CURB’s release of its Racial Justice Platform and its focus on 15 talking points appears to have created quite a sensation on the blogs. CURB prepared this platform because we believe that if Bermuda is truly to become united, there must be healing, educational advancement, economic justice, and a method put in place for measuring progress or a lack of same.For that reason CURB hopes that these ‘talking points’ would open up the conversation on race, demystify it and lead to more constructive dialogue.The major worry being ‘discussed’ on the blogs was the mandatory collection of statistics on wealth, with many feeling (to put it politely) that it was an invasion of privacy and a socialist agenda. Note the Department of Statistics already collects such data on income from the Census.The reality is that the mandatory collection of statistics on wealth is common in most Western countries, and is done by race. In the US it is Form 706 Tax Return which establishes the wealth of the living population.In the UK the information is gathered by the Office of National Statistics. The anomaly is Bermuda, which has never collected statistics on wealth.Reliable and accurate statistical information on earnings, income and wealth form an important part of the knowledge we have about the operation of the economy and as indicators of economic well being. (Royal Statistical Society 2007).CURB is certainly not the first to talk about the need to understand the issue of wealth in the Bermuda context. Lord Pitt in his Report on the 1977 Riots said “We repeat our belief that in the long run it will prove essential to regulate the transmission of inherited wealth.”Dr Dorothy Newman in her report (1994) ‘Bermuda’s Stride Towards the 21st Century’, wrote: “It is, for instance, essential in a biracial society for data to be collected, analysed, and published by race. The fact that this is not the case in some Bermuda institutions is, in itself, institutional racism.”Whenever anyone goes to a bank to obtain some form of loan, they are required to complete an application form detailing their assets. The easiest and most-cost effective way to establish wealth statistics in Bermuda would be to require the banks to add a question on race to their forms. This information would then be aggregated and submitted to the Department of Statistics. Note it would be aggregate net worth data by race, the information submitted would not be an individual’s net worth.Gathering this information would enable us as a country to establish a metric, we would then be able to evaluate whether the wealth gap between the races is diminishing.Or whether as Michael Powell in ‘Wealth, Race & the Great Recession’ wrote: “The primal economic divide in America remains the chasm between the wealth of black and white families, and it has widened steadily over the last generation. And that largely reckons — as demographic data trails a year or two behind economic reality — without the toll taken by the Great Recession, which several economists forecast will most likely deepen this divide.”In 2010 Professor Thomas Shapiro at the Institute on Assets and Social Policy at Brandeis University studied the same 2,000 black and white families between 1983 and 2007, and found that the racial wealth gap “has more than quadrupled over the course of a generation”.If in Bermuda the wealth gap between the races is widening it will mean that we as a people must look to what we need to do in order to bring about greater economic parity.If the wealth gap is diminishing, then we as a nation are moving in the right direction. Not having this statistical data is negligent, whereas having this information ensures we have the economic well being of all our people at heart.Lynne Winfield is Past President of Citizens Uprooting Racism in Bermudawww.uprootingracism.org