OKPOLICY.ORG
In 2010 in Oklahoma, just under half of the state’s residents of color owned their own homes, compared to three-quarters of the state’s white residents. Home ownership is a key element of economic mobility and has has been key to growing the middle class in America, as we’ve discussed in our report “Closing the Opportunity Gap” and in a previously-posted video on the impact of the racial wealth gap.
This clip from PBS’s “The House We Live In,” part of a multipart PBS series called “Race: The Power of an Illusion,” demonstrates how US post-war public policy widened today’s racial wealth gap by initially restricting access to home ownership almost exclusively to white Americans and later divesting people of color from the wealth in their homes by using a race based rating system for property values.
A transcript is available here; the clip linked above is from Scene #10.
- Debunking Myths About Who Pays Taxes
- The Economic Case for Preschool
- The Racial Wealth Gap in America
- The New Jim Crow
- The Line
