INTRODUCTION
When the Institute released Making the Two New Jerseys One, we described New Jersey as a modern-day version of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Two Americas.”
Since that last analysis, New Jersey’s approximately $300,000 racial wealth gap has doubled.
We now live in two New Jerseys that are even further apart.
As this report reveals, staggering racial disparities continue to persist and grow between white New Jersey and Black and Latina/o New Jersey in terms of wealth, homeownership, income and health insurance.
Why?
New Jersey designed it this way during its founding as a colony and has never confronted, let alone, repaired that harm. There is a direct line from New Jersey’s history of slavery, when white families were given 150 acres of land and up to an additional 150 acres of land for each enslaved Black person they brought with them, through generations of policy violence rooted in structural racism, to today’s racial wealth gap disaster.
Even recently, in the face of the devastating COVID-19 pandemic – 2020’s leading cause of death among Black people in the state – New Jersey had an opportunity to finally begin to repair the enduring harm to Black people by implementing reparative policies and investments and to protect Black communities from future disasters.
Instead, even as New Jersey rightly provided necessary short-term relief, it also pushed through the legislature – in just one week – the Economic Recovery Act of 2020, which included $14 billion in corporate tax breaks — a budgetary priority that we and our partners wrote would “eclipse critical funding needs for Black people in this state.” The state did not sufficiently address housing affordability and supply and failed to move on strategic policy recommendations like reparations and Baby Bonds, among others, that could help close the racial wealth gap.
As one of America’s wealthiest states, New Jersey’s challenge is not one of resources. Rather, it is that the state has designed a racialized system that determines who gets access to our wealth.
Since our last analysis, those with home equity and savings, who are disproportionately white, saw their wealth grow substantially, while those without, who are disproportionately Black and Latina/o, remained separated from homeownership and the opportunity to build wealth.
While the Institute and partners, with Governor Murphy and legislative champions, have achieved meaningful policies in recent years such as a $15 minimum wage, investing in first generation homeownership programs and fighting racial discrimination in home appraisals, so much more remains to be done to establish a foundation of racial equity in our state.
We are in a pivotal, turbulent and opportune time in our history, just months into a new presidential administration that is determined to roll back key civil rights progress from the last century – and during an election season in New Jersey in which every seat in the New Jersey Assembly is on the ballot and in which voters will elect a new governor.
We are inspired by the belief that even – especially – in the most difficult times lies an opportunity to harness our collective power to not only react, but to affirmatively advance a bold vision in which Black and Latina/o people – and indeed all of us – are connected to the vast prosperity of the Garden State.
An opportunity to finally make the Two New Jerseys One.
But first, clarity is required to understand the challenges we face – by the numbers.
