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Originally Posted by icecube
The access my family had in the early 1900s to land, citizenship, public education, mobility rights, bank loans, and government relief during famine secured their upward mobility and our middle-class status. The political economy of white settler status has been handed down from one generation to the next.
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The same thing was experienced by African Americans post-WWII. The GI Bill was enacted so veterans returning from the war would be rewarded with affordable post-secondary education and low-rate mortgages. This directly resulted in a dramatic increase in the number of Americans who received a college education and owned their own home, leading to a huge swelling of the middle class during the 1950s.
Unfortunately, the benefits of the GI Bill were not applied equally. African Americans who served their nation during the war just as honourably as their white countrymen were far more likely to have their applications for GI Bill benefits denied due to institutional racism. So while huge swarms of white Americans were able to enter the middle class and build wealth that has subsequently been inherited by their children and grandchildren, blacks have largely remained mired in poverty.
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Economic success in America is often seen as a reflection of what kind of family a person was born into, how hard they work, and what kinds of opportunites exist in the economy. Of course, though, the story goes much deeper than that. How well a person's parents were positioned financially tends to reflect the well-being of the family they grew up in and, in turn, how their parents and grandparents did.
In paticular, family wealth can take generations to build -- and confers advantages that grow over time. If your great-grandparents bought a home, chances are that your grandparents inherited at least some wealth from them. Which maybe means that your parents didn't have to take out loans to go to college and got a helping hand with a down payment for a house early in life in a neighborhood with top schools. Which means that you got a great public education instead of a lousy one, allowing you to get into a good college and set yourself up to confer advantages on your own kids. And so on.
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There are lots of reasons that whites have so much more wealth than nonwhites. How the GI Bill played out is one of those reasons. Whites were able to use the government guaranteed housing loans that were a pillar of the bill to buy homes in the fast growing suburbs. Those homes subsequently rose greatly in value in coming decades, creating vast new household wealth for whites during the postwar era.
But black veterans weren't able to make use of the housing provisions of the GI Bill for the most part. Banks generally wouldn't make loans for mortgages in black neighborhoods, and African-Americans were excluded from the suburbs by a combination of deed covenants and informal racism.
In short, the GI Bill helped fostered a long-term boom in white wealth but did almost nothing to help blacks to build wealth. We are still living with the effects of that exclusion today -- and will be for a long time to come.
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http://www.demos.org/blog/11/11/13/h...ican-americans