America has never had a race-neutral policy infrastructure for turning income into wealth.

Evidence

“It has never been the case in America that we have had a race-neutral structural and policy infrastructure in which blacks have been permitted to translate their income into wealth at the same rates as whites,” says Darrick Hamilton, Henry Cohen Professor of Economics and Urban Policy and director of the Institute for the Study of Race, Stratification and Political Economy at The New School. “Nor has it ever been the case that income itself was structurally generated in a similar fashion for blacks as it has been for whites in America.” — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 503

Categorization

• QUESTION: The ‘ahistorical approach’ critique Hamilton levels — worth pursuing how structural-opportunity studies still understate the gap by ignoring history.