After 46-year-old Black man George Floyd was killed by police in Minneapolis in 2020, people took to the streets all over the country calling for justice and change.
Thinking about race in this country, and the inequity that comes with it, came to the fore for many.
That was the case for journalists Ebony Reed and Louise Story, both Wall Street Journal editors at the time, who decided to take a deep look at the impact of race on financial well-being in this country.
After three years of research and hundreds of interviews, they co-authored the book "Fifteen Cents on the Dollar: How Americans Made the Black-White Wealth Gap."
The book explores the history of racial wealth disparity through the eyes of a group of Americans. And the authors found that, historically, at nearly every turn, Black people in the U.S. have faced and continue to face obstacles in amassing wealth.
Ebony Reed joins Tuesday's "Sound of Ideas" to talk about her book and its implications for attempting to create more equity in America. Reed began her career as a reporter at The Plain Dealer, covering Cleveland public schools, and documenting public education's inequities.
Later in this hour, in 2020, CityLab Bloomberg released a study that ranked 42 U.S. metropolitan cities, comparing the income, educational and health outcomes for Black women. Cleveland was ranked last.
The news made headlines in Northeast Ohio, and led to the creation of initiatives like Project Noir from Enlightened Solutions, which surveyed the lived experiences of Black women in the region, as well as the City of Cleveland's Commission on Black Women and Girls, which was announced in 2022, and got off the ground earlier this year.
The question is: have things changed in the last four years for Black women?
A new Project Noir survey asked more than 1,300 Black women from Cleveland, Lorain, Akron, and Youngstown, and the answer is mixed.
We'll talk about the new survey with the co-founders of Enlightened Solutions, and a mental health expert to talk about this issue, and why the needle hasn't moved that much given all the attention paid to this issue.
Guests:
-Ebony Reed, Co-Author, "Fifteen Cents on the Dollars"
-Bethany Studenic, Founder and Managing Director, Enlightened Solutions
-Chinenye Nkemere, Co-Founder and Director of Strategy, Enlightened Solutions
-Dána Langford, CEO & Medical Director, The Village of Healing
Note: An earlier version of this story said that Ebony Reed and Louise Story were former reporters at the Wall St. Journal. They were editors.
