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- #1
You know, people are always acting like racism is some kind of secret master plan for one group to get ahead, but if you actually look at the numbers, that's just a total lie, the real story?
It's a financial black hole, a straight-up drag on the whole economy. Think of it less as a strategy and more like an invisible tax that hurts everyone, but especially the people it's aimed at, I mean, look at what the pros say, Citigroup, McKinsey, they've done the math, and the numbers are just nuts, get this: a Citigroup study said America could be, like, $16 trillion richer over the last 20 years if we just got our act together on things like wages and housing, and they even updated it, saying the total cost since the year 2000 is now a mind-blowing $21.3 trillion, and another one from the San Francisco Fed and the World Economic Forum?
They say racial inequality cost the U.S. economy a crazy $51 trillion in lost output since 1990, these aren't just guesses, they're based on what our economy would've done if it wasn't held back by all this stuff, and this isn't one huge mess; it's a bunch of smaller disasters that all add up, so where did the money go?
Wages, wage gaps and getting passed over for jobs cost Black workers hundreds of billions, that's money that never got spent, never got invested, just between 2020 and 2024 alone, a Citigroup report says we lost $0.9 trillion just because of this, and housing? The housing market lost $218 billion over two decades, why? Black families getting denied loans or their homes getting low-balled, homeownership is how a lot of people get ahead, and this just blocked off that path for countless families, and businesses?
This is the big one, an estimated $13 trillion in business revenue never even happened because Black entrepreneurs couldn't get the loans they needed, think about all the new businesses, the jobs, the tax money—just gone, another Citigroup report points to $2.9 trillion in losses from 2020-2024 in just this area, so the takeaway is so simple: racism is financially stupid, whatever one group might think they're "gaining" is completely wiped out by the massive, long-term damage it does to the whole country, it's like a company destroying its own product and then wondering why sales are down, modern cultural shaming is hurting society like ancient rome.
-This post dont consider cultural and genetic factors on blacks, just a mere insight, not focusing on "gender", neither i live in the USA.
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- Citigroup:"Closing the Racial Inequality Gaps: The Economic Cost of Black Inequality in the U.S."
- This is the 2020 report from Citi's Global Perspectives & Solutions team that estimates the U.S. economy could have gained $16 trillion by addressing racial inequality over the past two decades.
- Link: https://www.citigroup.com/global/insights/closing-the-racial-inequality-gaps-20200922
- Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco:"The Economic Gains from Equity"
- This paper from the San Francisco Fed discusses the aggregate economic costs of persistent educational and labor market disparities by race and gender.
- Link: https://www.frbsf.org/wp-content/uploads/wp2021-11.pdf
- McKinsey & Company:"The economic impact of closing the racial wealth gap"
- This report from the McKinsey Institute for Economic Mobility projects that closing the racial wealth gap could add between $1 trillion and $1.5 trillion to the U.S. economy over a decade.
- Link: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries...nomic-impact-of-closing-the-racial-wealth-gap
