Land Theft: The Alarming Racial Wealth Gap in America Today

The five largest landowners in America, all white, own more rural land than all of Black America combined.
–Antonio Moore (2016)

In a country where land and its resources are commodities, the exclusion and expulsion of Black and Indigenous people from the land economy has been an act of financial warfare. Take the fact that Black Americans own less than one percent of U.S. farmland, or that Indigenous households have approximately eight cents of wealth for every white household’s dollar. White supremacy’s campaign to exclude communities of color from land for financial gain is a war not yet ceased.

The mainstream conversation on the racial wealth gap is nearly devoid of how much money was amassed, passed down, and repurposed through land theft and hoarding. There is of course the evidence: testaments of sacred, ancestral land being vandalized; Black family farms becoming university parking garages, vacant lots, military forts, and corporate campuses; and gentrification raging on, further displacing working-class (mostly Black and brown) people.

However, the national dialogue leaves most of this out. It’s why economists and sociologists like Charles C. Geisler have worked so tirelessly to bring landholdings back into the national framing of poverty. In his 1995 paper titled “Land and Poverty in the United States,” Geisler claims that “land influences wealth and poverty in a variety of important ways” and that “indirect ownership of property of all kinds increases with wealth.”

Geisler’s more explicit plea to the reader is that connections between land, power, and wealth be “dragged out of the closet, carefully examined, and used to forge more direct and more effective national, state, and local policy.”

There is a mountain of quantitative and qualitative evidence to back up the claim that the wealthy landowners of the past developed trusts and endowments for future generations. The wealth they hoarded has since funded and birthed the CEOs, politicians, and corporations who control our food, media, and housing into the twenty-first century.

Further, the children and grandchildren of the sharecroppers, farmers, and landowners who had their labor and acreage snatched from under them are just as poor and in debt—if not more so—than their foreparents were decades and centuries ago. Land and property were not by-products of this dynamic; they were critical tools used to create systematic barriers.

Cross-generational asset hoarding by white families and corporations has led to new heights of wealth accrual, and attempts to address them by working twice as hard have been sending Black people to early graves. For all the fearmongering around taxing the rich, fairly little is said of the ways white families have redistributed Black and Indigenous wealth for themselves. And for all of the advocacy around pay equity and wage equality, few are acknowledging trust funds and estates that can’t be outworked. The cards that are stacked against us have been compounding interest, and it’s time to follow the money.

Dedrick Asante-Muhammad is one of the leading subject-matter experts on racial economic inequality. In a conversation I had with him about the role of land ownership and passed-down assets in building wealth, he stated, “Wealth is the clearest indicator of socioeconomic stability and inequality.” It’s a fuller metric and highlights that the country isn’t on the path to bridging inequality but widening it. Further wealth is broader than immediate financial returns.

Having access to money is important for immediate survival, but the ability to stow money away for the future is how wealth accumulates for the benefit of future generations. “You can’t be as long-term or strategic when you’re in asset poverty,” he remarked. “You make decisions about the immediate future.”

Dedrick continued, “Asset poverty is not the condition of an individual or a household. It’s when the whole community is asset poor.” Assets can be leveraged for wealth-building through liquidation of assets or leveraging them as collateral. Yet at almost every critical juncture and economic shift in American history, Black Americans have had less capital to engage in those moments of great prosperity for white America.

“Whether individual household wealth or community wealth was more about land in the early twentieth century, home ownership in the late twentieth century, or finance in the twenty-first century,” Dedrick stressed, “Black people have less and we generally get less in returns.”

Black land theft has not only reduced Black economic opportunities, but it has also often been used for the direct benefit of white peers. When touching on the double-edged sword in these persistent inequities, Dedrick called attention to the ways white public benefit has always superseded Black autonomy.

Oftentimes, Black land has been taken to develop public space like highways or parks. These projects created white public benefit by confiscating Black land or by using Black land as a dumping ground. So it’s two things: It’s appropriating Black land, and putting negative externalities that further drive down the value of the land as well as Black lives themselves.

In a 2018 Brookings Institution report, Andre M. Perry, a commentator on structural inequality and the devaluation of Black assets and author of Know Your Price: Valuing Black Lives and Property in America’s Black Cities, posed the critical question, What is the cost of racial bias? “Homes of similar quality in neighborhoods with similar amenities are worth twenty-three percent less ($48,000 per home on average, amounting to $156 billion in cumulative losses) in majority Black neighborhoods.”

Further, the report states,

the devaluing of Black lives led to segregation and racist federal housing policy through redlining that shut out chances for Black people to purchase homes and build wealth, making it more difficult to start and invest in businesses and afford college tuition.

According to a 2019 report by McKinsey & Company, Black families are more than three times less likely to receive an inheritance, and when we do it’s at about a third of the value of white families. This report highlights that

Black families begin with lower levels of wealth: only eight percent of black families receive an inheritance, compared with twenty-six percent of white families. When an inheritance is distributed, it is thirty-five percent of the value of that of a white family.

Across history, Black Americans have worked tirelessly to invest in their families, in order to be able to pass on wealth, and we know that it is not lack of financial literacy or business acumen, but systematic inequity beginning with land and wealth hoarding, that prevents this.

In 1901, Rep. George Henry White, a Black congressman from North Carolina, delivered a speech to the House of Representatives where he listed the economic achievements of Black Americans nationwide:

We have accumulated over $12,000,000 worth of school property and about $40,000,000 worth of church property. We have about 140,000 farms and homes, valued at in the neighborhood of $750,000,000, and personal property valued at about $170,000,000. We have raised about $11,000,000 for educational purposes, and the property per capita for every colored man, woman, and child in the United States is estimated at $75….We have over 600,000 acres of land in the South alone. The cotton produced, mainly by black labor, has increased from 4,669,770 bales in 1860 to 11,235,000 in 1899. All this we have done under the most adverse circumstances.

Based on Congressman White’s words and access to research, Black America owned and controlled what today would be worth more than $30 trillion in land and property, with the majority of that land being communally owned and evenly distributed among Black families and community institutions. For all of the sociopolitical gains that we have made, most Black Americans are worse off financially now than they were a hundred years ago.

By 1910, multiple records show that sixteen to nineteen million acres of land were owned by about 210,000 Black people. But with the Wilmington Massacre, Congressman White had seen the carnage in his home state as a foreshadowing of the theft to come. His term came to an end as Wilmington marked a temporary halting of multiracial organizing and Black wealth building across North Carolina.

In that same 1901 speech, he said, “This, Mr. Chairman, is perhaps the negroes’ temporary farewell to the American Congress; but let me say, Phoenix-like he will rise up some day and come again.” Over the next seventy years after White’s term in office, no Black people were elected to Congress (Congresswoman Barbara Jordan would be the one to break this streak!), and Black wealth was slashed until only crumbs remained.

When talking about Black wealth, it’s necessary to focus on Black farmers in particular. Because of historic exclusion from most other industries, Black Americans were pigeonholed into the agrarian economy, so any wealth we could have passed down likely would have been tied to land or farming.

Further, most Black Americans have genealogical roots in the South, and Black families presently remain concentrated in Southern and Midwestern states like Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, Illinois, and Michigan, where farming and agriculture more generally dominate the economy.

A November 2021 McKinsey Institute for Black Economic Mobility report highlighted that the median income and net worth of Black farmers are significantly higher than those of all Black Americans. Ownership and participation in the agricultural economy present some of the greatest opportunities for Black wealth-building.

According to that 2021 McKinsey study, if Black farms were to achieve parity on a per-farm revenue basis, they stand to generate $5 billion in economic value. The reality is, year after year, Black farmers have been blocked from their rightful place in the larger rural land, agricultural, and mineral economy.

Dr. Darrick Hamilton, an economics and urban policy professor who has shaped progressive federal racial justice proposals and announced a first-of-its-kind study to quantify the land stolen from Black farmers, hasn’t been shy about reminding people that Black land loss isn’t a hypothesis or one-off experience. “This is empirical,” he says, and if you ask him, lead author Dr. Dania Francis, or any of the other economists who worked on the study, they’ll tell you that Black American farmers lost more than $326 billion’s worth of land throughout the 1900s.

According to the Historical Survey of Consumer Finances, by 1968, the median white household had ten times as much wealth as the average Black household. Notably, their research also found that while income grew at comparable rates, though still substantially uneven, most wealth inequality stemmed from persistent pre-civil rights era disparities.

The report, “Income and Wealth Inequality in America, 1949–2016,” explicitly states, “The wealth gap [between 1950 and 2010] is much larger than the income gap. The median Black household disposes of twelve percent of the wealth of a median white household.”

The report goes on to describe one of the only periods when racial wealth gaps temporarily narrowed: the housing boom of the 1990s and early 2000s. When Black households were disproportionately impacted by the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent housing price collapse and recession, racial wealth gaps widened once again.

The late twentieth century showed no signs of slowing down the wealth loss and theft. A thirty-year assessment of Federal Reserve data titled “The Road to Zero Wealth: How the Racial Wealth Divide Is Hollowing Out America’s Middle Class” found that between 1983 and 2013, median Black household wealth decreased by seventy-five percent, from $6,800 to $1,700.

The Winter 2002 edition of Rural America, titled “Who Owns the Land? Agricultural Land Ownership by Race/Ethnicity,” cites census data which finds that, by the late 1990s, Black farmers and landowners were still highly concentrated in the South and owned less than two million acres of land. Whereas before, almost one million Black farmers owned and tended to land, an investigation by The Counter discovered that by 1997 this number had declined by ninety-eight percent, to fewer than nineteen thousand Black farmers.

By 2002, the USDA reported that Black people owned less than one percent of rural land in the United States, valued at about $14 billion combined. Of all private U.S. agricultural land, the report explains, white Americans make up ninety-six percent of landowners and control ninety-seven percent of all land value, which means that, in addition to owning more land, white Americans also tend to possess more lucrative land.

America’s total land value in 2023 is more than $23 trillion for 2.4 billion acres of land, water, and biodiversity, ninety-eight percent of which is still owned by white Americans. Thirty years after abusing policies, violently seizing land, or deceiving and manipulating Black folks into selling, Black farmers and landowners have still not recovered.

Beyond farmland and rural acreage, Black people are less likely to own assets in general—unsurprising when you consider how much disposable income would be needed to do so. According to the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, while seventy-two percent of white Americans own a home, only forty-two percent of Black Americans do.

This gap has remained fairly consistent over the last one hundred years. Similarly, statistics available from a 2019 Board of Governors survey of the Federal Reserve System express that less than six percent of Black Americans own stake in a business and that Black households have about one-fourth the liquid assets of white households.

As of 2021, Black Americans held four percent of America’s household wealth despite making up about thirteen percent of the U.S. population. Millions of Black American families—approximately nineteen percent of us—have a negative net worth, and millions more have a net worth less than $10,000.

We’re overrepresented in jails, prisons, and debt metrics and underrepresented in areas that could holistically nourish our people, like: being business owners, pursuing higher education, investing in new crafts, or otherwise developing regenerative and independent communities. Generations of Black people who were forced to weather storms without so much as a raincoat have vanished safety nets.

Our economic precarity as a people has only been compounded by ongoing racial discrimination. Black people are more vulnerable to predatory lending, financial fraud, and housing insecurity. Living in zip codes accessible to working-class Black people has also typically meant surrendering to a lifetime of bad schools, crumbling infrastructure, limited healthcare, and weak public safety—all of which are expensive in both the short and long run.

The violence of chronic poverty and racial capitalism has been incessant, and the hoarded spoils have built modern empires. Unfortunately— and irresponsibly—many of the reports I’ve cited throughout this chapter have not named white supremacy, land theft, or capitalism as the culprit behind the statistics.

It’s important that we remember and reiterate that racial wealth gaps are not accidental, nor to be blamed on an alleged lack of ambition or work ethic. Poor and/or racially marginalized people cannot outwork a centuries-long head start, and certainly not if our opponent continues to cheat.

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Excerpted from Rooted copyright © 2024 by Brea Baker. Used by permission of One World, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.