Published by
Chicago Tribune
Chicago Tribune
The median white household owns over 10 times as many assets as the median Black household — a gap that has actually widened since the civil rights victories of the 1960s. There are all sorts of reasons for this staggering inequality — from segregation, redlining, loan discrimination and other systemically racist policies that historically shut many Black people out of homeownership and prevented them from building generational wealth, to mass incarceration and sentencing disparities that put a generation of disproportionately Black men behind bars for nonviolent crimes and made it nearly impo…