Structural racism, cultural racism, and individual-level discrimination generate racial wealth, health, and opportunity disparities that systematically undermine the success of Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) households. Families of color face barriers to economic mobility and opportunity that negatively impact wealth building. White family wealth is nearly ten 10 times greater than Black family wealth and eight times greater than Hispanic family wealth. The gap in net worth between Black and white families is particularly pervasive—it persists at nearly every income level, meaning that even when Black and white households have similar income, the latter are likely to enjoy more overall wealth.
Racial health disparities caused by inequity are ubiquitous. Black, Hispanic, and American Indian or Alaska Native (AIAN) people fare worse than whites on many measures of health, from diabetes rates to infant mortality. Nationally, life expectancy at birth for Black people is 3.6 years shorter than that of white people, and that gap can be even more pronounced depending on where a person lives. Everything from real estate and banking to education and the tax code is predicated upon structural norms that impose barriers to opportunity for people of color.
LISC is committed to advancing racial equity in local communities and eliminating the racial wealth, health, and opportunity gap across all of our work streams. We are supporting Black and Brown entrepreneurship by creating access to capital for business owners of color. We are working to increase wages and help people build twenty-first-century job skills with our investments in Financial Opportunity Centers. We are promoting housing affordability and homeownership opportunities. And we are investing in quality child care, primary schools, and health care serving communities of color. These are just some of the concerted ways that LISC is hoping to address the racial equity gap.
Creating communities of opportunity for all is a multisector, shared responsibility. We believe that the federal government—which in many instances established policies that have exacerbated the wealth gap—can join us in facilitating the dismantling of inequitable systems by adopting policies and approaches that intentionally address racial wealth inequality.
LISC has released a comprehensive set of policy priorities and proposals that we intend to promote with members of Congress and the Administration in the coming months and years. While in some respects all of these proposals will positively impact BIPOC households and communities, we highlight below a subset of the proposals that we believe can be particularly impactful with respect to closing the health, wealth, and opportunity gap for families and communities of color.
