White median household wealth is ten times that of black households

Evidence

Today, we can talk about the black-white wealth gap. But what we have to say isn’t pretty. According to a Pew Research Center analysis in 2016, the median wealth of white households was 171,000 compared with 17,100 for black households and $20,600 for Latinx households. (Asians and other racial groups are not identified in the Survey of Consumer Finances database that was used for Pew’s analysis.) White Americans have ten times the median wealth of black Americans and eight times that of Latinx Americans. — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 55

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

According to a Pew Research Center analysis in 2016, the median wealth of white households was 171,000 compared with 17,100 for black households and $20,600 for Latinx households. (Asians and other racial groups are not identified in the Survey of Consumer Finances database that was used for Pew’s analysis.) White Americans have ten times the median wealth of black Americans and eight times that of Latinx Americans. — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 55

Categorization

• XREF: The 10-to-1 wealth ratio (171k vs 17.1k) is the canonical statistic used across racial-wealth-gap literature.
• QUESTION: The parenthetical notes that some racial groups aren’t even captured in the main household-wealth survey database — worth chasing what this data hole itself says about how the gap gets measured.
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth: How the Tax…, 55; Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth: How the Tax…, 426