Eliminating Racial Wealth Disparity | Goop

Mullen: The racial wealth gap is a creation of the federal government. It began as the Civil War wound down. The federal government made a promise of forty-acre land grants to Black people who were newly emancipated, but it didn’t follow through on this promise. There was an initial allocation made to some families, but after Abraham Lincoln was assassinated and Andrew Johnson took over, he almost immediately began to reverse these policies.

At the same time, beginning in 1862, the federal government issued a policy called the Homestead Act. The Homestead Act provided 160-acre land grants to White Americans, including European immigrants. These were lands that were in the western part of the US, land that had just recently been occupied by Native American peoples. We’re talking about 270 million acres of land, a land mass that would be the equivalent of all of California and all of Texas. Some 1.5 million White families received those land grants. And that translated to 45 million White Americans who are today still benefiting from that single federal policy. The program was in place for almost seventy years. Folks owned this land outright, and it was tax-free. But most importantly, they could pass down the profits and the land itself to their offspring.

One of our colleagues, Jennifer Mueller, asked 150 students in one of her classes to talk to their parents and grandparents, and find out what their family’s wealth position is, and where it came from. One third of the White students in the class discovered that there was a land grant in their family. Of the remaining fifty students, twelve or thirteen of them were Black, and the others of color. Not a single one had a land grant in their family.

Darity: The Black Americans who did receive land grants did so primarily under the Southern Homestead Act, which was introduced later and lasted less than a decade. The number was relatively negligible.

Mullen: I wanted to share an example of what Mueller learned from her class. In 1880, a family received a land grant in the Texas panhandle. For two generations, the family leased out the land—when the parents died, their children divided the profits. Then, in 1980, natural gas was discovered on the land. It turned out to be the largest such deposit in that area, so large that they received $100,000 in revenue in the first year. The federal government is basically giving them a dividend check every month. And this is something that White Americans have had access to and Black Americans have not. So this is why we’re saying that the racial wealth gap was created by the federal government.