A national research organization, the Insight Center for Community Economic Development, recently released a report that revealed persisting wealth gaps between racial groups in the United States. The study proved especially daunting for black women, whose estimated net worth is $100. This number is even more shocking when aligned with their white female counterparts’ $41,500.

The Insight Center defines wealth as “the total value of assets minus debts.” Thus, the above figures reflect an individual’s median net worth “when debts exceed assets.”

Nicole Hilson, FSU student and Director of the Women’s Center was shocked at the gap, but approached it logically.

“I was surprised at the gap, but I understand why it’s there,” Hilson said. “Not that it’s okay in any way, shape or form, but I can see how institutions in this society could make that happen.”

According to the Insight Center, present U.S. institutions that make acquiring wealth difficult for the African American woman include: limited access to on-the-job benefits like health insurance, holiday pay, or pensions; the disabling affects of Public Assistance; the reality of habitually falling into lower paying job, and as a result, lower benefits of social insurance—social security, worker’s compensation, and unemployment insurance.

Although a lot of inequalities exist within the workforce itself, Dr. Mason, FSU Professor of Economics notes the significance of unemployment as well.

“African Americans sort of exist in a permanent deep recession,” Mason said. “[Their] unemployment rate usually hovers around 10% or 12%, what’s now the current national rate, and a lot of people are upset about it. Well, that’s the normal state of [black unemployment].”

The current unemployment rate for African American women, as estimated by the Labor Bureau of Statistics, is 11.7%, which is troubling considering that a great percentage of these women are single parents.

Because many single black women, like most unmarried women of other racial groups, hold the title of primary child-care provider, they must inevitably forgo many jobs due to lack of additional help in the home, prices of outside care, and unaccommodating nature of many job companies.

Audrey Torres of FSU’s Black Female Development Center has had personal experience with the poverty of black single mothers.

“My mom is a single mother, her mom was a single mother, and there are a lot of single women here who are in poverty raising children,” Torres said. “Poverty is a continued cycle.”

The Insight Center affirms her statement. According to their study, “black mothers with children under age 18 have a median wealth of zero.”

Raising a child alone is no doubt a strain on an individual’s finances, however, there are also other hindering economic effects that not having a spouse creates for these individuals.

BlackVoices online magazine states that “black women are the least likely group to get married, and if they do marry an African American man, those couples have the highest divorce rate in the country.” This reality produces an unsettling blow to these women’s financial status in comparison to men. As mentioned by the Center for Community Development, divorced women of color only have 26% of the wealth of divorced men of color, 8% of White women, and 5% of divorced White men.

Not only are discriminatory institutions fully intact in the U.S. today, but institutional factors of the past have played a major part in the current economic state for black women as well as black families, as stated in the report. For instance, the implementation of slavery, Jim Crow laws, “laws against interracial marriages, and policies which restricted opportunities for women to own and build assets.”

“Wealth is a way of transferring inequality across time,” Mason said. “If [there was] a large wealth gap 30-40 years ago, but [nothing was done] to adjust that wealth gap, even if you eliminate the wage gap, but [nothing’s done] about the accumulated differences from the past, then that wealth gap will persist for an extremely long period of time.”

Among the solutions included to help black women acquire and maintain wealth, the Insight Center recommends policies that will 1) improve employment opportunities, 2) support self employment, and 3) modify social insurance to provide adequate protection.

In addition to these proposals, Hilson believes that reeducation is also imperative.

“The actual solution would be to educate people about the systems that they’re apart of; the institutions they’ve grown to know and love, and how [society has] placed stereotypes and discriminations inside of their heads from day one,” Hilson said.

Although African American women can definitely use the above tools to better their accumulation of wealth, it will most likely be a very long time before they ever achieve economic equality, and finally close the economic gap.

“I think it’s always going to be a gap, maybe not as wide…[but] there’s always going to be discrimination, always going to be some type of prejudice between the races,” said Torres.

For more information visit www.racialwealthgap.org