The median net worth — not income — of black families in the U.S. is less than $5,000 compared with more than $110,000 for comparable white families, said small business officials.
Democratic congressional members are emphasizing the economy cannot be rectified without helping the nation’s growing minority demographics lift themselves.
Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., who chairs the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship, said she has begun focusing on growing minority entrepreneurship for three years now, but that the problems are heightening despite expanded efforts of the U.S. Small Business Administration to reach out and educate more.
As such, Landrieu moderated last week the “Closing the Wealth Gap through the African-American Entrepreneurial Ecosystem” roundtable featuring black government, education and business leaders nationwide. It also included several with Louisiana ties, such as Southern University Chancellor James Llorens and former New Orleans Mayor Marc Morial, who now leads the National Urban League.
White, black, Hispanic and Asian families are all losing family net worth, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, but the gap is greatest between whites and blacks. In 2010, the net worth for black families was $4,995, compared with $12,100 in 2005. The median white family net worth in 2005 was $135,000.
“Wealth is created and maintained generation to generation,” Landrieu said, while noting but not getting into the details of past decades and centuries of racial discrimination against blacks. source
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