#africanews #blackhistory
The wealth gap between white and black people in the United States, a country that always preaches and is supposed to be a defender of equality, fairness, justice, and human rights, has always been huge. Quite hypocritical in our opinion. Whenever there is a crisis in the United States, for instance, the 2008 housing market crash, blacks in America are hit the hardest. During the housing market crash, more blacks lost their houses by a significant margin compared to White House owners, they were denied loans, and unemployment was significantly higher among the blacks than other races in the United States. As Debbie Bocian, senior researcher at the Center for Responsible Lending, once said, “Billions and billions of dollars were stripped away from a community that already had lower levels of wealth than white communities. And, all this happened in a country that promotes itself as the greatest defender of human rights and equality. However, the interesting thing is, this wealth gap between the blacks and the whites didn't start in 2008. No, it can be traced back to the period after slavery was just abolished in America when one of the greatest scams to have ever happened to a group of people. Not, surprisingly, nothing was done about it. This is the story of how the US government stole an equivalent of 1.3 billion dollars in today's dollars from Black people with the help of a financial institution called the Freedman’s Bank.