Stock ownership gaps between black and white households persist even among the wealthy

Evidence

A study of households with comparable wealth of at least 356,900 (which represented the top 5 percent of black households versus the top 28 percent of white households) analyzed stock holdings outside of retirement accounts. That research showed 30 percent of these wealthy black Americans owned stock compared with 41 percent of whites with similarly high incomes. When you look at mean, or average, stock ownership values, black stock owners in the top 5 percent own 185,000 in stocks, and white stock owners own 449,000. But averages can be skewed by a single individual with an enormous amount of wealth—like Robert Smith, the black billionaire who pledged to pay the student loan debts for the Morehouse class of 2019. If you look at the median value, which means half the study participants have less, and half have more, white stock ownership drops to 140,000—but the black median doesn’t even reach $100,000. — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 453

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s ongoing theme of how race-neutral markets still reproduce racial gaps despite equal income and wealth levels. — connects to: Inequality stems significantly from uneven asset ownership, not only elite speculation and household debt — Paul Langley, Assets and Assetization in…, 46