Forbes July 21, 2020

Five Big Ideas To Narrow The Racial Wealth Gap

After centuries of systemic barriers, the median net worth of Black households is one tenth that of white ones. Without changes such as these, the Covid-19 crisis will only widen the divide.

^In April, Bill Bynum,CEO of Mississippi-based credit union Hope Enterprise, watched in frustration as a $350 billion well of forgivable Payroll Protection Program loans was emptied in just 13 days. Hope serves 110,000 mostly African American and Latino members in the Mississippi Delta. But it had just one license for the software required to submit PPP applications to the Small Business Administration, meaning it had to wait for the SBA to process one loan before it could submit another. Hope had hundreds of applications teed up, yet only got 46 through, totaling $13 million. 

Meanwhile, hundreds of publicly traded companies rode a tsunami of big bank applications to get $1.4 billion in PPP loans approved. “Black businesses were at the back of the bus,’’ laments Bynum.