How to reduce the wealth gap between Black and white Americans | Kedra Newsom Reeves

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🗓️ 22 October 2020

⏱️ 12 minutes

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Summary

The racial wealth gap in the United States is shocking: white families have a median wealth nearly 10 times greater than that of Black families. How did we get here, and how can we stop the gap from growing? Wealth equity strategist Kedra Newsom Reeves provides a short history on the origins and perpetuation of racial wealth inequality in the US -- and outlines four ways financial institutions can expand opportunity for Black individuals, families, entrepreneurs and communities.

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0:00.0	You're listening to TED Talks Daily. I'm Elise Hume. Today's talk is a crucial listen about the
0:09.1	staggering wealth gap in the United States between white and black families. And inequities
0:14.6	reach across every system, healthcare, education, finance, and more. How do we close those gaps? Kedra Newsom-Reeves's story-rich
0:23.5	and history-rich talk from TED at BCG 2020 gets the answer.
0:30.1	As last recorded by the U.S. federal government, the median wealth for a white family in the
0:35.8	United States was $171,000, and the median wealth for a white family in the United States was $171,000. And the median wealth for a black
0:40.4	family was just $17,000, a 10x difference over 150 years after the end of slavery. I think first
0:49.1	we have to ask ourselves, what is wealth really? Well, wealth is all of your assets, all of the
0:52.7	things that you own, minus all of your liabilities. Assets are things like your car, your house, your savings account,
0:59.7	your checking account, your investments, if you own other properties, your business.
1:06.4	Well, that gap, that 10x gap is partially because for many years, decades in fact,
1:13.6	black Americans were left off of that ladder and didn't really have access to it.
1:18.3	Well, why are we talking about this now?
1:20.7	Well, in 2020, in the midst of a global pandemic and a looming recession,
1:25.8	inequities were really laid bare across nearly every system in the
1:28.9	United States, health care, education, criminal justice, and finance. And people were moved to
1:35.7	take action online in streets, in meetings at work, in corporate boardrooms. And I, as a consultant,
1:43.2	started having conversations with clients that I thought I would never have.
1:47.5	I guess the question that I've been asking myself is, how do we make sure that in this moment, this results in action and progress that starts to close that wealth gap for black versus white Americans?
1:58.0	So, who am I? My name is Kedra Newsom Reeves. I'm a consultant, again, for banking institutions,
2:03.3	hedge funds, asset managers. But before any of that, I'm a black American who's the descendant of
2:09.1	slaves. And when we talk about the wealth gap, it's really important to understand the history.
	...

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