Post-recession economic recovery doesn't reach people of color as the wealth gap grows larger

 Take the recent recession for instance. While whites (especially wealthier ones) are, on average, recovering well from the recession, black and brown people are not.

Most Americans are still struggling to recover wealth lost during the worst recession in modern history, but those on the higher end of the economic spectrum are rebounding much faster, according to new government data.

The rising inequality is most pronounced along racial lines.
White households, especially wealthier whites, have recovered well.

Black and Hispanic households are taking far longer to recover, however, fueling a growing chasm between those with financial means and those without.

In 2016, The Nation said that black families would need 228 years to ac ulate the same wealth as white families.

More recently, in September, Forbes calculated that the net wealth of black and Latino families could reach zero by 2053.

The median U.S. household held $97,300 in assets in 2016, according to the Federal Reserve Board’s Survey of Consumer Finances.

That figure is well below the $139,700 in assets the median household held in 2007, just before the recession began.

The median white household has $171,000 in assets, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of the Fed data. That’s 10-times larger than the $17,100 in wealth held by the median black household and eight times more than the $20,600 in wealth owned by the median Hispanic household.

The recession, in short, wiped out decades of slow but steady gains among minority households who now hold assets similar in size to the median household in the late 1990s.

“We’re talking about being set back 20 years or more for Hispanic and black families,” said Rakesh Kochhar, Pew’s associate director of research.

And this is not limited to wealthy whites. This is a gap that spans income levels. Even low-income whites have more wealth than the average black family.

Among low-income households, the median white family holds three times the wealth of the median Hispanic family and more than four times the wealth of the median black family.

Middle-income whites have four times the wealth of black families in the same bracket and more than three times the median wealth of middle-income Hispanic families. [...]

Just 45 percent of black households owned their own homes, Russell’s analysis showed, compared with 72.5 percent of non-Hispanic white households. Home ownership rates among blacks have fallen farther than rates among non-Hispanic whites. And homes owned by African-Americans declined in value almost twice as much as homes owned by whites.

This is where we are in 2017.

More proof that all of our “anyone can be anything” and

post-racial at udes are really myth.



https://www.dailykos.com/stories/1712397