Left-wing accounts explain the wealth gap as past discrimination plus compounding wealth

Evidence

The left-wing narrative tends to center on blatant race discrimination by bad actors in the past: the FHA denying home loans to black Americans in the 1950s and ’60s, or subprime lenders targeting black Americans during the Great Recession. This past discrimination has led to a disproportionate percentage of black Americans (21 percent) living in poverty, compared with white Americans (8 percent). The economic gap has grown worse over time, the argument goes, simply because wealth begets more wealth, and black Americans are starting from behind. — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 61

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the left-wing baseline narrative (past discrimination + wealth begetting wealth) that Brown will later counter with her race-neutral-mechanism argument — the foil her whole book is built against.
• XREF: connects to: Intergenerational wealth transfers compound the racial wealth gap through the cycle of tax-subsidized assets — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth: How the Tax…, 504; The racial wealth gap persists independent of income, savings, and education attainment — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project: A New American Origin…, 1375; Race-neutral tax reforms perpetuate racial wealth gaps unless they account for societal racism — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth: How the Tax…, 70 (+6 more)
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Intergenerational wealth transfers compound the racial wealth gap through the cycle of tax-subsidized assets — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth: How the Tax…, 504; The racial wealth gap persists independent of income, savings, and education attainment — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project: A New American Origin…, 1375; Race-neutral tax reforms perpetuate racial wealth gaps unless they account for societal racism — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth: How the Tax…, 70 (+6 more)