The Rivers’s story was not unique. Between emancipation and 1920, Black families across the country had acquired 15 million acres of land; by 2000, they had lost 14 million of those acres. This land loss points to a much larger national problem: the racial wealth gap. The average Black household today has 15 cents in total wealth for every one dollar held by the average white household. Though Black Americans are better off than their ancestors, the racial wealth gap remains stubbornly high and has only widened in the past four decades. In 2022, the average Black family had $211,596 in total wealth, a 150 percent increase from 40 years ago. But the average white family had $1,361,806, an increase of 237 percent. As of 2023, 18 percent of Black Americans lived in poverty, more than twice the poverty rate for non-Hispanic white Americans.
In the past two decades, there’s been an explosion of economic research on the racial wealth gap, and historians are catching up. The Plunder of Black America: How the Racial Wealth Gap Was Made by Calvin Schermerhorn and Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman’s Bank by Justene Hill Edwards offer superbly rendered accounts of how centuries of racist exploitation got us to today’s inequalities. But they both leave open a question about the deeper causes of these inequalities—to what extent is the gap a narrow function of racism, and to what extent has it resulted from the broader system of capitalism in which it’s embedded?
Tracing 400 years of fully legal racial exploitation—from slavery and post-emancipation segregation to redlining and predatory subprime mortgages—The Plunder of Black America deftly illustrates how nearly every attempt by Black families to advance economically and pass down wealth has been undermined by a thicket of racist laws and practices, whether by intent or effect. Following multiple generations of Black families, including the Rivers, Schermerhorn shows how racially exploitative policies were not confined to the South but followed Black families to every corner of the country.
The story inevitably begins with slavery. One of Schermerhorn’s central characters is Morris, an enslaved man owned by George Washington. Washington acquired Morris in 1759 when he married Martha Custis, who, like Washington, was born into one of Virginia’s wealthiest slaveholding families. Morris was 30 and already a skilled carpenter, but Washington forced him to work under a new white overseer, Turner Crump, 10 years his junior. Nevertheless, Morris performed his duties diligently, and when Washington offered to promote Morris to a paid, though still enslaved, overseer position, it was hard to refuse. Though he would have to wield a whip over his fellow enslaved workers, it would enable him to move to the plantation where his enslaved wife, Hannah, lived. In effect, Washington made brutalizing other enslaved people a requirement if Morris wanted to live with his own wife.