Tag: racial wealth gap

Solutions to address racial wealth inequality have often focused on behavioral changes and individual choices, minimizing efforts to dismantle structural barriers to wealth accumulation for Black Americans.

We’ve been carrying out asset-building strategies for decades now, but the wealth gap has not shrunk. What needs to be done about it?

Seventy-one percent of jobs that pay $40,000 and above require a four-year degree, says Maurice Jones. That requirement is "having a huge, huge adverse impact on Black talent earning their way into the middle class."

A new generation of real estate agents are aiming for meaningful change in an industry most famous for championing and enforcing segregation.

Community development has long made attempts at wealth building, with a focus on trying to find successful or innovative models that can be replicated....

Andre M. Perry’s Know Your Price: Valuing Black Lives and Property in America’s Black Cities reveals the web of historical and contemporary socioeconomic barriers that maintain the racial wealth divide and does this through personal narrative, history, and an exploration of a wide array of social issues.

It may seem counterintuitive, but in order to close the wealth gap, we must shift our focus from the gap itself to the policies, conditions, and systems that spawned it.

Financial education messaging is too often presented as if individual behavior and attitudes are the cause of our growing economic challenges rather than our social, economic, and political systems.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation just released a set of proposed rules for the Community Reinvestment Act that threaten the very heart of the law.

Estate planning should be employed as part of a broader plan of preservation of wealth and assets in communities of color. 

In discussions around closing the racial wealth gap, we should be reminded that a very large portion of wealth gained by white Americans should be seen as ill-gotten.

Every month millions of Black Americans hand over half of our livelihood to the descendants of those who forcefully brought our ancestors here to work for free. Essentially, America is in the business of charging its captives rent.

Black people were excluded from many of the income and wealth-building programs that helped build the foundation of white Americans’ wealth today.

Homeowners' equity—the market value of residential real estate minus the value of home-secured debt—has long been the largest single component of wealth for Black...

Changes to the tax code, and tax programs that support low-wage earners, will strengthen gains made in the asset-building field.

Last week, we asked readers if credit scores were too much of a driver in home loan approval. You answered overwhelmingly that yes, credit...

Melvin Oliver, vice president for asset building and community development at the Ford Foundation, talks about community development, black and white wealth, and racial inequality.