Confronting Racial Disparities in America, From Cradle to Grave: A Reading List

Wealth Gap and More

[A]s surely as the law has outlawed racial discrimination, it has affirmed that Black Americans can be without jobs, have their children in all black, poorly funded schools, have no opportunities for decent housing, and have very little political power, without any violation of antidiscrimination law. (Alan Freeman, “Legitimizing Racial Discrimination Through Antidiscrimination Law,” p. 1050)

Following 200 years of slavery, the Civil War, the abandonment of Reconstruction, and 100 years of both legal and de facto nationwide Jim Crow, it should be no wonder that in the 21st century, the average “White” child is born into a family with ten to twenty times the wealth of a “Black” peer…

1 “Systematic Inequality: How America’s Structural Racism Helped Create the Black-White Wealth Gap

2 “The Black-White Economic Divide Remains as Wide as in 1968

3  “Whites Have Huge Wealth Edge Over Blacks (but Don’t Know It)

4 “The racial wealth gap: How African-Americans have been shortchanged out of the materials to build wealth

…regardless of family structure or parents’ education…

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