By Prudence L. Carter

This article is part of Occupy the Future, a forum on lessons to be drawn from the Occupy movement.

It is an age-old debate: which has more significance in terms of inequality—class or race? The Occupy movement has focused on gross economic inequality in the United States. But while economic inequality affects our life chances and well-being, we cannot ignore the relationship between color and membership in the 99 percent and 1 percent. Black, Latino, and Native American citizens are more likely to be confronted with what it means to be at the bottom.

Is there sufficient discussion in the Occupy movement about race? Are we, the 99 percent, willing to see how we, too, collude in racial inequality in the choices we make about whom we hire, where we live, where we send our children to school, where we worship, and how we create social networks? Class-centered debates tend to be more palatable than race-centered ones. We don’t tense up as much when we talk about class. Yet, inequality will not be reduced by changes in economic practices alone if we ignore the effects of racism.

The growth of the American middle class after World War II owed a lot to the establishment of the Federal Housing Authority in 1934 and to generous entitlements proffered by the GI Bill, including access to higher education. But these government programs were not race neutral in their effects. Racism encouraged neighborhood redlining and thus limited black and Latino access to mortgage loans. University segregation prevented many blacks and Latino GIs from obtaining higher education. Discriminatory mortgage practices prevented people of color from developing assets through home ownership, creating a significant wealth gap.

Blacks and Latinos did eventually gain greater access to home ownership—through predatory home loans that inflated the housing bubble. During the recession aggregate wealth has plummeted in communities of color. The median wealth of white households is now twenty times that of black households and eighteen times that of Hispanic households according to a July 2011 report from the Pew Research Center. That is twice the prevailing disparity of the previous two decades. In 2007 the average middle-income white household had $74,000 in wealth, whereas the average high-income African American household had only $18,000, according to a May 2010 report from Brandeis University’s Institute on Assets and Social Policy.

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