The racial wealth gap persists independent of income, savings, and education attainment

Evidence

The Duke study shows that the racial wealth gap is not about poverty. Poor white families earning less than 27,000 a year hold nearly the same amount of wealth as Black families earning between 48,000 and $76,000 annually. It’s not because of Black spending habits. Black Americans have lower incomes overall but save at a slightly higher rate than white Americans with similar incomes. It’s not that Black people need to value education more. Black parents, when correlated by household type and socioeconomic status, actually offer more financial support for their children’s higher education than white parents do, according to the study. And some studies have shown that Black youths, when compared with white youths whose parents have similar incomes and education levels, are actually more likely to go to college and earn additional credentials. But what’s probably most astounding to many Americans is that college simply does not pay off for Black Americans the way it does for other groups. Black college graduates are about as likely to be unemployed as white Americans with a high school diploma, and Black Americans with a college education hold less wealth than white Americans who have not even completed high school. Further, because Black families hold almost no wealth to begin with, Black students are the most likely to borrow money to pay for college and then to borrow more money in total. That debt, in turn, means that Black students cannot start saving immediately upon graduation, the way their less-debt-burdened peers can. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1375

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s earlier engagement with the 1619 Project thesis and the foundation-vs-deviation framing; also relevant to the Wilentz dispute over what counts as evidence. — connects to: Black economic inequality relative to whites remained structurally fixed across multiple decades — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology: Key Readings, 3351; Race-versus-income analyses measure relative explanatory power by decade, not decomposed shares — Ilyana Kuziemko and Ebonya Washington, Why Did the Democrats Lose the South?…, 211; Racial income inequality persists despite near-parity in education — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America:…, 453