You know what they say: You can never be too rich, or too white:

The gap in the wealth of white families and what’s owned by blacks and Hispanics has widened in recent years. Researchers say it will widen even more unless steps are taken to break what’s become a vicious cycle — the rich getting richer and the poor struggling to keep from falling further behind.

[…] The Pew Research Center recently found that the median white household has net assets worth 20 times that of the median black household and 18 times that of a Hispanic family — assets such as housing, savings and investments, minus any debt.

But of course, this is America, the Land of Opportunity, in which racism is long dead, and class divisions never, ever existed. So obviously, white families must simply be working harder and smarter than their black and Hispanic neighbors, since the market, color-blind as it is, always allocates resources as efficiently and fairly as possible.

So since there is no institutional racism left in America to require remedies via legislation or public policy, the growing wealth gap between the races must mean that whites are naturally superior. Given these assumptions (the absence of racism and the preternatural efficiency of the market), there can be no other logical explanation.

56 replies on “The Rich Are Getting Richer… and Whiter”

  3. Actually, since the median of a set of data is robust (resistant to outliers), this doesn’t actually mean that the rich are getting richer and whiter. Rather, it means that there are more and more rich white people and more and more poor black and brown people. Slight distinction, but significant. Doesn’t change the problem much.

  9. Is generational family wealth built more by generations of whiteness or by generations of family planning? I think I remember seeing some fairly atrocious statistics on un-wed teen pregnancy in the black community…

    Where do other non-white minorities fit in (Asians for instance) ?

  12. Every time I start to feel optimistic about the state of race relations in this country, I need only read the comments of a story like this and wonder how on earth a just god hasn’t wiped us off the face of the earth. Then I remember that I’m an atheist.

  14. “Probably generations of not being slaves, followed by a few generations of not being marginalized “

    Chinese were all but slaves in the USA. Never had a chinaman steal my car radio.

  15. If you bothered to read the paper cited, you’d see there’s a significant portion of the decline due to the housing price collapse. And, of course, Goldy simply ignores that Asians are ranked higher than whites in the study.

  16. @15

    Okay. Then explain Hispanics and Asians.

    I think Asians were possible more aggressively repressed more recently (FDR loved those internment camps) than either Black or Hispanics, yet I believe they have a higher median wealth than whites.

  21. So based on Goldy’s astute analysis, the ranking of racial superiority must go something like this:
    1.) Asians (despite having been de-facto slaves and interned and stripped of their property by FDR).
    2.) Whites (because their bastards)
    3.) Hispanics
    4.) Blacks (because they were slaves 150 years ago)

    But where do the Jews stack in here… I think I remember that they might have been enslaved and interned too…

  22. This article gets interesting if you read down below the headline. Note that the White-to-black and White-to-hispanic imbalances are at historic highs only during the beginning of the Democratic Supermajority of 2006-2010. Even during the middle of the Reagan and Bush eras they were much much better and closer to the (still imbalanced) average.

    The reasons given are that Black and Hispanic wealth was achieved recently only by housing price increases, but since they bought in to the most risky homes with the biggest decreases, they basically lost their bankrolls.

    The article still doesn’t go along way to explaining the real mystery of why Whites held on even during all these “financial crises” or what assets they held other than real estate that kept their values up. Do Blacks and Hispanics not participate in any intangible equity markets, for example?

    (NOTE: Thanks for policing the trolls. Even the racists at the Seattle Times comments section are getting eradicated from cyberspace. It’s high time SLOG had at least “some” standards.)

  26. This study is more about housing values, housing as a portion of wealth, and (as always with real estate) location, location, location.

    But it’s soooo much more fun for the Goldys and NPRs of this world if you can bend it through the prism of race in a way that implies “White Supremacy” is at its root.

  28. @25 Not in the US, thankfully (as far as I know and I could be wrong), my father’s grandparents came here escaping it from Germany though, just before it all started (luck is sometimes a good thing or was it intuition?). Anyhow, if we cater to every single group … we’d be catering all the time and nothing positive will come of it.

  33. Goldy.
    you shitface.
    it is not about race.
    compare the out-of-wedlock birthrates of the groups.
    you will find a correlation to wealth that even a retard such as yourself can recognize.

  35. 1.) Asians (despite having been de-facto slaves and interned and stripped of their property by FDR).

    I see. So all Asians are Japanese who lived in West Coast states in the early 1940s. Christ, you are a fucking moron.

  39. Exactly. Goldy hopes to work in the White House.

    There you’re either from Chicago or you’re the other two characteristics, @41, as Goldy says in @45.

  42. Goldy,
    I don’t think it was a good idea to post this.Your sarcasm spurred a lot of unnecessary even racist commentary. Many people of ALL stripes are suffering. The rich rarely if ever suffer in a down economy.

    Look, according to a piece I read in the Nation recently by John Younge, African-Americans have not fared well under Pres. Obama. The rates of foreclosures are disproportionally high among other many problems in the community. The Pew Research tells me not much except that people are suffering in this stubborn stagnant economy.

  43. @57, Well, I dunno, the city of Richmond California has a Green Party mayor. Of course, that’s a good counter balance to all the industrial pollution that goes on there.

  44. @58: “Thereby proving ONCE AGAIN that more blacks equals more murders.”
    I like how you have no idea what constitutes proof. Correlation sure implies causation in here, right?

  45. @66: You have anecdotal evidence and spin. You have no statistically significant evidence of any sort. I can disprove your little suggested correlation of blackness to murder simply by reaching into the Internet and seeing what falls out.
    For example, Oakland has over 1.5 times the murder rate and over 1.4 times the total violent crime rate of Chicago, despite being only 83% as black as the Windy City. The two have nearly identical rates of poverty as well. Before you claim that Hispanics are to blame, you might want to know that Chicago happens to be 13% more Hispanic than Oakland. The same can be said of many other pairs of cities.
    You see, Alleged, blacks do not cause crime. A city full of humans is a highly complex system, one whose outcomes cannot be predicted by any one variable alone, or even two or three variables in conjunction. You like to toy with isolated correlations that confirm your internal prejudices, but you in fact fear the truth.

  46. @68: Hard facts can still be anecdotal in their presentation.
    As you pointed out, anecdotal evidence is unreliable because it is from a very small sample size, and often suffers from cherry-picking. When you present murder statistics from one city alone, you have chosen that one data set because you feel that it supports your chosen conclusion; this is formally known as “bias” or “data snooping”.
    Now, my numbers so far are from Wikipedia articles, specifically those listing American cities by crime rate and those detailing the demographics of those cities. You have a lot of choot-spah claiming that you cite all your sources and then, two sentences later, listing a bunch of numbers that you give no source for.
    The very fact that you try to bring total population into this demonstrates that you are grasping at straws. I have been working with crime rates (number of instances per 1000 population), not raw summations. If more blacks equals more crime, how do you account for the fact that Oakland, which has proportionally fewer blacks and Hispanics than Chicago (we agree on this), has much higher rates of violent crime?
    Or do blacks only lead to crime sometimes? Are other factors involved? Could it perhaps be that blackness doesn’t actually cause crime?
    Your insistence that blackness CAUSES crime, end-of-file, is not only offensive, but most unscientific. To quote Obi-Wan-Kenobi, only a Sith deals in absolutes.

  47. @72: I am perfectly aware that poor neighborhoods tend to have more crime than rich neighborhoods. Whaddya know? Black people are more likely to be poor than white people! I wonder why that is?
    @74: You didn’t say that more whites means less crime. You said that more blacks equals more crime. Chicago is proportionally way blacker than Oakland, and yet has much less violent crime.
    Why is this, then?

  51. @86: “the problem with IP banning is another topic, but … it’s no longer a solution now for many sites.”

    It’s not “another topic”, it’s useful and not entirely difficult to accomplish. Does it “fix” the problem for good? No, certainly not perfectly. Does it generally work to keep harmful, insincere trolls away? Yes.

    <- administered a board with ~300k users in the not too distant past.

  52. @87 It’s another topic from the article, so yes it is another topic. Also, you don’t seem to understand how lots of people get online, for an ex-administrator you’re either from the old dial-up BBS era or just haven’t paid much attention. Hint: It reduces your readership and participation level by a few with each IP most times now.

  53. @92: Don’t be foolish, I understand how Dynamic IP works. You’re only IP banning people who log in from the same specific IPs repeatedly (or from a specific proxy), therefore there are very few false positives involved. I did not run into significant problems with a site of that size.

    These techniques are still useful when using the latest vBulletin (and other similar frameworks) today.

  54. Actually, vBulliten has a much better solution, it works like how the new IRC moderated flag does, not to mention spedkids and the like also included in vBulliten. 90% of the real trolls were only controllable through the ghost user system, all others failed, especially IP banning. Dynamic IP isn’t the only problem, there are also public access computers and the like. Ever see what happens when a user using the public library gets banned from a website? They move to the next computer until they finally run out of computers, essentially cutting off everyone who uses that service. Just because you didn’t notice a problem with it, doesn’t mean the problem does not exist. Remember when one of Youtube’s servers accidentally had the all the northwest Qwest users banned? I do, it was annoying.

    Signed, an ex-moderator for USMessageBoard.com, quit because of an inability to work during medical procedure. So yeah, most people can make that claim without lying, it’s like saying “I own a car and therefore I’m an expert on all things mechanical” … I’m also a software dev for many networking solutions and security tester, but my knowledge on this … actual experience in dealing with real trolls and not just people who disagree or have bad language practices.

  55. @94: Yeah, I had more than ten times the users, and much much much more trolls to handle. I did it just fine.

  56. We had very few false positives to worry about, and besides, the Slog could just block it for anonymous users, then when the troll logs in, block the email. It’s not that tough.

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