In America today, the average white family currently holds almost seven times the wealth of the average African-American family, and five times the wealth of the average Hispanic family. This disparity is nothing new: The racial wealth gap hasn’t changed in 50 years, despite decades of policies aimed at reducing discrimination in the labor market and improving African Americans’ access to higher education.
The causes behind this wealth gap, while not simple, are clear: Centuries of slavery, segregation, and government-sanctioned discrimination dramatically curtailed African-American families’ ability to amass wealth and pass it along to their children. All the while, white families were slowly accumulating wealth, thanks in part to government policies designed to help them afford college tuition and a home mortgage, and to later pass such benefits on to their children. As William Darity, a professor at Duke University, told me last month, “[t]hese inequalities are baked into the system through the process of transfers that take place across generations.”….