Matching income and asset characteristics halves but does not close the racial wealth gap.

Evidence

A recent study shows just how wrong this narrative is. It concluded that if blacks had the same levels “of income, business ownership, stock ownership, and home ownership and other characteristics as whites, the wealth gap would be cut in half. However, the mean racial wealth gap would still be more than $155,000.” The authors correctly describe their results as demonstrating how “cultural and behavioral factors explain less of the racial wealth gap than structural and ownership opportunity variables.” But where they missed the mark was in their ahistorical approach. — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 502

Categorization

• SHARE: A striking number for anyone working on inequality: even with identical income, business, stock, and homeownership levels, blacks would still trail whites by over $155,000 in mean wealth.
• XREF: Directly supplies the quantitative anchor for the reader’s framing that the wealth gap is structural, not behavioral. — connects to: Economic growth does not equalize status, and rising wealth only raises entry bars — W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for…, 104