But it gets much worse! When you remove vehicles and other durables from the equation, according to New York University economist Edward Wolff, the median Black family worth is just $1,700 (while 40 percent of Black families have zero or negative wealth). The median White family worth (without durable goods) is roughly 69 times more than that of Black families, or about $116,800.
And worst of all, the sad reality is that liquid wealth is largely non-existent within Black families. Liquid wealth is the money used to pay bills, buy food, pay the rent and cover emergency situations. In 2011, the Center for Global Policy Solutions in a report entitled Beyond Broke, showed the median liquid wealth of Black Americans as only $200, compared to $23,000 held by Whites.
More than $100 billion might have been extracted from Black American communities during the recent recession according to a report by the Center for Responsible Lending, Foreclosures by Race and Ethnicity. That money left the bank accounts, housing accounts, investment accounts and pockets of Black people and went somewhere else. While few people are searching for where that $100 billion went, it is almost certain that it will never come back to those Black families. This economic carnage of the Black American economy constitutes a kind of “financial rape” of the African American community, similar to the devastating effects of colonization on the African continent. Black Americans might never recover. Never!