The Whiteness of Wealth by Dorothy A. Brown

Author:Dorothy A. Brown [Brown, Dorothy A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-03-23T00:00:00+00:00

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When it comes to who gets what kind of retirement account, the racial divide is stark. The Bureau of Labor Statistics classifies jobs outside of service, sales, transportation, and construction as “professional and related occupations”; this broad category includes everything from architect to zoologist, but what these jobs have in common is that they’re the most likely to come with tax-free perks.16 Almost two-thirds (66.4 percent) of employers in those professional industries sponsor retirement accounts, and their workforce is 80 percent white and 9.4 percent black.

In contrast, in the service occupations, which includes custodians or restaurant staff, and where retirement sponsorship rates are only around 34 percent, black Americans make up 16.8 percent of the workforce. If we narrow the focus, black overrepresentation and white underrepresentation increase. Dr. Tatjana Meschede, associate director of the IASP and senior scientist at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management, described in her co-authored research: “Historical legacy and contemporary employment practices concentrate Black and Latino working people disproportionately in jobs and industries stripped of or lacking in benefits that connect work to wealth and better livelihoods.”17

The healthcare industry, for example, is one of the fastest-growing fields in the country today, projected to add about 1.9 million new jobs by 2028. The median annual wage for practitioners and technical employees (such as doctors, nurses, and dental hygienists) is more than one and a half times higher than the median wage for all occupations, but the median annual wage for workers in health support fields, like health aides and assistants, is below that median.18

Guess which are the “white” jobs and which are the “black” jobs—the ones where the pay is better or worse than the median?

Meschede and her colleagues found that while black workers made up 16 percent of the healthcare labor force, they are more than three times as likely to work as lower-paid health aides than their white counterparts. And even when black and white healthcare workers earned comparable salaries, there were huge discrepancies in their overall wealth, which Meschede’s report attributes to the lack of access to “asset-building benefits”—the health insurance and retirement benefits that make up one-third of total employee compensation. Black health aides earning $23,100 in income had median wealth of $900; white health aides earning $23,600 had median wealth of $5,300. Among registered nurses, black and white nurses reporting comparable incomes near $55,000 reported median wealth of $20,000 and $93,500, respectively.

A common argument, when it comes to both care and compensation in the health field, focuses on education and training. It’s true that home health aides and anesthesiologists don’t require the same levels of training and certification to do their jobs, and becoming a physician requires significant financial investment. However, the healthcare field isn’t an outlier when it comes to these racial wealth discrepancies; it’s the standard. Meschede and her colleagues found that the discrepancies exist across industries, regardless of education or specialization, including in highly paid fields like technology and finance. Not only were

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