“If there’s one thing I wish people understood about the wealth gap, both here and nationally, it would be that it was created that way. The gap was created. It was designed. The gap exists because it was made.”
– Ryan P. Haygood
Interview with Ryan P. Haygood
Ryan P. Haygood, civil rights lawyer and president & CEO of the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice in Newark, NJ, is a leading voice for efforts to close the persistent wealth gap between white families and families of color.
What is the role of the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice?
We do systems change work that responds to structural inequality. And we measure success through policy change, very often through legislative policy change.
Our work, if we do it well, should return to the communities that we work with rights, opportunities, things that didn’t previously exist through the form of changed, minds, policies, practices, and laws.
In my 8 years, we’ve been very, very productive in policy change, legislative change.
One I’ve learned is that every community has a team of individual heroes. Like Michael Rowe, who donated $25,000 for computers during COVID. But those individual acts of heroism are not replacements or supplements for broken systems.
The ideal is to live in a community with systems that build a cycle of opportunity and you have heroes that supplement that system.
What’s one thing you wish people knew or understood about the wealth gap in America and in New Jersey?
If there’s one thing I wish people understood about the wealth gap, both here and nationally, it would be that it was created that way. The gap was created. It was designed. The gap exists because it was made.
One of the first things I worked on at the Institute was an effort to restore the right to vote to people with criminal convictions in New Jersey. At that time, about 100,000 people couldn’t vote because they had a criminal conviction. They were either in prison, on probation, or parole. So, we started to do some research into New Jersey’s law. And we learned that New Jersey in 1844 restricted voting to white men and disqualified people with criminal convictions from voting.
As we dug deeper into the history of New Jersey, we learned about slavery and how New Jersey was regarded as a slave state of the North. And this, frankly, was mind-blowing, because it’s totally inconsistent with what I knew about New Jersey.
But ours was a state that, when founded as a colony, incentivized slavery. We gave each English white settling family 150 acres of land to settle here, and we gave them an additional 150 acres of land for each enslaved Black person that brought with them. And we created whole systems that survived slavery, that separated Black people, in particular, from owning land. So, our modern day racial wealth gap in New Jersey was conceived of — it was birthed in — slavery.
And people will often ask, to that question, “Bro, you went to slavery. It’s 2024. Why does that matter today?” And the reason is our racial wealth gap — our $300,000 racial wealth gap between Black and white people in 2024 — was created in slavery at our founding as a colony. And then it was reinforced through the generations through a series of laws, practices, and policies after slavery ended. There’s a direct line from slavery to today’s racial wealth gap in 2024.
It’s important to talk about that period in history — the way slavery took root so deeply in New Jersey and the way it was carried forward through policies and practices to the present day. Because if we don’t, then we misunderstand both who we have been and who we presently are — what those numbers really reflect. And as importantly for people of conscience, what we’re obligated to do about it.
Because if you divorce the history from those disparities — if you look at that $300,000 racial wealth gap on its own, then you’re left to believe that there’s something wrong with Black people. There’s something in our DNA — we’re irresponsible with finances when we work, we have high levels of unemployment. There’s a parade of horribles that attaches to that number, that it’s a reflection of personal failures — which is not the case.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with Black people, as we know, or people of color more broadly. That number reflects something inherently wrong with the system in which we operate, going back to slavery, which shaped every aspect of our founding and every aspect of our present-day reality.
Slavery is one of those topics, it’s demoralizing. It causes you to be heavy hearted. But acknowledging it and its enduring impact leads us to opportunity. Because we weren’t alive when New Jersey was called the slave state of the North. But we certainly have inherited what that system meant, both the advantages and disadvantages that it advances. And it provides a real opportunity for the work of the Burke Foundation and for the work of the Institute, to think about opportunities to confront that enduring legacy and to do real work, both as part of direct service programs and policy work, to build a New Jersey where we turn the corner on that enduring history.
What are some recent developments you see affecting families’ financial security?
We’re still emerging from what COVID-19 meant in New Jersey, particularly in communities of color. In 2020, COVID was the leading cause of death of Black people in New Jersey. There are institutions, like Black churches, that existed pre-pandemic that don’t exist now. There were businesses owned by people of color that don’t exist. People lost jobs they did not regain.
One of my colleagues, Jake, created a powerful image of a small Black boy standing on a foundation that’s cracked, and we think of those cracks as the cracks of structural racism. And COVID exacerbated those cracks in ways that we’re still trying to understand. From the perspective of my wife and other educators, two years are mostly lost. We’re still trying to understand the profound impact that COVID had, particularly on Black and brown and other communities of color.
What are the major barriers to success for most families, especially Black and brown families?
New Jersey is one of the most racially diverse states in the country. It’s a beautiful, rich diversity. The 2020 census shows that New Jersey is right on the cusp of becoming a majority people of color state, which is incredible to see. And what it means for people of color to play a more meaningful role in all aspects of government and business life. But it’s also true that rich racial diversity exists alongside some really entrenched racial and residential segregation.
One of the most diverse states in the country, it’s also one of the most racially-segregated states in the country. For example, I’ve lived in Newark’s South Ward for 20 years. And I love Newark, I love the area where we live, but it’s intensely segregated, as is a good part of our state. We’ve never had a white neighbor. My wife has taught in the Newark public school system in the South Ward, three different schools, thousands of kids, over 25 years. She’s never had a white student.
And she won’t, because we’ve designed neighborhoods so that you go to the school in the area that’s been designed for you. And that’s intentional; that segregation is intentional. The reason that matters is because what it often means is the opportunities that are available to you are largely in the area where you live, and you’re confined to that area. My wife has students, you can see Manhattan from their school, but many of her kids have never been there.
The nature of segregation is that you think of the world in the way it’s been designed for you, so it becomes very small. That’s also true around opportunity for employment, education, outlook. Part of New Jersey’s challenge is to reimagine how we take advantage of the rich racial diversity broadly so that it doesn’t just exist in intensely-segregated, mostly cities, but also more suburban places. That’s a great opportunity. As intensely segregated as we are, or separated as we are by race in this state, one of the real opportunities is that we have such racial diversity here. We just have to think about how we tap into that.
How can programs like Baby Bonds and college savings plans help close the wealth gap?
It was probably on my 100th or so Zoom — we’re in the throes of COVID, then George Floyd’s killed, and I got tired. I had been tired, but I became aware of how tired I was about beginning conversations about Black and other people of color from a position of profound loss. It’s hard not to when talking about George Floyd and COVID, but the conversations at that time, and I think since and before, they begin with loss, and profound loss, and disparities and inequality. And then when is a harm reduction strategy? And it’s a” close the racial wealth gap” strategy.
But can we also carve out space to have the bandwidth to think about what might it look like for people of color in New Jersey to win? I would ask people that question. And it was fascinating. Very thoughtful people, “I don’t know, but Ryan, you don’t understand the depth of the loss.” No, no, I get it. We talked loss, we talked harm reduction. We talked about protecting mental health, and we even got a little bit of joy in there, but I’m asking, “What is a vision for what it would look like to win?”
And we struggled, because we’re so connected to the loss that we haven’t created space to think about an affirmative vision for flourishing and winning. And that gave birth to the Institute’s push for a conversation around reparations.
Because the reparation conversation is yes, about slavery — its enduring impact — but it’s as much about, “what would you need, not just to repair all, but to win?+ We’re in the throes of that.
We created New Jersey Reparations Council to have that conversation. We tried to get the Legislature to do it, but you’re probably going to have a hard time winning an election if you lead with that issue, unless you’re in California. New Jersey will get there eventually. Not there just yet.
So, we created our own council that’s having that kind of conversation.
In the meantime, we’ve championed a number of things that we think help address the racial wealth gap. A big push has been around deepening access to home ownership. So I mentioned we championed with partners a bill that provides this $15,000 in down payment assistance for first-time home buyers and an additional $7,000 for first-generation home buyers. I’m very excited about that.
We also championed the body of work, in the Legislature and with the attorney general, around discrimination in home appraisals — which has been a big deal once you have a home and seek to sell, or purchase the home. Appraisals can be a major impediment, particularly because they tend to be lower in ways we showed. So I was really proud of that work we did around home ownership. And we even worked with the City of Newark and the mayor around the universal basic income pilot program that provides families some amount of money to get a sense over 18 months about whether that was impactful.
We’ve explored ideas like Baby Bonds — the governor and Senator Booker — which we think would be impactful certainly to help give young people a nest egg that they could use at a critical time in life. The $15 minimum wage, which went into effect this year — we think about 350,000 hourly workers in the state, who think it’s a big deal. And we continue to think about things like student loan debt forgiveness and ways to deepen home ownership further.
Much of our work at the Institute is designed to help deepen home ownership upon the recognition that home ownership is the primary driver of the wealth gap. It’s hard right now to be pushing a home ownership strategy with such high interest rates and folks who are emerging from periods of unemployment or underemployment caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
How do you activate the community around these programs — hearing them and then getting people to use them, trust them?
That’s the real opportunity. Because as painful as COVID and George Floyd, have been, it has also sparked in people a desire to do something. So we’ve had great success in having people power our advocacy. We do research and writing, and then we provide the data to our partners who interact directly with their policymakers or their legislators, and their city council members to advocate for policies. It’s a powerful form of direct democracy. We’ll help to organize it; we’ll stand with them, but they have a voice and they use it.
And in each of the policies that we’ve championed, each of the things that have happened in the Legislature have been powered by people power, by people using their voices to advocate.
The Burke Foundation does a lot with parenting. Any parenting advice to our readers?
My phrase for this year is to give myself grace so that I can extend it to others. I tend to be very hard on myself and I pass that on to my kids. If in the morning, “Pick up the towel from the bathroom,” is the first thing I say, I need to work on the grace that I’m not extending to myself.
If you’re going to school and all you’ve heard that morning is a series of complaints — including pick up a towel, do this, do that — it’s a tough way to begin the day, versus I might start with a “Good morning.”