In a country where land and its resources are commodities, the exclusion and expulsion of Black and Indigenous people from the land economy has been an act of financial warfare. Take the fact that Black Americans own less than one percent of U.S. farmland, or that Indigenous households have approximately eight cents of wealth for every white household’s dollar. White supremacy’s campaign to exclude communities of color from land for financial gain is a war not yet ceased.
The mainstream conversation on the racial wealth gap is nearly devoid of how much money was amassed, passed down, and repurposed through land theft and hoarding. There is of course the evidence: testaments of sacred, ancestral land being vandalized; Black family farms becoming university parking garages, vacant lots, military forts, and corporate campuses; and gentrification raging on, further displacing working-class (mostly Black and brown) people.
However, the national dialogue leaves most of this out. It’s why economists and sociologists like Charles C. Geisler have worked so tirelessly to bring landholdings back into the national framing of poverty. In his 1995 paper titled “Land and Poverty in the United States,” Geisler claims that “land influences wealth and poverty in a variety of important ways” and that “indirect ownership of property of all kinds increases with wealth.”
Geisler’s more explicit plea to the reader is that connections between land, power, and wealth be “dragged out of the closet, carefully examined, and used to forge more direct and more effective national, state, and local policy.”
There is a mountain of quantitative and qualitative evidence to back up the claim that the wealthy landowners of the past developed trusts and endowments for future generations. The wealth they hoarded has since funded and birthed the CEOs, politicians, and corporations who control our food, media, and housing into the twenty-first century.
Further, the children and grandchildren of the sharecroppers, farmers, and landowners who had their labor and acreage snatched from under them are just as poor and in debt—if not more so—than their foreparents were decades and centuries ago. Land and property were not by-products of this dynamic; they were critical tools used to create systematic barriers.