White wealth traces to federal land grants denied to Black Americans.

Evidence

But even as the federal government decided that Black people were undeserving of any restitution, it was bestowing millions of acres in the West on white Americans under the Homestead Act, while also enticing white foreigners to immigrate with the offer of free land. From 1868 to 1934, the federal government gave away 246 million acres in 160-acre tracts, nearly 10 percent of all the land in the nation, to more than 1.5 million white families, native-born and foreign. Some 46 million American adults today, about 20 percent of all American adults, are descended from those homesteaders, according to research by the social scientist Trina Williams Shanks. “If that many white Americans can trace their legacy of wealth and property ownership to a single entitlement program,” Merritt writes, “then the perpetuation of Black poverty must also be linked to national policy.” — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1353

Categorization

• SEED: The 20-percent-of-adults-descended statistic is a strong hook for a piece on policy as the actual engine of the racial wealth gap.
• XREF: This directly parallels the Homestead Act causal claim central to the 1619 reframing; a case study on how historical controversy handles such statistical claims is the reader’s stated goal.
• QUESTION: How do Wilentz and other critics respond to the Homestead Act argument specifically?