0:05

Last year, Like a lot of black Americans,

0:08

I started thinking more about our collective

0:10

history in America in my own

0:12

place in it. My family had

0:15

a plot of land in East Texas, near a town

0:17

called Mount Pleasant. I grew

0:19

up in Arizona, and as far as I was

0:21

concerned, Texas was another planet.

0:24

Big hats, rodeos

0:27

that showed Dallas. We

0:29

drove through Mount Pleasant once, but I don't

0:31

remember much. As I got older,

0:34

my dad would call and talk about the Texas

0:36

property. He daydream about

0:38

all the ways that might one day give him a financial

0:40

cushion, How would buy a better life

0:43

for him and my brother, who has a disability,

0:45

How there might be oil on the land or some

0:47

kind of rare timber, And if I'm being

0:49

honest, he planted some of those thoughts

0:52

in my head too. Then

0:54

came the pandemic and George Floyd

0:57

and I started thinking more about inequality in America,

1:00

and because I'm a business journalist, the racial

1:02

wealth gap. I started digging

1:04

into my past in Texas.

1:07

I learned that the land would never be our ticket to

1:09

prosperity. It was gone. When

1:12

I found out why, I realized

1:14

my family's story isn't much different

1:16

from other black Americans. I

1:21

started wondering, how did other black

1:23

people build wealth in America and

1:25

how did they hold onto it, or

1:27

like my family failed to hold onto

1:30

it. That's what we'll be exploring on

1:32

this season of The Paycheck, the

1:34

racial wealth gap. The U.

1:36

S is the richest nation in the world and

1:39

has been for a long time. But while

1:41

black people make up around of

1:43

the population, they hold just

1:45

three of all the wealth. I'm

1:52

Jackie Simmons and I'm Rebecca

1:54

Greenfield. Starting on March eleven,

1:57

we'll be diving into how the racial wealth

1:59

gap came to be. He was deeply,

2:01

deeply racist. He couldn't have cared less about

2:03

the fate of the former slaves, and

2:06

he restored white supremacy

2:08

as quickly as he could. What it looks like now.

2:11

He was the next thing to God in this county.

2:14

He controlled all the bank boards, and

2:16

he said, nobody lends more money in this county

2:19

than I do. And if you don't

2:21

learn how to speak to me, you're not gonna get any

2:24

any money, and you won't be farming very

2:26

long. I told him I didn't.

2:28

I didn't know what Jesus Christ nor God look

2:30

like. I said, But he can't look like you and

2:33

what might start to close up. It

2:35

is a way to repair egregious

2:38

injury and crimes against

2:41

humanity against the black

2:43

community. Yes, it

2:45

is reparations. Let's not call it anything

2:47

else. To make you feel better, subscribe

2:55

to the Paycheck on Apple Podcasts, Spotify,

2:58

or wherever you get your podcast. We'll

3:00

see you on March eleven. H