A close examination of wealth in the U.S. finds evidence of staggering racial disparities. At $171,000, the net worth of a typical white family is nearly ten times greater than that of a Black family ($17,150) in 2016. Gaps in wealth between Black and white households reveal the effects of accumulated inequality and discrimination, as well as differences in power and opportunity that can be traced back to this nation’s inception. The Black-white wealth gap reflects a society that has not and does not afford equality of opportunity to all its citizens.
I don't love playing the who can find the best stats game, but I just Googled it and Master Google says the average net worth of
an individual American is something like $692,000. I find that number staggering since a scant time ago I remember fun facts that sounded more like half of Americans have a negative net worth. Of course perhaps the figures get messed with to include or not include certain data. For instance if you're talking about average Americans it would include everyone (presumably over the age of 18?), whereas white people obviously only includes white people. Depending on your selection method you might or might not be including people like Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates in your calculations, which in terms of actually assessing how things are in America is pretty useless. Switching to median net worth USA it comes out as $97,000
per household, a far cry from $692,000
per person. I don't know where Master Google is getting these numbers but anyone I have my doubts about exactly what these figures mean.
But let's leave the Google-fu aside and look only at your figure: if the 'white household' figure includes Jeff Bezos then it's obvious (to me) that this will skew things. But you do list two scenarios that affect the landscape: old money (or leverage), and new opportunities. The former is interesting because it's true that a couple of generations alone will probably not fix this aspect of it no matter what the laws are (within reason) and no matter how well or poorly anyone acts. It can take a while to accumulate a fortune or a power base under normal circumstances outside of very rare cases. The new opportunities side of it seems most relevant if you're taking a young black kid and a young white kid and comparing what they can expect out of life. I don't really know how an average (or even median) net worth figure is going to be able to disentangle the 'old money and power' side of it from the new opportunities side of it. I guess for the sake of this definition we'll define new opportunities as 'all things being equal how well do they do.' The problem here is that looking at aggregate figures won't - in the short term - help you to easily see how well they do all things being equal, because all the data from where things
are not equal gets figured into it.
The good response now would be - aha! the fact that things are not equal is exactly the point! Well, yes, but in what way? Unequal in the sense that having had a head start the old money families will be tough to catch up with? That's true, but also not that relevant to a young black kid. Unequal in the sense that starting out poor puts you at a disadvantage? This one I would agree with, since it could affect the ability to have a stable enough life to get through school, go through college, etc. So I would definitely be happy to agree with an argument that poverty puts people at a disadvantage, and history of poverty for an ethnic group certain makes it hard for them to hit parity in the short term. In the long term, all things being equal, we would expect parity to be reached eventually, or at least asymptotically, assuming their performance is equal to that of a group that had a head start. But what I would like to know is whether a poor white kid has better chances than a poor black kid, all things being equal; and if so, what the impediments were to the black kid. I guess my hunch is that if poverty is such an impediment then a good test for whether the money alone is the issue would be a UBI test, and to see what effect that has. Take the baseline out of the equation by making sure having money for food and rent isn't an issue, then see how things go after that for the white and black kids.
The problem is right now we have a lot of anecdotal evidence and IMO not much solid basis for knowing what our conclusions should be. Far be it for me to say there is no racism in America, that would be silly. But too quickly people will use stat-fu to make some short circuit analysis and clamor for legal remedy, whereas in reality we know practically zero about economics to my satisfaction, and even less than that about psychology in any hard sense. 'Experts' claim all sorts of overblown stuff that they "know" but I think it's mostly smoke to justify a paycheck. The ability to reasonably calculate why one person has one result in life and why another has another is probably far beyond us, maybe
hundreds of years away. Data is nice, but can be misleading. In fact it might not even be data in the sense of observations as physics means it.
I know, I know, 'color-blind strategies don't work', I guess. I mean, if you're able to find stats to show that the lot of black families hasn't improved since practically Jim Crow then I don't know what to tell you, other than it sounds like voodoo hocus pocus to me. Go look with your own eyes at the state of black people in business, government, science, professions, and you'll really tell me it's just like it was in 1960? That sounds actually crazy to me. Maybe Jeff Bezos and the Waltons are throwing the numbers off, who knows. I mean, it's also possible that certain conditions are creating a huge amount of debt and negative net worth, which is a whole other topic that tbh I haven't studied, but it's only one of many possibilities for how a grand number can come to what it is. Maybe having huge debt means you went to college, which kills your net worth but also increases 'how you're doing in life'; maybe many black people are buried under student debt and this is affect the figures. And hey, if so I'd be on board to criticize the student debt situation. The complexity of it all is staggering, though.