By: Kimberly Atkins-Stohr for The Boston Globe
Kimberly Atkins-Stohr highlights the role predatory debt plays in widening the racial wealth gap in this story for the Boston Globe:
“I was inspired to write the series “We Can Solve the Racial Wealth Gap” — in honor of Stewart’s words, ‘Where is the money’ — based on my experience of coming out of graduate school with six-figure student loan debt. I remember talking to some of my classmates around graduation about what felt like an insurmountable financial hurdle, hoping to engage in a little group venting session.
But I couldn’t. None of my White friends in that conversation had student loan debt. Their parents paid their tuition.
That was the first time I really understood what the racial wealth gap was. I felt it. I worked hard, stayed in school, did what I was told to do to be successful. Yet my professional adult life began with me about $200,000 behind the starting line as compared with my peers.
Over the years, I watched them buy new cars, homes and vacation homes, and travel to exotic locations. Meanwhile, I bought decades-old used cars, rented apartments, and learned to travel on a shoestring. Despite holding similar professional titles, my net worth was a drop in the bucket of theirs. My hard work, and the hard work of my parents — who sent me to a private high school to boost my chances of having a bright future and helped me pay some of my grad school debt — was not enough. As I write this, I still have a five-figure student loan balance, although the light is beginning to appear at the long tunnel’s end.
I’m very lucky now to live well, within my means, and I have never known poverty. But I still have a fraction of the accumulated wealth of my White peers.”