Inheriting Wealth
Wealth Two swallows don't make a consensus, of course, but scarcely a week after Jesse Jackson's Wall Street Project was in the news, the National Urban League launched a major push for black economic power.</br></br>Jackson's not-yet-fleshed-out idea is for black Americans to acquire stock in national and local corporations, thereby giving black America an insider's view -- and an insider's influence -- on the workings of the commercial marketplace.</br></br>The Urban League's equally inchoate notion is that it's time for black Americans to begin working at closing the wealth gap that can be expressed in this shorthand fashion: Black household income, according to one recent survey, is about 62 cents for every dollar earned by white households. When it comes to wealth, however, the black share is about 8 cents on the dollar.</br></br>"The wealth data expose far deeper inequalities {than the income gap}," Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro wrote in the essay that was the basis for discussion at the Urban League's recent convention in Philadelphia. "Half of all white households have at least $6,999 in a {net financial assets (NFA)} nest egg, whereas nearly two-thirds of all black households have zero or negative NFA."</br></br>A couple of things worth noting: The essay is the lead article in the league's 1998 edition of "The State of Black America," an annual report that used to focus on how awful things were for black people and how white racism was to blame.