U.S. racial wealth gap won't budge: The Hill

NEW YORK, April 21 (Xinhua) -- The racial wealth gap is one of the most glaring injustices in the United States today, said an article published by The Hill on Thursday.

Hundreds of years of structural and legal barriers excluded and prevented Black households from being able to accumulate and hold onto wealth, and policies continue to perpetuate those barriers today, said the article.

"While the civil rights movement brought changes that narrowed the gap, the last few decades piled on more laws that favor the wealthiest and widened the gap again," said the opinion article.

"We've seen 70 years of breakthroughs in science, academia and technology, but public policy has kept the profound racial wealth gap largely unmoved since 1950," it added.

It began with a systemically racist past that begins with slavery and Black people being forced to serve as capital itself for a white landowning plantation class, and then later, establishing a system in which Black people were excluded from accumulating wealth and cut out from New Deal policies, especially labor laws, according to the article.

"And it continues to this day: exclusion in access to finance, predatory financing, barriers to home ownership and the trap of low-wage employment, to name a few," said the article.

The tax system and who it works for also helps people understand that this inequality is by design. "Today's tax code perpetuates the racial wealth gap through federal tax subsidies that especially benefit wealthy households, higher-income workers and those with access to tax-advantaged retirement plans," it added.