The Racial Wealth Gap — Inequality in the United States, 1977

A data limitation, stated up front

The Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) — the standard source for wealth by race — has been conducted on a consistent triennial basis only since 1989. There is no equivalent, methodologically consistent data for the Carter and first Reagan terms. The earliest reliable benchmark is a 1983 pilot survey, cited below, and the first full modern SCF is 1989. Figures before 1989 should be read as directional, not precise.

Wealth (assets minus debts) is a different and more slowly moving measure than income, and the racial gap in wealth is dramatically wider than the racial gap in income — because wealth compounds across generations while income resets every year. Tracking it alongside the treatise's other six metrics adds a dimension that income-based measures alone can miss.

Median household wealth by race, by term

Term	SCF year(s)	White median	Black median	White:Black ratio
Carter (1977–1981)	no consistent survey	Not available — predates the SCF series.
Reagan 1 (1981–1985)	1983 (pilot)	A widely cited cohort study found white families held roughly 3× the wealth of Black families in the same birth cohort in 1983 — the earliest reasonably reliable benchmark, right as this treatise's documented inequality inflection point begins.
Reagan 2 (1985–1989)	1989	$121,742^†	$7,253^†	~17:1
Bush (H.W.) (1989–1993)	1992	$105,670^†	$15,009^†	~7:1
Clinton 1 (1993–1997)	1995	$108,775^†	$15,466^†	~7:1
Clinton 2 (1997–2001)	1998 / 2001	$126,826 → $148,882^†	$20,675 → $23,429^†	~6.1–6.4:1
Bush (W.) 1 (2001–2005)	2001 / 2004	$148,882 → $157,351^†	$23,429 → $23,588^†	~6.4–6.7:1
Bush (W.) 2 (2005–2009)	2007	$245,450	$30,050	~8.2:1
Obama 1 (2009–2013)	2010 / 2013	$177,210 → $180,620	$21,720 → $16,650	8.2:1 → 10.8:1
Obama 2 (2013–2017)	2016	$210,910	$21,150	~10.0:1
Trump 1 (2017–2021)	2019	$219,210	$27,940	~7.8:1
Biden (2021–2025)	2022	$284,310	$44,100	~6.4:1
Trump 2 (2025–2026, interim)	not yet released	The next SCF (fielded 2025) had not been published as of this writing.

† 1989–2004 figures are from an Economic Policy Institute tabulation restricted to households aged 26–79, expressed in 2010 dollars, and are not on the same dollar basis as the 2007–2022 figures, which are drawn from a separate compilation of the all-ages SCF series. Ratios are computed within each source's own consistent series and are the more reliable comparison across the two.

What the trend shows

Three things stand out when this is read against the rest of the treatise:

The gap was already historically severe by the time consistent data begins. The Federal Reserve's own researchers note that the very high 1989 ratio partly reflects small early survey samples of Black and Hispanic families, but independent cohort research confirms the underlying divergence was already well underway by 1983 — squarely overlapping Reagan's first term, the point this treatise independently identified as the broader inequality inflection point.
The 2008 crisis widened the gap more than any other episode in the record. The white-to-Black wealth ratio in this table peaks at 10.8:1 in 2013 — not in 2007 or 2010, but three years after the crisis, because Black median wealth kept falling through 2010–2013 even as white median wealth stabilized. This directly corroborates the Bush (W.) 2 and Obama 1 documents' finding that home-equity-concentrated wealth (which Black homeowners disproportionately held, often in neighborhoods that lost more value and recovered more slowly) bore the deepest and most prolonged losses of the entire period.
The ratio has narrowed since 2013, but the dollar gap has not. Black median wealth grew faster in percentage terms than white median wealth in every survey from 2013 onward — consistent with this treatise's findings about tight labor markets in the late Obama, Trump 1, and Biden terms. But because the starting gap was so large, the absolute dollar difference between typical white and Black household wealth was larger in 2022 (roughly $240,000) than at almost any earlier point in the series.