More for the record that responding specifically to the OP:
There’s actually some truth to this, but people are overestimating the degree of financial literacy, agency, and sheer luck required for the average family to still retain housing wealth from that far back. The vast majority don’t. A lot of (white) housing wealth was also destroyed in that same era due to the social disintegration and skyrocketing mostly black crime rates that accompanied the 1960s social changes. This is still a country where you can start with nothing and make it. These types of comparisons always leave out Asian people who, despite mostly being poor or young immigrants a generation ago, now have more median household wealth than white people. Hispanic people have a higher median wealth than black people even though most of them came here quite literally dirt poor, and are still coming. One of the most infuriating things about the modern left is denying anyone other than white people agency. Any given disparity can’t possibly be the result of individual choices.
But there’s definitely *some* impact for sure. Whites are more likely to receive an inheritance and if you do receive one the median is substantial, but so few do that the “median” across the five year period studied was only $15k for whites vs $3k for blacks as the vast majority inherited nothing. Inheritance is definitely a significant component to the racial wealth gap but it’s not the entire thing, and not all or even most differences in inheritance come from racism instead of differences in how families spent and saved over the years.
Unfortunately there seems to be an issue with wealth/status transmission in the black community. A longitudinal study using US census data found that black men raised in rich households were far less likely to remain that way as adults then white men. The NYT attributes this to racism, but no such gap exist between white and black women which doesn’t make sense if racism is the explanation. This is probably because black women commit fewer crimes and are more likely to attain education than black men are.
Reparations from people who didn’t do anything to people who didn’t have anything done to them would probably destroy the country and it’s certainly not worth it if would just be gone in a generation anyway.
