The Wealth Gap
Good News, Bad News
In the last 40 years, the Black middle class has quadrupled, the African American poverty rate has been cut in half, and there are more African American doctors, lawyers, business owners, and elected officials than ever before in our nation's history. There are more African-American corporate executives in board rooms than ever before, and three of America's largest Fortune 500 companies headed by African Americans: Richard Parsons at Time Warner, E. Stanley O'Neil at Merritt Lynch, and Kenneth Chenault at American Express -- a feat never dreamed of by our civil rights foregathers and foremothers.
But when we look more closely at where we are today, as Dr. King would say, 'we still have a long, long way to go.' In the past two years, the "Equality Index" in the National Urban League's annual publication, The State of Black America . . . found that the overall status of Blacks is 73 percent that of Whites. More troubling is the fact that the economic status of Blacks is much worse, just 56 percent when compared with the White counterparts. . . The fact is almost every indicator available shows that economic progress for Black America is stagnant and starting to fall behind.
(The material immediately above was excerpted verbatim from an essay by Marc Morial entitled "Accessing Good Jobs, Wealth, and Economic Prosperity," as presented in "The Covenant with Black America," pages 165-66, published in 2006.)
Specifics on the Bad News
African Americans face challenges in every measure of economic status.
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While African Americans make up about 13% of the U.S. population, they own just 3% of the assets.
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The average total net worth of white families is $70,000 compared to just $6,000 for African American families.
One part of this gap is explained by the fact that African Americans are twice as likely to be
unemployed as the average American. The unemployment rate is 10.6% for blacks compared to 5.3% nationally.
Those African Americans who are employed earn about $13,000 a year less than whites. Another source of the tremendous racial disparity in wealth is the racial gap in homeownership, the size of which has doubled in recent decades.
(The material immediately above was excerpted verbatim from the "NAACP State of the Disparities Report," published December 2006.)
Wealth versus Income
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African Americans have a median net worth (value of assets owned, minus debt) of $5,998.00, compared to $88,651 for Whites. Even more alarming, 32 percent of African Americans have
a zero or negative net worth. -
Although African Americans are more than 13 percent of the nation's population, their total net
worth is only 1.2 percent of the total net worth of the nation.
This number has not changed since the end of the Civil War in 1865.
(The material immediately above was excerpted verbatim from "The Covenant with Black America," page 171.)
