There's still a long way to go to close the racial wealth gap—some 228 years, to be precise, according to a study by the Corporation for Enterprise Development and Institute for Policy Studies (pdf).
According to the report, if the average black family’s wealth continues to grow at the same pace it has over the past 30 years, it will take black families 228 years to accumulate the same amount of wealth that white families have today.
That, the report notes, is just 17 years short of the 245-year span of slavery in the country.
The CFED and IPS looked at three decades’ worth of data from the Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances. Their findings showed that over the past 30 years, the average wealth of white families has grown by a whopping 84 percent, representing 1.2 times the rate of growth for Latinos and three times the rate of wealth growth for blacks.
The organizations noted that if this trend were to continue, the average wealth of white households would grow by $18,368 per year, while Latino households would grow by about $2,254 per year and black households by $765 per year.
The study recommends several interventions, including executive action by the next president to assess "how major policies and programs within every federal agency contribute to the racial wealth divide today."
The groups recommend reforming the U.S. tax code, fixing unfair tax programs and conducting a governmentwide audit of federal policies to understand how said policies may be affecting households of color, among other interventions, in order to facilitate the closing of the wealth gap.
Read the study here (pdf).