Wealth Gaps

 

The nation of South Africa has recently been in the U.S. media. There are more similarities between the two countries than many may think. The similarities of racial wealth gaps between Blacks and Whites in the U.S. and South Africa is a sobering reminder, as the Honorable Minister Farrakhan once said, that “Politics without economics is symbol without substance.”

Minister Farrakhan’s statement is a powerful indictment of the fallacy of putting Black hope into a global White supremacist imperialist system that is the product of the Transatlantic slave trade and Jim Crow segregation.

The byproduct of the industrial revolution, the principal catalyst of imperialism, is Western colonialism, exploitation capitalism, and free-market exploitation.

The U.S. and South Africa are prime examples of these failures. Both countries, with their history of anti-Black policies, practices, and laws, have adversely impacted the economic and financial realities of Black people. South Africa’s apartheid system and America’s history and systems of slavery and Jim Crow  

---

The Review of Political Economy, in its 2024 study, headlined “The Racial Wealth Gap in South Africa and the United States,” stated, “In South Africa, the typical Black household owns 5 percent of the wealth held by the typical White household.

In the U.S., the typical Black household owns 6 percent of the wealth held by the typical White household. In both countries, a racial wealth gap exists at different levels of education and income.”

According to the study’s authors, Grieve Chelwa, Mashckwa Mabashe, and Darrick Hamilton, capital deficiencies help explain America’s racial wealth gap. “A striking statistic is that White households, where the head is a high school dropout, have higher net worth than Black households where the head has a college degree.”

The study also reported that, in the U.S., “the existence of discrimination against Black workers in markets considered ‘competitive’ is evidence against the irrationality arguments advanced by mainstream economics.” 

In the U.S., the most poignant wealth gap disparity, the study notes, can be traced to chattel slavery, when the White plantation class outright owned Blacks as “chattel property.”

According to the study, “As of 2019, the latest year for which we have nationally representative data, the typical Black household had 12 cents for every dollar of wealth held by the typical White household.”

And in South Africa, the deafening noise of inequality, capital deficiencies, and limited economic advancement continues to define life for Blacks in the post-apartheid era.

Economist Anna Orthofe describes the country’s high levels of wealth disparity as the top “one percent owns between 60 and 90 percent of all wealth, while the top 10 percent owns 90–95 percent of all wealth,” cited the Review of Political Economy report.

In addition, according to another report in the 2024 British Journal of Sociology, the fact that economic policies in South Africa have done little in terms of asset or wealth redistribution, coupled with “sluggish growth and unemployment it is not surprising that inequality has become more, and not less, entrenched.”

“Indeed, the situation has deteriorated markedly, and statistics characteristically place South Africa as the most unequal nation in the world, having overtaken Brazil during the 2000s,” noted the journal’s reported titled, “The socioeconomic dimensions of racial inequality in South Africa: A social space perspective.”

Al Jazeera also noted that South Africa “Is the most unequal country in the world, ranking first among 164 countries,” quoting from a report titled “Inequality in South Africa.”

Three decades after the end of apartheid, “race remains a key driver of high inequality in South Africa, due to its impact on education and the labor market,” the outlet noted. 

At the root of the disparity is that South Africa continues to be plagued by remnants of the disease of apartheid, similar to the vestiges of slavery in America. “The legacy of colonialism and apartheid continues to reinforce inequality,” noted Al Jazeera.

Black America received “emancipation” from chattel slavery in 1863, 131 years before the 1994 end of the apartheid government of South Africa, and the beginning of the country’s first non-racial elections and transition to a democratic government.

In those 131 years, “patterns of Black–White inequality look similar between the two countries,” according to the Review of Political Economy.

“In other words, the racial wealth gap in the U.S. is similar to that of a country that recently emerged out of apartheid,” the report continued. This speaks to the premise that “there is international patterned evidence to suggest that the future of the racial wealth gap in South Africa is the U.S.

That is to say, South Africa’s future racial wealth gap will not look any more different than it is today in the absence of large-scale economic/capital-based/or reparations public interventions that can neuter the link between identity and outcomes,” the study pointed out.