The 2008 crash erased black wealth three times faster than white wealth

Evidence

African Americans lost 31 percent of their wealth between 2007 and 2010. White Americans lost 11 percent. By 2009, 35 percent of African American households had zero or negative net worth. According to the Pew Research Center, by 2011, black families had lost 53 percent of their wealth. Just think about it: an entire decade of economic gains wiped away. Gone. This wasn’t just the loss of homes—the primary source of wealth for most African Americans—but lost retirement savings, which shrank by 35 percent from 2007 to 2010. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 48

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to read later — the exact racial wealth disparity data will ground the ‘value gap’ definition in the chapter that introduces it.