The Black Lives Matter movement has drawn attention not just to police brutality but to an entire system built on racial injustice. One major expression of that injustice is the nation’s glaring racial wealth divide, the financial legacy of centuries of white supremacy.
Even before the pandemic, our research at the Institute for Policy Studies found that median white families had literally dozens of times more wealth than median Black or Latinx families. The median Black family today, we found, owns just $3,600 in household wealth, or about 2 percent of the median white family’s $147,000, while the median Latinx family has assets worth $6,600, or 4 percent of the white median.
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