The Enormous Black-White Wage Gap

As a result, the official statistics on wages and many other economic subjects ignore a growing segment of the black population. They cover only those men fortunate enough to be working. “It’s a weird hole,” Kerwin Kofi Charles, the dean of the Yale School of Management, told me.

When you take a comprehensive look at black and white men — as Charles and another economist, Patrick Bayer of Duke University, have done — you see that the black-white male wage gap is as large today as it was when Harry Truman was president. (I go into more detail, including charts, in this article.)

From The Magazine: “Racial income disparities today look no different than they did the decade before King’s March on Washington,” Nikole Hannah-Jones writes. “More critical, the racial wealth gap is about the same as it was in the 1950s as well. The typical black household today is poorer than 80 percent of white households.”

The central reason is centuries of government policies that have denied opportunities to black Americans — from slavery to the Homestead Act to Jim Crow laws to federally mandated segregation that affects housing prices today. The only solution, Hannah-Jones argues, is restitution: A federal program to repay black Americans for the wealth that the government has taken from them.