Abstract
This report provides a look at the Black-White racial wealth gap in the United States today, explains the historical foundations and contemporary drivers of the gap, and offers a lens for developing and assessing policies to address these structural disparities. While we provide some detail for other groups as context on the overall state of wealth inequality in the United States, this report primarily focuses on and examines the history of wealth inequalities between Black and White Americans. Of course, this focus is only one aspect of the total picture of wealth inequality in American society. We commend efforts to explore other aspects of wealth inequality, including Eric Rodriguez’s discussion of the Hispanic/Latinx wealth gap, Christian E. Weller and Jeffrey Thompson’s work on wealth inequality among Asian Americans, and Greg Leiserson, Will McGrew, and Raksha Kopparam’s analysis of wealth inequality in the United States generally