Black Power Scorecard
Measuring the Racial Gap and What We Can Do to Close It
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
From the creator of “a unified field theory of racism” (NPR’s Planet Money), a dollars-and-cents reckoning of the state of Black America and a new framework to close the power gap.
Historically, Black Americans’ quest for power has been understood as an attempt to gain equal protections under the law. But power in America requires more than basic democratic freedoms. It is inextricably linked with economic influence and ownership—of one’s self, home, business, and creations.
Andre M. Perry draws on extensive research and analysis to quantify how much power Black Americans actually have. Ranging from property, business, and wealth to education, health, and social mobility, Black Power Scorecard moves across the country, evaluating people’s ability to set the rules of the game and calculating how that translates into the ultimate means of power—life itself, and the longevity of Black communities. Along the way, Perry identifies woefully overlooked areas of investment that could close the racial gap and benefit everyone.
An expansive take on power supported by documentation and data, Black Power Scorecard is a fresh contribution to the country’s reckoning with structural inequality, one that offers a new approach to redressing it.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Economist Perry (Know Your Price) reevaluates what it means for Black Americans to be empowered in this smart and revelatory treatise. Defining longevity as "the ultimate expression of power," Perry measures how Black life expectancy fluctuates against factors like wealth, education, and pollution in neighborhoods throughout the country. This allows him to identify not only areas where Black power is at an ebb, but also areas where Black power is thriving and what factors are contributing to it. Perry concludes that it is Black property ownership, above all, that correlates with Black longevity. Not even personal ownership is the defining factor; for Black people, Perry finds, simply living in an area with a higher percentage of Black home and business ownership leads to longer life expectancy. Perry goes on to makes a strong case that other factors that contribute to Black social inequality—like a lower percentage of two-parent households, which are correlated to a number of positive social outcomes for children—are offshoots of the ownership problem (he cites studies showing that asset ownership leads to marriage, not the other way around). Perry also reflects on how this struggle for ownership resonates with Black history, suggesting that the failure of Reconstruction to adequately provide restitution for slavery is fundamentally the main issue leading to Black disempowerment today. The result is one of the most riveting and convincing studies yet to make a case for reparations.
