nti-black racism has cost the US $16 trillion since 2000, White House Domestic Policy Council chief Susan Rice told Al Sharpton\u2019s racial justice advocacy group National Action Network on Wednesday.
\u201cThe US had a GDP shortfall of $16 trillion due to discrimination against black Americans\u201d between 2000 and 2020, Rice, who was shortlisted for the vice president post in President Joe Biden\u2019s cabinet but passed over for Kamala Harris, told the audience.
\u201cIf we closed our racial gaps, we could add another $5 trillion to GDP over just the next 5 years,\u201d she continued, without elaborating on what was meant by \u201cracial gaps.\u201d
Reassuring cheering onlookers this was \u201cnot my math,\u201d Rice attributed the claims to Citibank, which published a report in 2020 titled \u201cClosing the Racial Inequality Gaps; The Economic Cost of Black Inequality in the US.\u201d
The Citi report claimed that \u201cclosing the black wage gap could have added $2.7 trillion in income available for consumption or investment,\u201d while \u201cfacilitating easy access to higher education for black students could have increased lifetime incomes $90-$113 billion.\u201d Meanwhile, \u201cimproving access to housing credit might have added an additional 770,000 black homeowners,\u201d equating to $218 billion in spending, it continued.
Most impressively \u2013 according to Citi \u2013 simply \u201cproviding fair and equitable lending to black entrepreneurs might have resulted in the creation of an additional $13 trillion in business revenue and potentially created 6.1 million jobs per year.\u201d The statistics are sourced to \u201cCiti Research,\u201d with no further discussion of their origins.
Continuing her speech at Sharpton\u2019s event, Rice called for the audience to \u201cstand together in defense of facts, truth and history,\u201d warning that \u201cwe\u2019re seeing bans on innocuous children\u2019s books just because they feature prominently black or brown characters\u201d and \u201cblack history erased from our classrooms and textbooks.\u201d
\u201cMake no mistake, those who are doing this are trying to tell us that we do not count, that we do not matter, and that perhaps we should not exist,\u201d the former Obama national security adviser declared, without going into detail on who that might be.
Citi\u2019s report recommended that the government \u201cprovide guaranteed wages, income and jobs\u201d in order to close the \u201cracial gaps.\u201d While urging the government to beef up the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, an authority tasked with protecting against racial discrimination in hiring, the bank also called on corporations to favor racially diverse candidates in seeming violation of the EEOC, describing this as \u201cthe right thing to do.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n