It's true that money cannot buy happiness, at least not directly, but it can buy decent food and housing and health care.

It can enable a quality education, and it can allow you to buy your way out of

car trouble and rent increases in seasonally high utility bills. The thing is, in the United States,

your odds of having enough money to take good care of yourself and your family are affected by

your race. From KERA in Dallas, this is Think.

I'm Chris Boyd.

The gap in average household wealth between white and black American homes

has been apparent for as long as anybody has been tracking it.

And my guest has a pretty stunning assessment of why it has persisted,

even though the solutions are fairly obvious.

She says the workings of capitalism

did not require black people to be poor, but American politics did. Mercer Barataran is professor

of law at the University of California Irvine and author of The Racial Wealth Gap, A Brief History.

Marisa, welcome to think.

Thank you so much for having me. What an honor. Let's start by making sure we all know what we're talking about here. What does the racial wealth gap refer to? It's a, you know,

a number, it's a statistic of wealth that usually, you know, you can track it between, you know, the medium

or mean average black family versus white family. And across the income spectrum, what you see

is so, you know, high income, the wealth of a black family compared to a white family is

something like 12 to 1 or 1 to 12, right?

Down the income ladder it sticks, but also like the higher incomes, the higher the wealth gap.

And this is a number that is sticky through time.

You know, it has not changed since the sort of dawn of the Civil War.

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