The Trump administration continues its policies against diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, calling them “illegal and immoral” and using them as a rationale for cancelling millions of dollars in federal grants, firing federal employees, and compelling universities and private businesses to halt DEI efforts. Now Brookings Institution scholar Andre M. Perry provides a timely and essential counterweight to the Trump attacks, in his new book “Black Power Scorecard: Measuring the Racial Gap And What We Can Do To Close It.”
Persistent Structural Racism
Perry presents a clear, sobering case about progress against systemic racism, specifically efforts led by Black Americans. And he provides painful but compelling details about how large America’s racial gaps remain, from education to housing to small business formation to health.
Undaunted by America’s persistent racial discrimination, Perry has an ambitious agenda. He doesn’t view assimilation into historically white institutions as the end goal, although he is strongly in favor of fair and equal treatment for Blacks. And while seeking fairness and equity for Black entrepreneurs, he argues that “being better capitalists will not significantly advance the Black community’s socioeconomic status.”
Perry thoroughly lays out the persistence and reproduction of structural racism across many dimensions of American life. He sees any progress made to date linked with Black leadership and advocacy, and argues Black Americans must continue fighting for real economic and political power.
Black Empowerment Is Not Anti-White
Perry rejects any parallels between Black empowerment and white racism. In contrast, President Donald Trump often has claimed America suffers from “a definite anti-white feeling in this country,” as reported in Time Magazine in 2024.
Trump has gone so far as to create a new refugee program for white South Africans while blocking refugees from other countries, in spite of the enormous wealth and privilege gaps enjoyed by white South Africans. Economists Grieve Chelwa, Mashekwa Maboshe, and Darrick Hamilton (my colleague) found in an academic journal article that in South Africa, “the typical Black household owns 5% of the wealth held by the typical White household.”
Does that wealth gap number in South Africa tell you about structural racism and economic disadvantage? Then you might be surprised to learn the same economists found that “in the U.S., the typical Black household owns 6% of the wealth held by the typical White household”—barely different than the 5% in South Africa.
Can Education Close The Racial Gap?
Some argue providing more and better education to Black people will help close the wealth and income gap, although many of these analyses falter when faced with how America persistently underinvests in education, especially for low-income and non-white people.
Certainly, more and better education is a good thing. But other research undercuts the idea this will close racial gaps. In 2016, Hamilton and other economists found that “Black families whose heads graduated from college have about 33 percent less wealth than white families whose heads dropped out of high school.”
Economist Ellora Derenoncourt and her colleagues looked at American white-to-Black wealth ratios from 1860 to 2020, building a unique data set allowing them to take a long historical look at this issue. The findings are distressing: Racial wealth convergence, faced with the gaps between formerly enslaved Black people and free white people, proceeded very slowly, but “has followed an even slower path over the last 150 years.” They found racial wealth convergence “stalling after 1950” and “since the 1980s, the wealth gap has widened again.”
It is these sorts of analyses, especially his own work, that anchor Perry’s book in sobering reality. For several years, Perry and his colleague Jonathan Rothwell have been producing a “Black Progress Index,” detailing racial gaps in income, homeownership, educational attainment, business ownership, exposure to pollution, and other factors.
Perry’s new book builds on the index, methodically walking us through the persistent racial gaps in wealth, income, education, employment, life expectancy, health, and housing. But he also goes further in the book, explicitly arguing that power is needed to make lasting progress against pervasive structural racism.
Reparations And Other Policy Options
The cascade of these persistent problems leads Perry to consider reparations for Black Americans. Although that’s a controversial idea, he isn’t alone. Reparations are being considered in cities including Evanston, Illinois; St. Louis; New York; Detroit; Providence, Rhode Island; St. Paul, Minnesota; Boston, and Chicago. California, New York, Maryland and other states also are examining the issue.
Reparations may seem a dramatic step, but consideration of it is driven by the very slow—or even non-existent—impacts of other policies. Derenoncourt and her colleagues, in careful economist language discussing the racial wealth gap, distinguishes between two types of policies: “flow” policies, meaning financial literacy, improved educational outcomes and greater stock ownership; and “stock” policies, referring to reparations that could build wealth directly for Black households.
They find that closing the racial wealth gap through “flow” policies alone—non-reparations—is “simply a matter of centuries,” if it worked at all. Reparations, in their careful analysis, could make a major contribution to closing the wealth gap.
So when you see continued efforts to dismantle DEI, and claims of anti-white racism, arm yourself by reading Perry’s clear, accessible, and data-driven analysis of persistent racial gaps and what it might take to overcome them. “Black Power Scorecard” is a timely and essential book—not only a valuable encyclopedia of data on persistent racial gaps, but a clear and forceful analysis of what it might take to overcome them.
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