Yesterday's segregation is today's wealth gap. “You can see how it becomes this baked-in system, with every generation having less to pass down to the next generation,” said William Welburn's son, Jonathan Welburn-a researcher at RAND, an expert in economic analysis, and the lead author of the wealth gap study. But even then, in the 1980s, there were still neighborhoods where Black families were not welcome, where buying a home-the single most important source of wealth in America-was just not possible. The next generation, his son, William Welburn-the grandson of William Thornton-earned a Ph.D. Edward opened an auto body shop with his brothers. His White counterparts got their degrees, moved to the suburbs, and retired years later as corporate managers or directors. He came home and, like many Black veterans, could not access the GI Bill's housing and education benefits. But he could not practice in his hometown, because White customers would not accept a Black pharmacist.Ī generation later, his son-in-law, Edward Welburn, Sr., fought in World War II. In 1924, a man named William Thornton, a veteran of World War I and a graduate of the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy, went looking for a job.
“In 200 years, we could still have problems with racial wealth disparities that are equal to, or worse than, the problems we have today.” “The magnitude of the disparity is just mind-blowing,” said Pedro Nascimento de Lima, an associate engineer at RAND who specializes in computer modeling and coauthored the study. What they found when they ran the numbers: There is no reason to think the wealth gap will ever close without potentially trillions of dollars in investments in Black households. What would it take, they asked, to close the gap, to give Black households the same opportunities that wealth affords many White households?Įxisting economic models, they found, were not enough to answer that the disparities are just too wide. In the summer of 2020, as American cities echoed with protests following the murder of George Floyd, researchers at RAND decided to take a closer look at America's Black–White wealth gap. The median White household: around $189,000, a disparity that has worsened in recent decades. The median Black household in America has around $24,000 in savings, investments, home equity, and other elements of wealth.
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