Giving Compass' Take:
- Lucas Hubbard discusses a new study showing that Black families, regardless of profession or class, lost far more wealth than white families during the Great Recession.
- How does this research also apply to racial and economic inequity during the COVID-19 pandemic? How can policy address the racial wealth gap?
- Learn more about the Great Recession.
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During the decade-long economic recovery following the Great Recession, Black family households lost much more wealth than white families, regardless of class or profession, according to a new study.
Notably, while most other groups experienced an economic recovery between 2010 and 2019, Black professionals suffered losses in wealth, researchers found. Meanwhile, Black working-class families remained in the worst overall economic position.
As a result, many Black families entered the COVID-19 pandemic in a state of financial precarity.
“As the economy recovered, the typical Black household remained financially fragile and entered the COVID-19 crisis with less of a private safety net,” says Fenaba Addo, an associate professor of public policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, faculty affiliate of the Samuel DuBois Cook Center for Social Equity, and coauthor of the study in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences.
“By comparison, white working-class households had overwhelmingly middle-class levels of wealth—and were better positioned for the economic uncertainty the pandemic brought.”
For the study, researchers explored the roughly decade-long period following the Great Recession, starting in 2010 and ending in 2019, prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Read the full article about Great Recession recovery by Lucas Hubbard at Futurity.