percentage of poor Caucasians, but there are a larger total number of Caucasians as a collective ethnic race within America causing them to have a lower percentage than other races, but they have the poorest people in America.
Income Inequality Income Inequality or “wage gap” is a big topic for freedom fighters and liberals for the simple fact that it isn’t equal for everyone. Because the wage gap is so prominent it's one of the biggest “facts” that discrimination is still apart of everyday American society. The wage gap from these radical interest groups think the economy is get a dollar take a dollar instead of a free flow economy. This misguided idea of the economy is absolutely not true and isn’t at the fault of the Government, but the people.
A problem I would like to solve is the prevalent racial inequality in the United States today. African Americans and Hispanics are the most underserved racial groups in American society. About 45% of African Americans and 46% of Hispanics live in episodic poverty (defined as poverty lasting less than three years). Over 15% of African Americans are unemployed, and they make up 40% of the prison population in America. This is a shocking statistic, as only 13% of the United States ' population is African American.
