"Nothing says that you don't belong in an economy than having a cop kill you dead in the street.” 

I awoke on Wednesday morning to those words from Andre Perry of the public policy think-tank Brookings Institution on the radio.

Unusually for a report about institutionalised racism, this was the business news slot and Perry went on to articulate deftly the various ways in which racist attitudes pervade American society and act to stifle social mobility for black people.  

The unemployment rate for African Americans in the US is roughly double that of white people. Black neighbourhoods are devalued by an average of 23%, or $48,000 per home, when you strip-out the impact of crime, educational provision, and other factors to enable a like-for-like comparison. That means if you were to lift a property out of an African American neighbourhood and place it down in a predominantly white neighbourhood, its value would rise instantly by nearly one-quarter.

As Perry points out, that is money that could be used to send kids to college, to start a business, to put a deposit down on a new home. In short, “the money that people use to lift themselves up,” he noted. Aggregated across the US, Perry calculates that black communities are denied $156bn in total, simply through racism. 

“It’s sad but true,” he continued “that the same racist thoughts that compelled a cop to kneel on the neck of an unarmed man and kill him in the middle of the street are the same attitudes that employers have, banks have, that folks in education have, and those attitudes are baked-in to so many of the structures in the United States and they all throttle the economic trajectory of blacks." 

You can listen to Perry’s short Today programme interview with Dominic O’Connell here (from 16 minutes into the show) and a longer conversation on the same topic from the Brookings Institution podcast here (from six-and-a-half minutes into the episode). 

It was a timely reminder to me that ‘Black Lives Matter’ as a cause or a campaign needs to be as much about investing in people’s lives and livelihoods as it is about preventing wrongful deaths. 

As a privileged white man in the UK, I acknowledge that I am not well qualified to tackle this subject and do so with a degree of discomfort. However, we all have a duty and a stake – economically, as well as morally – in eradicating racism so I think it is better to write than not.    

As Perry himself concludes: “There’s nothing wrong with black people that ending racism can’t solve.”    

I hope you have a good weekend.