2007: “Wealth Building” & the Great Recession

The market crash of 2008 revealed, yet again, the long history of systemic racism in American financial and housing markets.

Ballooning foreclosure rates, the loss of value for “mortgage-backed securities (MBS) and derivatives,” and the decline of “solvency of over-leveraged banks and financial institutions” (AIG, Lehman Brothers, etc.) caused the Great Recession (Picardo, 2018). Despite laws and regulations enacted to protect people of color from speculators, flippers, and unethical lenders, the real estate transactions in the 2000s continued the long history of systemic racism in America and in the St. Louis area.

The system existed to benefit whites and was structured to control black advancement and limit their attainment of wealth.

African Americans who lacked historic wealth as a result of the historical slavery and racist housing practices, continued to be forced into housing areas with much less value, and were often defrauded out of housing situations that would normally provide wealth advancement for white Americans. As Bonilla-Silva (2018) notes

The available data on wealth indicate that the disparities in this important area [of wealth accumulation] are greater than in any other economic area, and they are increasing. Blacks owned only 3 percent of U.S. assets in 2001, even though they constituted thirteen percent of the U.S. population. In 2013, the median net worth of whites, $141,900, was about thirteen times that of blacks, which was only $11,000. This represents the largest gap in black-white wealth since the late 1980s. (p. 48)

The shameless exploitation of the African American community by the banking community and ongoing discrimination in housing further segregated Black from white America.