ALC 2012: Measuring and Understanding the Racial Wealth Gap

I spent last Thursday and Friday attending my very first Assets Learning Conference here in D.C. With over 1,200 asset building policymakers and practitioners in attendance from 49 states (Wyoming was sadly absent), ALC 2012 was a productive and energetic meeting of incredibly smart and engaged members of the field. The Asset Building Program will be posting a series of blog entries covering some of the sessions we most enjoyed over the next week or so. Be sure to check out CFED’s blog for more thorough coverage (and well done, CFED, on a great conference!) My colleague Justin King started us off on Monday by reflecting here on his favorite session: the rousing plenary speech Newark Mayor Cory Booker gave that successfully framed financial empowerment and economic opportunity as key issues of our time.

I’m going to share some observations from one of my favorite sessions: Measuring and Understanding the Racial Wealth Gap.This session included perspectives from three academics who have studied wealth inequality, racial and gender disparities, and the economics of poverty in the U.S. extensively. Kilolo Kijakazi (Program Officer at the Ford Foundation) moderated the conversation and helped frame the issue of racial wealth inequality as a structural rather than individual level problem. This framing is critical for the asset building field, which has struggled to address the ongoing structural impediments to individualized solutions to poverty. A longstanding pattern of both historical and present day racial discrimination (such as that seen in discriminatory lending practices) have thrown up major roadblocks along the pathway to asset ownership for people of color and other marginalized groups.

Mariko Chang started the session off with an excellent overview of the intersections of race and gender with wealth. Specifically, she argued that until we address gender-based wealth disparities we will fail to make adequate progress in closing the racial wealth gap, due to dramatically low levels of wealth held by women of color. Chang articulated a number of ways in which gender factors compound wealth disparities. For example, women are more likely to have sole custody of children but less likely to have access to what she terms “wealth escalators” (that is, work-based benefits and savings opportunities that facilitate asset building).

Next, Rebecca Tippet from the University of Virginia discussed the role different types of assets play in household economic security. Her research looks at asset holdings by race and shows that while white and Asian American households typically hold four main types of assets (homes, bank accounts, cars, and retirement accounts), black and Latino households typically hold just two types (cars and bank accounts) and that the value of these assets is less. Tippett suggests lifting asset limits for public assistance programs and automating workplace savings opportunities to improve asset ownership opportunity for all groups, two ideas the Asset Building Program is also a proponent of.

Darrick Hamilton, from The New School, was the final panelist to share remarks. Hamilton discussed a problem with the racial wealth gap conversation: namely, that a lack of nuanced data on the wealth of people of color leads to widespread generalizations about the status of certain racial groups. For example, the overall high median wealth of Asian Americans as a whole masks profound intraracial disparities, such as the gap between Chinese Americans and Vietnamese, Hmong or Cambodian Americans. In an effort to address the lack of detailed information about the wealth holdings of people of color based on ancestral origin, Tribal affiliation, immigration history or other key factors, Hamilton and a team of researchers from a range of disciplinary backgrounds have received Ford Foundation funding to embark on a “National Asset Scorecard Study.” This project will provide badly needed information about how historically marginalized groups (who are typically sampled in too small numbers for statistical interpretation) are faring. The research group will particularly focus on Native, Latino, Asian and black Americans living in four U.S. cities. I am particularly looking forward to reading more about the results of this study and expanding my own understanding of the racial wealth gap among the sampled groups.

This session, and the conference more broadly, was a great opportunity to connect with researchers and familiarize myself with their current projects. The Measuring and Understanding the Racial Wealth Gap session was especially important because the panelists and moderator were so successful at linking their work to the broader asset building field, connecting the dots on how racial inequality will continue to hamper asset building initiatives unless we intervene, and offering possible solutions and avenues for policy change.

Tell us here in the comments or on Twitter: what was your favorite #ALC2012 session?