That’s the Guardian UK asking, spurred on by a new study from Brandeis University:

White families typically have assets worth $100,000 (£69,000), up from $22,000 in the mid-1980s. African-American families’ assets stand at just $5,000, up from around $2,000.

A quarter of black families have no assets at all. The study monitored more than 2,000 families since 1984.

“We walk that through essentially a generation and what we see is that the racial wealth gap has galloped, it’s escalated to $95,000,” said Tom Shapiro, one of the authors of the report by the university’s Institute on Assets and Social Policy.

OK. So why?

The report attributes part of the cause to the “powerful role of persistent discrimination in housing, credit and labour markets. African-Americans and Hispanics were at least twice as likely to receive high-cost home mortgages as whites with similar incomes,” the report says.

Although many black families have moved up to better-paying jobs, they begin with fewer assets, such as inheritance, on which to build wealth. They are also more likely to have gone into debt to pay for university loans.

“African-Americans, before the 1960s, first by law and then by custom, were not really allowed to own businesses. They had very little access to credit. There was a very low artificial ceiling on the wealth that could be accumulated. Hence there was very little, if anything, that could be passed along to help their children get to college, to help their children buy their first homes, or as an inheritance when they die,” said Shapiro.

Since the 1980s, US administrations have also geared the tax system to the advantage of the better off. Taxes on unearned income, such as shares and inheritance, fell sharply and are much lower than taxes on pay.

“The more income and wealth people had, the less it was taxable,” said Shapiro.

There were also social factors, the study found. “In African-American families there is a much larger extended network of kin as well as other obligations. From other work we’ve done we know that there’s more call on the resources of relatively well-off African-American families; that they lend money that’s not given back; they help cousins go to school. They help brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, with all kinds of legal and family problems,” said Shapiro.

James Joyner read the same article, the same words, and came away not knowing why the income gap has worsened. Those six paragraphs I quoted sound exactly right to me. We seem incapable of recognizing the advantages we have — higher incomes to build from, higher status to start from, inheritance on top of that, and economic policies that favor thems that’s got!

In fairness, Joyner dug around for more. He went to the IASP site and read the “very short policy brief, ‘The Racial Wealth Gap Increases Fourfold.’” [PDF] and still comes away genuinely confused. Shapiro himself has interviews planned over the next two years to find out why. I’ll be interested to see what he learns.

In the meantime, will we do anything about it:

Shapiro said the gap is so wide that the government has to help narrow it. He pointed out that, according to the Pew Economic Mobility Project, the vast majority of federal deductions and benefits to enhance upward mobility ended up in the hands of the wealthiest Americans. For instance, between 72 percent and 98 percent of deductions for retirement savings, health insurance, home mortgages, self-employed health insurance, and preferential rates on capital gains in 2006 went to the top 20 percent of income-earning Americans.

“We need a national portfolio shift in that investment,’’ Shapiro said. “Right now, we have a broken chain of achievement. African-Americans are achieving. But the payoff that gets passed on to the next generation is not the same.’’ For too many achieving families, the American Dream is still a restless night.

RELATED: Dave Schuler is, like Joyner, also confused, citing the same article I did here but not jumping to my same conclusion: continued segregation exacerbates the problem. Today I’ll up the ante, noting the resegregation of our schools as a significant factor.

You can find me @jwindish, at my Public Notebook, or email me at joe-AT-joewindish-DOT-com.