White median family wealth exceeds black median wealth tenfold

Evidence

By nearly every social and economic indicator, wide economic and educational disparities exist between whites and people of color. These disparities are rooted in the historical ways that racism as a normalized discourse and way of thinking has been internalized in our culture. One key indicator of the historical legacy is in the figures on “net worth”— or the total value of what a household owns minus debts (including assets such as inheritances, house ownership, etc.). According to U.S. Census Bureau figures, “in 2000, the household median net worth was 79,400 for households with a non-Hispanic White householder, 7,500 for households with a Black householder, and $9,750 for households with a Hispanic householder” (Orzechowski & Sepielli, 2003). In other words, the average wealth of a white family is over 10 times that of the average black family. When we suggest that this is a historical legacy, we mean that partly due to the long discursive history of inferiorization, black and Latino families have often not been able to acquire the assets that stable and fair employment would provide. This is a clear example of the ways unequal resource distribution intersects with ideologies on race and racialized identities (Fraser, 1997). — Rebecca A. Martusewicz, Jeff Edmundson, and John Lupinacci, EcoJustice Education, 1224

McCoy’s answer—“Mom and dad couldn’t save us”—is the story of black wealth, across generations, in America. We’ve already seen why getting married, buying a home, graduating from college, or getting a good job results in greater wealth for white taxpayers than black taxpayers. Under those constraints, one would expect white Americans to have greater wealth than black Americans, and they do—white families hold 171,000 in median wealth compared to 17,100 for black families. In 2016, 83 percent of black households had less net worth than the median for white households, and the top 10 percent of black households had average wealth of just over 1 million, compared to 6.7 million for the top 10 percent of white households. — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 426

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: A concrete data anchor showing material consequences of inferiorization discourses — useful follow-up data for any racial-hierarchy teaching segment.
• XREF: The 10:1 white:black median wealth ratio is a canonical statistic throughout the wealth-gap literature and earlier chapters.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Rebecca A. Martusewicz, Jeff Edmundson, and John Lupinacci, EcoJustice Education: Toward Diverse,…, 1224; Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth: How the Tax…, 426