If Racial Inequality Does Not Move Your Heart, Will You Feel Your Wallet's Pain?

The shadow of endemic racism in the U.S. is long and dark, depriving light to tens of millions of American citizens, and over more than four centuries of our national history. It casts that darkness still today, across the nation painfully and often violently.

It is hard for most of white America to understand the abject denial that is present in so many neighbors and countrymen, often including friends and family, even as they grapple with its stubborn presence within their own hearts. Perhaps it is the combination of the passing down of historical prejudices and mythologies, along with the attention provided to recently emboldened fringe elements within parts of our media; perhaps it is an intellectual laziness that prefers to believe anything that appears to elevate one's own status at the expense of another's.

Whatever the cause, the desire to object to aggressive responses in addressing racism’s impacts on fully one eighth of American citizens remains intact, and even flourishing today. Appeals to the immorality of the practice, references to the inconsistency of people who profess faith in seeing one hue of God's creation being somehow less worthy than another, have failed to create the seemingly logical outcome of repudiation. Racism persists, endures and painfully appears to be even growing in boldness.

Perhaps this will matter to those whose hearts have not been moved. Citibank has just released a massive economic study demonstrating the rank cost of racism in America. In the 104 page report, “CLOSING THE RACIAL INEQUALITY GAPS The Economic Cost of Black Inequality in the U.S.” the exhaustive report demonstrates that the economic cost of racial inequality has been some $16 trillion dollars over just the past 20 years, and threatens to deprive the American economy of another $5 trillion dollars over the coming 5 years. 

To put that into perspective, the GDP (Gross Domestic Product) of the entire U.S. is estimated to be $19 trillion in 2020, meaning that unchecked, racism will reduce the total production of our economy by some 5% per year. It will cost America an equivalent to one third of what the country takes in each year in taxes. It will represent an economic loss equal to the entire GDP of all but 15 countries. 

Enough?

The simple logic is, as I state in my book (shameless self-plug here) “The Insufficiencies of Reparations” indisputable: 

“There has never been a profit to be made in turning down a paying customer at a diner seat, never a benefit gained in not hiring the person most able to do a job. In actively denying equality in development and engagement, America has deprived itself of the inestimable contributions of fully one eighth of its citizens, and critically handicapped its progress and success”

It is a rational, human wish that the motivation for a universal response to racial inequality and inequity was just the sheer rightness of it, a repulsion of the predatory and inhumane treatment of fellow travelers on this fraught planet. It has been proven that, for far too many and far too long, that is insufficient. 

In not finding justification in our hearts and souls, perhaps we will finally find it in our wallets. At this point in our national evolution, even a bad reason for good acts feels like progress.