The Racial Wealth Gap: A Brief History

Why has the racial wealth gap between the median white households and median Black households remained stagnant over the past century, never narrowing below six to one?

Leading expert on race and financial equality Mehrsa Baradaran attempts to answer this question in The Racial Wealth Gap. She shows how decades of the laws rooted in white supremacy—from slavery and the broken Reconstruction-era promise of "40 acres and a mule," to the racist policies of the Jim Crow and New Deal eras—have restricted Black access to capital, credit, homeownership, and other mechanisms of wealth creation while subsidizing the rising economic fortunes of white families.

In this concise and authoritative history, Baradaran outlines two tectonic forces that have driven apart the economic fortunes of white and Black families: wealth creation for white Americans, who have been systematically receiving financial subsidies in the century and a half since emancipation, and wealth destruction for Black Americans—either by vigilante violence or by official means, such as allowing Black banks to collapse or building highways through segregated Black communities. These forces, combined with the racist notion that Black communities fail to rise because of their own moral, intellectual, or economic shortcomings, have kept Black families behind their white counterparts, despite decades of civil rights activism and national economic growth—a deep injustice that can only be achieved through reparations.