By Andrea Estrada

Disparities in wealth—or net worth—have shaped financial inequality between black and white Americans for generations, even as racial income differences have narrowed somewhat. That was the authoritative view of a pair of prominent scholars a decade ago when they published a groundbreaking book on the subject.

Now those experts—Melvin L. Oliver, professor of sociology and dean of social sciences at UC Santa Barbara, and Thomas Shapiro, professor of law and social policy at Brandeis University—have collaborated on an updated edition in which they take a second, even closer look at the problem.

In a 10th anniversary edition of “Black Wealth/White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality” (Routledge, 2006), the authors have added two new chapters on the increase in wealth inequality in the past 10 years and some of the state and federal policies that have been launched to address it. The authors concluded that the gap continues to be large and that recent financial sector actions and national policy have had a negative impact on the ability of blacks to accumulate wealth. Once again, their major finding is that despite a narrowing income gap, blacks continue to have significantly less wealth than whites.

“In many ways, wealth is more powerful than income,” Oliver said. “Income comes in and goes out every month. But wealth is what you use to strategize about social mobility. You can talk all you want about poverty and helping people move out of poverty, but that doesn’t mean those same people will achieve social mobility.”

The wealth gap, Oliver and Shapiro contend, is at the core of many of the socioeconomic differences that have persisted during the post-civil rights era. According to Oliver, wealth creates opportunity, and whether or not parents can achieve home ownership, a car, and a mutual fund is one of the best predictors of whether their children will do the same.

“Right now, almost 80 percent of black kids begin their adult lives with no assets whatsoever,” said Oliver. “That’s not the case for white kids. If they don’t have financial resources in hand, they have access to them through their families.”

According to some researchers, as much as 80 percent of the wealth people accumulate over the course of their lifetimes actually begins as a gift from a relative, he added. That gift can come in the form of a down payment on a first home, a college education, or an inheritance.

“The overriding idea people bring away from this book is that the prism of wealth allows one to understand the historical accumulation of inequality and how it continues to structure the lives of African Americans differently from that of whites,” Oliver said.

Closing the racial wealth gap, he continued, may well be the next major challenge facing the full inclusion of people of color in United States society.