Giving Compass' Take:

• Dwyer Gunn at Pacific Standard discusses reasons why there is still an increase of racial economic disparity in America. The report show that comparatively white families still have higher rates of employment, educational accessibility and wealth. 

• How can donors help drive programs that encourage a distribution of wealth to all? What governmental initiatives can help close the racial gap and how can we help incentivize this?

• Here's an article depicting some myths about the racial wealth gap specifically.  

As cities across the country geared up for celebrations around the birth of Martin Luther King Jr., a new report offers a sobering reminder that there's still much work to be done in America on the civil rights front.

The report, released by the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive think tank, finds that African Americans still hold a fraction of the wealth of their white peers. What's worse, this racial wealth divide has actually grown more severe since the 1980s.

Looking at median household wealth—that is, the wealth of households at the 50th percentile of the income distribution—Institute for Policy Studies researchers Chuck Collins, Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, Josh Hoxie, and Sabrina Terry found that, between 1983 and 2016, the overall metric declined by about 3 percent (from $84,111 to $81,704). That trend is damning all on its own: "In other words, despite three decades of economic growth, great leaps in productivity, and other advances, the typical U.S. family at the statistical middle of the wealth distribution not only saw zero benefit, but saw their wealth go down," the researchers note in their report. (The researches define wealth as "the sum total of assets held by a family minus total household debt.")

Read the full article about racial inequality in America by Dwyer Gunn at Pacific Standard