The Widening Racial Wealth Divide - The New Yorker 

The Widening Racial Wealth Divide - The New Yorker: "“Race still determines too much,” Hillary Clinton said, in last week’s debate with Donald Trump. It “often determines where people live, determines what kind of education in their public schools they can get, and, yes, it determines how they’re treated in the criminal-justice system.” She could have added that it has a profound effect on how much money Americans have. Our racial wealth divide, as it’s often called, is enormous, and, fifty years after the civil-rights movement, the gap is growing. Everyone knows that wealth is unequally distributed. The work of Thomas Piketty has made this a mainstream concern. But the magnitude of the gap between white and black Americans is on a different scale. According to a recent report from two progressive think tanks, CFED and the Institute for Policy Studies, white households own, on average, seven times as much wealth as African-American households (and six times as much as Latino ones). The Forbes 100 billionaires are collectively as rich as all black Americans combined. "