Race and Inequality

 The Great Recession hit American families hard across the board, but it turns out that certain households haven’t recovered as well as others. According to a new Pew Research Center analysis, the wealth inequality in America has widened significantly along racial and ethnic lines since the country began recovering from the Great Recession, and blacks and Hispanics have been hit the hardest.

The poverty rate for black Americans age 18-64 in 2012 was 27%. The rate for white Americans that age was 9.7%, the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality reports. Both numbers have risen over the past decade. For black children the poverty rate is 33% — the highest rate of any group of children in the country

$629: The median weekly earnings for a black full-time wage or salary worker in 2013, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Compare that to $802 for a white worker. The New York Times reports both numbers have climbed since 1980, but the gap between the two has widened.

$98,305 is the average wealth for black families in 2010. Investopedia defines wealth as "total market value of all [one's] physical and intangible assets," making it a strong indicator of whether a family gets richer or poorer as time passes. The average wealth of white families in that same year was a staggering $631,530. The wealth gap between white and black Americans has widened steadily for at least the past decade.

In 2013, the median wealth of white households was 13 times that of black households. In 2013, the median black household had a wealth of $11,000, compared to $19,200 in 2007.

$33,321 is the median household income for black families in 2012, down from $37,558 in 2007. Compare that to $57,009 for white families in 2012 — a nearly $24,000 gap that hasn't just remained constant, it's actually widened since the early 1970s.

$27,808 is the average amount of student debt for a black college graduate in the class of 2012. The average white student graduated with $19,613, or roughly $8,000 less.

The unemployment rate for black college graduates in 2013 was 13.4%, a number that's been climbing since 2007. That's more than twice the unemployment rate for white grads in 2013, which stood at 5.6%.

Nearly a 100 people murdered by registered members of online white supremacist network Stormfront in the past five years, as of April.

It is 21 times more likely a black male age 15-19 was to be killed by police than a white male the same age between 2010 and 2012

4,347 per 100,000 of black men were incarcerated in 2010. The number for white men that same year was 678 per 100,000.

Madison’s  Young, Gifted and Black Coalition mounted a series of large, peaceful protests over the past few weeks. “We will NOT support the status quo. We will NOT continue to support prison labor and low wages,” they say in their post. “Corporations are making millions off of government subsidies for employees on government assistance,” the organizers argue. 

The current white-to-Hispanic median wealth ratio has reached its highest point since 2001. The study shows that the median white household has 10.3 times the wealth of the median Hispanic household. That number is drastically higher than at the beginning of the Great Recession in 2007, when white households had 8.2 times the wealth of Hispanic households. From 2010-2013, the median wealth of Hispanics decreased from $16,000 to $13,700. During the same time frame, the median wealth of non-Hispanic white households actually increased by 2.4 percent, rising from $138,600 to $141,900.

While white households have recovered better than both black and Hispanic households, there is still one common trend throughout every group – everyone’s median wealth is still below its pre-recession level.