Almost immediately after the Civil Rights legislation, influential Whites encouraged a pause in redressing racial disparities. Moynihan encouraged a period of “benign neglect” while a Commentary article forecast the “march toward statistical parity.” Economic orthodoxy largely agreed as Becker’s taste-based discrimination model predicted that competitive markets would eliminate disparities over time. This left mostly Black economists willing to challenge this view.

Recent carefully conducted research demonstrates little likelihood that Black households can overcome the racial wealth gap, even if they persist in outsaving their White peers.

This chapter offers a different direction. It proposes to replace our current estate tax system with a simpler and more transparent inheritance tax. It recommends elimination or severe curtailment of the discussed tax expenditures to redirect assistance to those most in need. It suggests implementation of a Baby Bonds program, a doubling of Pell awards, and the enactment of guaranteed retirement accounts (GRAs). These three programs would enable far more households to reach the wealth pathway thresholds and benefit from the privileges of wealth.

Acknowledging that even these efforts are inadequate, the chapter calls for the enactment of a reparations program that effectively would eliminate the racial wealth gap.

Chapter 4 explores wealth inequality of the basis of disability, with particular concern for disparities in wealth accumulation, access to homeownership, and discrimination in financial processes such as rental sales, mortgage lending, and housing-related insurance. Contemporary Black disability justice activists announce a broad anti-capitalist critique of wealth inequality and call for the end of public assistance programs that hold disabled people in an economic underclass through asset tests and other means. This chapter presents an intersectional research framework for improved analysis of the wealth barriers faced by Black disabled Americans. Chapter 4 concludes with recommendations for structuring a baby bonds program to guarantee nondiscriminatory implementation and targeted equality of access for Black disabled program recipients.

Chapter 5 identifies disability-based educational inequality, which occurs in teacher bias, social stigma, classroom access, disability diagnosis, and school discipline. It attends to the education policy demands of disability justice activists and identifies dis/ability critical race studies (“DisCrit”) and critical race spatial analysis (CRSA) as two emerging intersectional research methods that can contribute to the intergroup analysis of stratification economics. Chapter 5 considers proposals for a federal baby bonds program and identifies program mandates and antidiscrimination requirements that would be necessary to guarantee equitable designation of eligible funds for college and university tuition.