What accounts for the enormous and extensive racial wealth gap and racial inequality in the United States, specifically among whites and blacks?
Darrick Hamilton, assistant Assistant Professor at Milano – The New School for Management and Urban Policy and William Darity Jr., Arts & Sciences Professor of Public Policy Studies and Professor of African and African American Studies and Economics at Duke University, explore this question in a recent article, Race, Wealth, and Intergenerational Poverty in the September 2009 issue of The American Prospect. Focusing on the disparaging racial gap in the United States, the article traces its history and indicates, “regardless of age, household structure, education, occupation, or income, black households typically have less than a quarter of the wealth of otherwise white households.”
Hamilton and Darity’s work aims to understand why the black-white wealth gap persists and how to directly close (or at least greatly decrease) the gap, through public-sector intervention. Perhaps the most interesting and crucial aspect of this article dispels the commonly cited discriminatory myths that were “crafted” to explain why inequity exists, such as “blacks are less frugal when it comes to savings” and lack “financial literacy.” Through their research, Hamilton and Darity find that both statements are false and present their findings in the article.
To further get at this question of why the racial wealth gap remains, the authors’ analysis indicates that “inheritances, bequests, and intra-family transfers account for more of the racial wealth gap than any other demographic and socioeconomic factor, including education, income, and household structure.” Hamilton and Darity provide necessary policy proposals that will help us begin move far and beyond this racial divide.
Be well-
Lisa