inequality

The disease of racism isn’t just a white policeman kneeling on a black man’s neck. It’s black and brown people breathing polluted air. It’s black folks in Boston spending 64 more hours stuck on the bus than white folks. It’s decades of housing policy that leave the average black family in Boston with $8 in wealth while the average white family has $247,500.

The immense wealth gap between white households and households of color may seem like old news by now. A much-discussed 2015 Federal Reserve Bank of Boston report showed that the median net worth — assets minus debt — of the city’s white households was $247,500, while for black households it was just $8. But such disparities have been felt intuitively and lived painfully day-to-day in communities of color long before data quantified them so harshly.