WASHINGTON (ABC News) - Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen discussed the systemic inequities still lurking in the U.S. economy and the work her department “needs to do to narrow the racial wealth divide.”
“From Reconstruction, to Jim Crow, to the present day, our economy has never worked fairly for Black Americans -- or, really, for any American of color,” the Treasury chief said.
Since taking office last January, Yellen said that she and her team have worked hard to “ensure that neither the figurative bank of justice -- nor any literal economic institution -- fails to work for people of color.”
Yellen added that they have also hired the department’s first-ever counselor on racial equity and sought to hire the “most diverse leadership team in Treasury’s history.” She added that the Treasury was injecting some $9 billion into Community Development Financial Institutions and Minority Depository Institutions that seek to serve people and places that the financial sector historically has left out.
The insidious legacy of slavery in the U.S., as well as decades of racist policies that followed, results in systemic economic issues that are still present today -- such as the racial wealth gap, experts said. A Brookings Institution report published last year said that the net worth of a typical white family ($171,000) is nearly 10 times greater than that of a Black family ($17,150) in America, with researchers saying the 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.”