Whites Wealth Advantage Over Minorities and Political Correctness as GOP Ploy

I. Whites' Great Wealth Advantage Over Minorities
If current economic trends continue, the average black household will need 228 years to accumulate as much wealth as their white counterparts hold today. Latinos will take 84 years. The study reaching this startling conclusion was a joint effort by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) and the Corporation for Economic Development (CFED). They looked at trends in household wealth from 1983 to 2013. Average wealth of white households increased by 84 percent, three times the gains of blacks and 1.2 times the rate of growth for Latinos in those thirty years. For the next thirty years, if the same trends continue, the average white family's net worth will grow by $18,000 a year, compared to $750 for blacks and $2,250 for Latinos. [1]

Members of the Fortune 400 saw their net worth increase by 736 percent in that 30-year period.

Economist Thomas Picketty says we would move toward a "hereditary aristocracy of wealth." He didn't say that in the United States it would be a white aristocracy of wealth. A big reason that the wealth gap will grow is because "accumulated wealth is a mechanism for transmitting economic success from generation to generation." Princeton University sociologist Dalton Conley has found that the wealth of a child's family is the "greatest predictor of that child's future economic prospects."

What are some other factors contributing to this great racial gulf in wealth? A 2013 study by he National Priorities Project found that 77 percent of the home mortgage deduction benefits in the federal income tax  goes to households with annual incomes between $75,000 and $500,000. Also, an estimated two-thirds of all public subsidies for retirement savings go to those with incomes in the top 20 percent of the distribution.

II. The GOP Ploy on Being Politically Correct
The Republican Party has been making major use of politically correctness as a major cause of problems in the United States. In a Time magazine piece, Kareem Abdul-Jabber makes a case that use of political correctness is a way of avoiding solutions to serious problems in the nation. He begins by citing a poll in which nearly 60 percent of respondents identify political correctness as a problem in the U.S. Those worried that we've gone too far in our pursuit of political correctness falls pretty solidly along political party lines: twice as many Republicans as Democrats think it's a problem. Only 18 percent think we're not politically correct enough. [2]

"Deriding political correctness gives people permission not to fix a problem, because we can claim instead that it doesn't exist." "Arrogantly clutching onto wrong-headed traditions is damaging to the country." Abdul-Jabber writes that "Every time a male coach berates his players by referring to them as 'ladies,' or tells them to "hike up their skirts' while playing, we're perpetuating an atmosphere where women are not men's equals."

"The Anti-PC Rhetoric is a clever tool by politicians who wish to distract voters from the real issues by tapping into their darkest fears about people who are different from them and, at the same time allowing the politicians not to have to fix the problem."

Kareem Abdul-Jabber concludes by writing that: "So while we're told to focus on building a massive wall to keep out immigrants, the real causes of job-loss and economic instability continue unabated."

Footnotes
[1] Joshua Holland, "The Average Black Family Would Need 228 Years to Build the Wealth of a White Family Today," The Nation, August 8, 2016.

[2] Kareem Abdul-Jabber, "Politically incorrect? Or master strategists? Try both," Time, September 12-19, 2016.