Race and Extreme Inequality

PETER O. ZIERLEIN

The current presidential campaign has sparked a lot of conversation about race, but it has primarily been at the symbolic and interpersonal level. It has failed to probe the underlying substance of racial economic disparities and the slow rate of progress toward equity in wealth and wages. Too many Americans naïvely see the strong presidential candidacy of Illinois Senator Barack Obama as evidence of the resolution of the racial divide.

Since 1968, the year Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, the income gap between blacks and whites has narrowed by just three cents on the dollar. In 2005 the median per capita income in the United States stood at $16,629 for blacks and $28,946 for whites. At this slow rate of progress, we will not achieve income equality for 537 years. And if politicians continue to dismantle government checks on income and wealth concentration, even these modest gains may be reversed.

Extreme inequality in the overall economy exacerbates income and wealth disparities between whites and people of color. These disparities remain shockingly wide and especially evident when we examine the polarization of assets and wealth in the United States. The black homeownership rate, for instance, sits at 47 percent and the Latino rate at 49.7 percent, compared with 75 percent for whites.

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