White People Have 13 Dollars for Every Dollar Held by Black Americans

(Courtesy photosteve101/Flickr/ Creative Commons)

Michael A. Fletcher, THE WASHINGTON POST

(The Washington Post)—The Great Recession was hard on almost everyone, eroding the net worth of the typical American by nearly 40 percent between 2007 and 2010. But the recovery has been more selective, according to a new analysis of Federal Reserve data by the Pew Research Center. While the wealth of whites leveled off as the economy began to heal between 2010 and 2013, blacks and Hispanics experienced continued decline.

The result is an expanding racial wealth gap. Now whites have 13 dollars for every dollar held by African Americans, a level of inequality not seen since 1989, when the white-black gap was 17 to 1, according to Pew researchers Rakesh Kochhar and Richard Fry. The gap separating whites and Hispanics is not as huge but still massive: just over 10 to 1, a level not seen since 2001. The charts below show how wealth has fluctuated by race and ethnicity since  since the government began collecting the data in 1983.
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