Know Your Price: Valuing Black Lives and Property in America’s Black Cities

Regression models are mathematically most stable if the referent group is the largest within the sample you are drawing from. For that reason, in the United States, data sources that make note of racial categories are generally presented sequentially, with “White,” the largest single racial group, listed first.

negative reinforcement campaign that attempts to punish Black people

Culture of poverty theories manifest themselves in a seemingly constant focus on how Black folk aren’t living up to White norms instead of probing how to dismantle systems that privilege White people at Black people’s expense.

Racism is a common denominator for Black people; it’s a given. It’s much more useful, in many cases, to examine the variation within the Black population to see what factors and conditions can be attributed to differences.

She, like many Black immigrants, feels the collateral damage of negative expectations, stereotypes, and assumptions she didn’t grow up with but now has to live with in her adopted country. The expectations of Blacks in America spill over onto those who haven’t been reared in our context.

What

Adding insult to injury, we’re professionally trained and rewarded to make White people the default referent group that Blacks are measured against. In doing so, we acquire a tendency to center White people in our work.

According to the research nonprofit the Institute on Assets and Social Policy, “Assets provide the tangible resources that help individuals move out of and stay out of poverty.”2 Assets

for poverty we didn’t create.