Cook Center Faculty Affiliate Fenaba R. Addo, Ph.D., recently coauthored a review article in the Annual Review of Sociology that explores the racialized dynamics of debt and wealth in the United States. The paper synthesizes various categories of research that examine the sources of racial disparities in wealth and debt, and it explores how these disparities reflect and reproduce inequality across generations.
In this paper, Dr. Addo and her coauthor Daniel Auguste highlight the role of wealth and debt in shaping broader patterns of economic inequality and social mobility. Rather than treating wealth solely as an outcome of life circumstances, the authors suggest an approach that examines how wealth (and its absence) acts as a driver of life outcomes such as education, entrepreneurship, health, housing, etc.
The paper concludes by calling more attention to community-level wealth as an underexplored factor in closing the racial wealth gap, and by asking a vital question: How do wealth differentials translate into barriers to mobility, limit opportunity, and compound disadvantage over time?
Read the full review here: Black and White Wealth Differentials in the United States: Explaining and Recreating Persistent Inequality
