Black and White Wealth Differentials in the United States: Explaining and Recreating Persistent Inequality

Even in the context of high levels of overall wealth inequality, the racial wealth gap in the United States is striking. Black Americans own between 5–9 cents for every dollar of White wealth. Because socioeconomic factors are both fundamental determinants of health and strongly patterned by race, the racial stratification of wealth in the United States is a key mechanism linking structural and institutional racism to population health inequality. This chapter reviews and synthesizes previous research on the associations between wealth and individual and population health, contextualizing these findings in an era of rising levels of wealth inequality in the United States. Given documented associations between wealth and health and staggering levels of racial wealth inequality, the chapter makes the case that the racial wealth gap is a critical driver of population-level racial health inequities across the life course. In addition to reviewing previous research, the author also uses new estimates from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) and the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) to make claims. The chapter closes with a discussion of how policies and interventions to reduce wealth inequality and to shrink the racial wealth gap are essential health policies and describes future directions for research on wealth and health. Throughout the chapter, the author pays particular attention to the relevance of life-course theories and concepts in research on wealth and heath and highlights the critical role of aging and life-course scholars in shaping policy debates.

In this essay, I respond to Racial and Ethnic Inequality in Poverty and Affluence, 1959–2015 (hereafter Racial and Ethnic Inequality). I argue that Racial and Ethnic Inequality does not fully explain racial inequality in poverty and affluence—particularly among black Americans and American Indians compared to white Americans—because the manuscript follows conventional approaches to the study of racial inequality that obscure racial domination and oppression in the US. These conventional approaches include (1) highlighting the racial gap in a given outcome without conceptualizing and historicizing the social construction of race, (2) theorizing human capital as race-neutral to account for racial inequality, and (3) employing data analyses that reflect analytic bifurcation, which treat racial groups as real essences, monolithic, and position white Americans as the standard against which people of color are measured. These conventional approaches are not unique to Racial and Ethnic Inequality. My goal is to use Racial and Ethnic Inequality as an illustrative example of how conventional approaches address the idea of “race” in sociological research, and whether these approaches provide readers with the most optimal ways to understand racial inequality in the US. I make several recommendations to move research on racial inequality forward. My intention is to spark a conversation about what can be considered “best practices” in addressing the role of race in racial inequality research.

The difference in the average wealth of Black and white Americans narrowed in the first century after the Civil War, but remained large and even widened again after 1980. Given high levels of wealth concentration both historically and today, dynamics at the average may not capture important heterogeneity in racial wealth gaps across the distribution. This paper looks into the historical evolution of the Black and white wealth distributions since Emancipation. The picture that emerges is an even starker one than racial wealth inequality at the mean. Tracing, for the first time, the evolution of wealth of the median Black household and the gap between the typical Black and white household over time, we estimate that the majority of Black households only began to dispose of measurable wealth around World War II. While the civil rights era brought substantial wealth gains for the median Black household, the gap between Black and white wealth at the median has not changed much since the 1970s. The top and the bottom of the wealth distribution show even greater persistence, with Black households consistently over-represented in the bottom half of the wealth distribution and under-represented in the top-10 percent over the past seven decades.

In the US, Black individuals die younger than White individuals and have less household wealth, a legacy of slavery, ongoing discrimination, and discriminatory public policies. The role of wealth inequality in mediating racial health inequities is unclear. To assess the contribution of wealth inequities to the longevity gap that exists between Black and White individuals in the US and to model the potential effects of reparations payments on this gap. This cohort study analyzed the association between wealth and survival among participants in the Health and Retirement Study, a nationally representative panel study of community-dwelling noninstitutionalized US adults 50 years or older that assessed data collected from April 1992 to July 2019. Participants included 7339 non-Hispanic Black (hereinafter Black) and 26 162 non-Hispanic White (hereinafter White) respondents. Data were analyzed from January 1 to September 17, 2022. Household wealth, the sum of all assets (including real estate, vehicles, and investments), minus the value of debts. The primary outcome was all-cause mortality by the end of survey follow-up in 2018. Using parametric survival models, the associations among household wealth, race, and survival were evaluated, adjusting for age, sex, number of household members, and marital status. Additional models controlled for educational level and income. The survival effects of eliminating the current mean wealth gap with reparations payments ($828 055 per household) were simulated. Of the 33 501 individuals in the sample, a weighted 50.1% were women, and weighted mean (SD) age at study entry was 59.3 (11.1) years. Black participants' median life expectancy was 77.5 (95% CI, 77.0-78.2) years, 4 years shorter than the median life expectancy for White participants (81.5 [95% CI, 81.2-81.8] years). Adjusting for demographic variables, Black participants had a hazard ratio for death of 1.26 (95% CI, 1.18-1.34) compared with White participants. After adjusting for differences in wealth, survival did not differ significantly by race (hazard ratio, 1.00 [95% CI, 0.92-1.08]). In simulations, reparations to close the mean racial wealth gap were associated with reductions in the longevity gap by 65.0% to 102.5%. The findings of this cohort study suggest that differences in wealth are associated with the longevity gap that exists between Black and White individuals in the US. Reparations payments to eliminate the racial wealth gap might substantially narrow racial inequities in mortality.

Racial inequalities in health: Framing future research

The Political Economy of Hope and Fear: Capitalism and the Black Condition in America By Marcellus Andrews. New York: New York University Press, 1999. Pp. vii, 224. $29.95. Marcellus Andrews, an associate professor of economics at Wellesley College, argues in this provocative and passionate series of essays that racism is not the cause of Black economic backwardness in the modern era. Instead, he contends that the persistence of racial economic inequality stems from the nature of competitive capitalism and the destructive forces of globalism. The book has four chapters. A brief introduction provides the context of the discussion of conservative and anticonservative views on racial inequality and Andrews' statement of the hypothesis that racism is not the cause of racial economic inequality. The first chapter lays the foundation for the paradox explored in the remaining chapters. On one hand, the author demonstrates that there has been much economic progress among African Americans in the past decades. Relative Black poverty has fallen, educational completion has increased, and at least one segment of the Black community, the Black middle class, has made significant gains toward economic parity. On the other hand, the SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) scores of Blacks from families with incomes of more than $100,000 are lower than the SAT scores of Whites with incomes of only $30,000. The racial gap in test scores at the upper end of the income distribution is larger than it is at the lower end. Andrews contends that this persistent disparity in one measure of merit-even accounting for racial differences in income-opens the door for two competing conservative explanations for racial inequality. One explanation, effectively detailed in Charles Murray and Richard Hernstein's The Bell Curve, points to genes, as Andrews puts it. The other, restated recently by Dinesh D'Souza in his The End of Racism, is termed by Andrews as cultural deficiency. The first chapter passionately rejects both of these apparent explanations for the persistent racial gap in economic performance. The explanation for the rejection of the culture and genes arguments rests in the second chapter, where Beckerian models of labor market discrimination are detailed and elaborated. The central point of the second chapter is that in a dynamic world in which previous discrimination vests itself in underdeveloped skills among the discriminated-against group, racial inequality will persist under competitive capitalism. Alternative explanations for the failure of the elimination of racial discrimination in conventional market economies are also explored. The third chapter initiates a more macroeconomic approach to the persistence of BlackWhite economic inequality. Here, Andrews details the destructive forces of worldwide competition and the implications for Black and White workers alike. It is here that the argument advanced in the introduction is developed: [T]he movement towards racial justice in America was assassinated by free markets and the technological whirlwind driving capitalism worldwide rather than by organized racism per se. Racism is still an important and destructive influence on the economic fortunes of Black people in America, but it is no longer the primary reason why Black people are poorer than White people. .. . Black people were completely unprepared for, and unable to take advantage of, the shift in the structure of the American economy toward a knowledge- and technology-driven system that offers huge rewards to brains over brawn, because they remain an industrial labor force in a postindustrial country. (p. 3) According to Andrews, capital mobility, budget deficits, and a strong dollar limit the ability to subsidize the declining relative positions of the poorest of the poor, whose very position is a consequence of the new international competition. …

Banking Access and Racial Inequality: Wealth and Human Capital Accumulation of Young Men

I am pleased to introduce this special issue of Sociobgical Focus, Sociological Perspectives on Racial and Ethnic Inequality in Health and Health Care. Although researchers from a broad set of discipli nes contribute to efforts to answer questions about racial inequality in health and health care, sociologists have the ability to add a vital perspective to this research. We have social theories and methodological approaches that lend insight into the mechanisms that lead to social inequality. The papers in this issue use a variety of theories and methods to illuminate several of the mechanisms associated with racial and ethnic inequality in health and health care. Racial and ethnic groups are socially created and recreated categorizations of people that serve to distribute material and symbolic resources unequally (Bonilla-Silva 1997; Lewis 2004; Orni and Winant 1994). Racial and ethnic inequality can be found on many measures of health status, with non-Hispanic whites having better health than blacks, Native Americans, and Hispanics. For example, Mexican Americans and Native Americans are more than two times more likely than whites to have diabetes. Blacks are 1 .6 times more likely than whites to have diabetes. Based on limited data, it appears that some Asian American subgroups have an increased risk of poor health, while other subgroups have a decreased risk (Centers for Disease Control 2005). Given documentation of inequality in health status, researchers have sought to uncover the sources of racial and ethnic differences in health status. Sociologists contribute to this work by examining how structural forces influence the resources available for health-promoting activities and the likelihood of experiencing health risks. Unequal health status results from a myriad of mechanisms that begin with the system of racial inequality and lead to inequities in many domains-from income inequality to stress associated with interpersonal racial discrimination (Williams and Collins 1995). Sources of inequality in health have often been investigated using large national data sets, which provide a vehicle for effectively assessing national-level inequality on specific measures of health status. In this volume, the research by Lisa A. Cubbins and Tom Buchanan follows this tradition by using the National Health Interview Survey to demonstrate the complex relationship among race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, health behaviors, and health status. The/ report that socioeconomic status and health behaviors help to explain racial and ethnic inequality in health status, but that the benefits of some of these factors vary by race and ethnicity, with non-Hispanic whites garnering greater benefit. Their thoughtful analysis reflects the complexity of the system of racial, ethnic, and class inequality in the United States. One of the complexities of racial, ethnic, and class inequality can be found in the infant mortality rate. This rate is considered an excellent indicator of population health, because it provides an indication of the health of women as well as access to health care. In 2005, the infant mortality rate for babies born to black mothers was 2.4 times higher than for those born to non-Hispanic white women. In contrast, the infant mortality rate for babies born to Hispanic women is lower than that for white women (Mathews and MacDorman 2008). The low infant mortality rate among Hispanics has led to research on the of a socially and economically disadvantaged ethnic group with unexpectedly good health (e.g., de la Rosa 2002). Though, as Toni Terling Watt and Gloria Martinez-Ramos note in this issue, conclusions about an epidemiological paradox should be made cautiously. Watt and Martinez-Ramos challenge the low reported prevalence of development disorders among Hispanic children. They demonstrate that while the prevalence of diagnosis of development disorders is lower among Latinos than among whites, Latino parents are more likely to have concerns about their child's development. …

Black Wealth, White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality, by Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro. New York and Great Britain: Routledge, 1995. 242 pp. $22.95, cloth. Reviewed by Rodney D. Green, Department of Economics, Howard University. Black Wealth, White Wealth opens with an evocative racial comparison of income and wealth which reveals that although half of the top 10 earners in the U.S. are Black, virtually no Blacks are included among the wealthiest 400 Americans. Indeed, the wealth levels for those Blacks who have made into the American middle class are shown to be only 15% of the wealth level of Whites in the same income category. These and other presented data suggest that if Blacks are disadvantaged relative to Whites in terms of income-and they are, earning on average less than 60% of White household incomethen they are completely eclipsed when it comes to wealth. This tale of two middle classes is part of an even bleaker tale of two unequal nations within America, a tale Oliver and Shapiro attribute to three historical processes: the racialization of state policy, the economic detour, and the sedimentation of racial inequality. These three concepts reflect, respectively, how government policy has systematically reduced Black capacity to accumulate wealth by historically limiting access to land, housing, and other wealth builders; how Blacks have been prevented from forming thriving businesses because of institutional barriers to their serving the entire domestic market, leaving Blacks in impoverished niche businesses; and how the cumulative effects of Black oppression have cemented Blacks to the bottom of society's economic hierarchy. The story begins in chapter one, in which the authors revisit Reconstruction's failure to provide the freedmen with elementary productive property-the proverbial 40 acres and a mule. They move next to a review of the Federal Housing Administration's role in deliberately blocking Black home ownership from the 1930s through the 1970s, followed by a contemporary account of how redlining and mortgage discrimination have deepened Black economic deprivation. They also review the ways in which macroeconomic forces such as globalization and deindustrialization have undermined Black economic wellbeing. For example, they point out that these forces have eliminated over half of the Black industrial jobs in the Great Lakes area in the last two decades. In chapter two, Oliver and Shapiro sketch a sociology of race and wealth in America, wrestling (perhaps too briefly) with the race/class debate and invoking Marx and Weber. With this backdrop, they offer additional historical and anecdotal evidence for the three historical processes noted above. Chapter three presents a discussion of the data constraints past researchers have experienced in attempting to study wealth distribution in the U.S. The authors surmount such difficulties themselves by using the relatively new Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) data set to measure individual net worth (all wealth) and net financial assets (net worth minus housing equity and automobile value) as they artfully describe the trend of deepening economic inequality between the races since the 1980s. This theme is extended further in chapter four, in which two startling findings are highlighted: (a) though Black income has consistently hovered at around 60% of White income, Black wealth is only one-twelfth of White wealth; and (b) Black financial assets are, at the median, zero! Oliver and Shapiro go on to note that a large share of each race has no financial assets, and even larger shares of both races could not sustain lives even at poverty level for more than a few months if they lost their current income. The absolute wealth differences mentioned above conceal an even graver problem detailed in chapter five. Most Black wealth is shown to consist of home equity and automobile ownership while a substantial share of White wealth is shown to include financial assets, the key to wealth accumulation. …

Equally inequitable? A cross-national comparative study of racial health inequalities in the United States and Canada

To determine whether the racial inequity between African Americans and Caucasians in receipt of influenza vaccine is narrower in residents of nursing homes with facility-wide vaccination strategies than in residents of facilities without vaccination strategies. Secondary data analysis using the National Nursing Home Survey 2004, a nationally representative survey. One thousand one hundred seventy-four participating nursing homes sampled systematically with probability proportional to bed size. Thirteen thousand five hundred seven randomly sampled residents of nursing homes between August and December 2004. Receipt of influenza vaccine within the last year. Logistic regression was used to examine the relationship between facility-level influenza immunization strategy and racial inequity in receipt of vaccination, adjusted for characteristics at the resident, facility, state, and regional levels. Overall in the United States, vaccination coverage was higher for Caucasian and African-American residents; the racial vaccination gaps were smaller (<6 percentage points) and nonsignificant in residents of homes with standing orders for influenza vaccinations (P=.14), verbal consent allowed for vaccinations(P=.39), and routine review of facility-wide vaccination rates (P=.61) than for residents of homes without these strategies. The racial vaccination gap in residents of homes without these strategies were two to three times as high (P=.009, P=.002, and P=.002, respectively). The presence of several immunization strategies in nursing homes is associated with higher vaccination coverage for Caucasian and African-American residents, narrowing the national vaccination racial gap.

The relative importance of racial and class inequality in incarceration in the United States has recently become the subject of much debate. In this paper, we seek to give this debate a stronger empirical foundation. First, we update previous research on racial and class inequality in people’s likelihood of being imprisoned. Then, we examine racial and class inequality in people’s risk of having a family member imprisoned or living in a high-imprisonment neighborhood. We find that racial inequality in prison admissions has fallen in the twenty-first century, while class inequality has surged. However, in recent years, Black people with high levels of education and income were more likely than white people with low levels of education and income to experience the imprisonment of a family member or to live in a neighborhood with a high imprisonment rate. These seemingly contradictory conclusions can be reconciled by the fact that enduring structures of racial domination have made class boundaries among Black people more permeable than they are among white people. Imprisonment in the United States is increasingly reserved for the poor. But because Black Americans are disproportionately connected to the poor through their families and neighborhoods, racial inequality exceeds class inequality in people’s indirect experiences with imprisonment.

Racial Inequalities in Mortality from Coronavirus: The Tip of the Iceberg

United States Healthcare System

Reviewed by: Poison in the Ivy: Race Relations and the Reproduction of Inequality on Elite College Campuses by W. Carson Byrd Walter R. Allen and Gadise Regassa W. Carson Byrd. Poison in the Ivy: Race Relations and the Reproduction of Inequality on Elite College Campuses. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2017. 264 pp. Paperback: $34.95. ISBN: 978-0-8135-8936-7 Poison in the Ivy: Race Relations and the Reproduction of Inequality on College Campuses reflects the growing disillusionment with higher education's efforts to sufficiently address inequality and negative racial attitudes. Byrd offers a sociological perspective on how elite colleges in the United States sustain and reinforce racial inequity through campus social redlining. Student's limited interactions with diverse peers distort their understanding of racial disparities on campus and beyond. Building on Pierre Bourdieu's theory of social reproduction of power in institutions, Byrd examines how elite higher education institutions create and reinforce individualistic conceptualizations of racial inequality. Byrd's study helps readers make sense of why notions like meritocracy and individualism persist despite demonstrable structural racial inequities in the United States and globally. Elite college campuses represent perfect settings for study since they are often simultaneously sites of progressive change and entrenched racial inequality. Byrd masterfully demonstrates that despite exposure to research and knowledge disputing racial stereotypes, student's [End Page E-2] socioeconomic status, racial identities, and peer interactions can lead them to rationalize—and accept—racial disparities. Using elite college environments as proxy, this book explores racism and the future prospects of racial equality in the United States. Poison in the Ivy focuses on elite college campuses given their students' disproportional access to opportunity, status, and privilege. Elite colleges are major contributors to the pipeline for influential public and private leadership positions. Byrd's prior research on racial essentialism, race and intelligence, and racial socialization in highly selective colleges sets the context. He goes on to analyze how toxic, segregated campus environments inhibit students' efforts to make sense of racial inequity in their own lives, on campus, and in the wider community. He identifies how college students develop social networks, how social interactions inform racial attitudes, and whether racial identities influence these outcomes. Byrd addresses five key issues: (1) how often students interact across racial and ethnic lines, (2) whether patterns vary across social situations, like friendships, roommates, or student organizations, (3) the relationship between student interactions and racial beliefs, (4) how racial identity influences attitudes and interactions, and (5) how "eliteness" and "whiteness" jointly shape student ideologies and interactions. To explore these questions, Byrd analyzes quantitative data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Freshmen (NLSF), a 1999-2003 study of 3,251 students from 28 of the nation's most highly selective colleges and universities. The book's intuitive structure eases reader access by introducing typical views of race, difference, and inequality on college campuses. Byrd's longitudinal framing of the college-going process illustrates the evolution of racial attitudes and beliefs. He details the process of racial socialization and intra- and inter- group interactions before, during, and after college. Chapter Two, "Life Before College: Factors Influencing Early Views of Race and Inequality," begins with the understanding that college students receive messages around race and difference early on in their educational journeys. Before college, from primary through secondary school, students develop and are bound by rigid conceptualizations of race and inequality. By the time they enter college, students have deep-seated beliefs about race as well as how and—with whom—they should interact. Byrd finds that students disregard structural explanations of racial and class inequalities and instead attribute the lower social and economic status of racial minorities to individual causes. Whether these ideologies change during college is explored in the next two chapters. Chapter Three, "Mixing it Up on Campus: Patterns of and Influences on Student Interactions," introduces the crux of the argument by analyzing interactional patterns during college. When students enter college, they find a space characterized by racial hierarchy and segregation that normalizes certain patterns of social interactions. Ironically, for many students, college is their first exposure to racial, ethnic diversity. Byrd finds that pre-college friendships across racial lines...