Wealthy black households hold far less stock than comparable whites

Evidence

Stock ownership disparities transcend income, education levels, and many of the commonly held ideas about what limits black wealth building. 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: Offers hard numbers supporting the reader’s stated thesis that income equality does not equal wealth equality; also useful data point about mean-skew by billionaires.