“Wealth is a safety net that keeps a life from being derailed by temporary setbacks and the loss of income.” Brookings Institute
The wealth gap for African Americans remains significant. A close examination of wealth in the U.S. finds evidence of persistent and staggering racial disparities and past racist federal policies, according to the Brookings Institute findings. Specifically, the disparities include:
- At $171,000, the net worth of a typical white family is nearly ten times greater than that of a Black family ($17,150) in 2016.
- Gap in stock market participation between the groups persists, with 55 percent of Black Americans and 71 percent of white Americans reporting stock market investments.
This disparity means that Black Americans will have less money saved and invested for retirement, and less accumulated wealth to pass onto the next generation than their white peers.
Figure 1. White families have more wealth than Black, Hispanic, and other or multiple race families in the 2019 SCF.
Notes: Figures displays median (top panel) and mean (bottom panel) wealth by race and ethnicity, expressed in thousands of 2019 dollars.
These gaps in wealth and investments between Black and White households reveal the effects of centuries’ of accumulated inequality, discrimination and racism, as well as differences in power and opportunity that can be traced back to this nation’s inception. The Black-White wealth gap reflects a society that has not and does not afford equality of opportunity to all its citizens.
It is important to note that it was never the case that a White asset-based middle class simply emerged, according to research based on a study of historical and contemporary racial inequality. Rather, it was extraordinary government policy, and to some extent literal government giveaways, that provided Whites the financial assets, educational opportunities, land grants and infrastructure to accumulate and pass down wealth.
In contrast, blacks were largely excluded from these wealth generating benefits. When they were able to accumulate land and enterprise, it was often stolen, destroyed or seized by government complicit in theft, fraud and terror.
Federally funded racism in housing and labor unions
In the mid-twentieth century, the government subsidized builders to construct suburbs of single-family homes in scores of developments across the country on explicit federal condition that no homes be occupied by African Americans, according to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Over several generations, federally subsidized white homebuyers gained a quarter million dollars in home equity or more. In contrast, the government restricted African Americans, including war veterans, mostly to segregated urban apartment rentals where no wealth appreciated.
White homeowners were able to bequeath some of this federally subsidized wealth to subsequent generations, after using it for retirements, children’s college education, care for elderly parents, or medical emergencies. African Americans had to use current income for such expenses, if they could do so at all, pushing many into poverty. Largely because of twentieth century federal segregation policy, while average African American income is about 60 percent of white income, African American wealth is only 7 percent of white wealth.
Other federal policies forced African Americans into poverty, continuing for generations. In 1935, the government gave construction and factory unions the right to collectively bargain for higher wages and benefits. As proposed by Senator Robert Wagner, the law denied that right to unions that barred African Americans. Segregated unions lobbied to remove that provision and the Wagner Act was then passed, unconstitutionally empowering unions to exclude black workers — a policy that continued for over 30 years. Denied the best blue-collar employment, African Americans participated less in the collectively bargained income boom that raised white working class incomes in the three decades following World War II.
Wealth
“Black children are less economically upwardly mobile partly because of the multigenerational effects of federal and state government racist policies that purposely segregated their grandparents and great-grandparents into low-income communities and low paying jobs from which exit was difficult.”
Wealth is the sum of resources available to a household at a point in time; as such it is clearly influenced by the income of a household, but the two are not perfectly correlated.
Two households can have the same income, but the household with fewer expenses, or with more accumulated wealth from past income or inheritances, will have more wealth.
As a result, high- and middle-income white families are much wealthier than Black families with the same incomes. A few reasons are that White families receive much larger inheritances on average than Black families. Economists Darrick Hamilton and Sandy Darity conclude that inheritances and other intergenerational transfers “account for more of the racial wealth gap than any other demographic and socioeconomic indicators.”
For example, while 51 percent of white Americans say they have inherited wealth, just 23 percent of Black Americans have, according to an annual Ariel-Schwab Black Investor Survey.
All of this matters because wealth confers benefits that go beyond those that come with family income.
Wealth is a safety net that keeps a life from being derailed by temporary personal economic setbacks and the loss of income, according to Brookings Institute. This safety net allows people to take career risks knowing that they have a buffer when success is not immediately achieved.
Family wealth allows people (especially young adults who have recently entered the labor force) to access housing in safe neighborhoods with good schools, thereby enhancing the prospects of their own children.
Wealth affords people opportunities to be entrepreneurs and inventors. And the income from wealth is taxed at much lower rates than income from work, which means that wealth begets more wealth.
Education a Way to Weslth
Social science research indicates that blacks attain more years of education than whites from families with comparable resources. Essentially, blacks place a high premium on education as a means of mobility
Yet, the racial wealth gap between Blacks and Whited expands at higher levels of post secondary education. In short, Black families where the head graduated from college have less accumulated than wealth than white families where the head dropped out of high school.
One take-away…better mindsets regarding wealth and money alone can’t fix the legacy of unconstitutional and racist federal and state sanctioned economic policy.
References:
- https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2020/02/27/examining-the-black-white-wealth-gap/
- https://www.aboutschwab.com/ariel-schwab-black-investor-survey-2021
- Source: Federal Reserve Board, 2019 Survey of Consumer Finances.
- https://www.marketwatch.com/story/heres-why-black-families-have-struggled-for-decades-to-gain-wealth-2019-02-28
- https://www.epi.org/blog/is-poverty-a-mindset/