NEW JERSEY — Another study has named New Jersey as a state with one of the worst racial wealth gaps in the nation.
On Tuesday, financial information website WalletHub released a ranked list of “2022’s States with the Biggest and Smallest Wealth Gaps by Race/Ethnicity.” See the full list and its methodology here.
WalletHub compared the 50 states and the District of Columbia across 21 key metrics, ranging from the median household income gap to the unemployment rate gap.
According to WalletHub researchers, New Jersey has the 12th worst racial wealth gap in the U.S.
“Because white people comprise the majority of the American population at 63 percent, we chose this racial group as our benchmark with which to measure the gap with minority, non-white populations, including Black people, Hispanics and Asians,” researchers said. “To determine the overall ranking of each state, we selected the biggest gap between racial groups for each metric.”
Some highlights for New Jersey included:
- Biggest Median Household Income Gap – Black residents, 40.04% compared to white residents
- Biggest Homeownership Rate Gap – Hispanic residents, 52.48% compared to white residents
- Biggest Poverty Rate Gap – Hispanic residents, 203.39% compared to white residents
- Biggest Educational Attainment Gap – Hispanic residents, 54.03% compared to white residents
Nationwide, non-Hispanic white Americans had a median household wealth of $139,300, compared to $12,780 for Black households and $19,990 for Hispanic households.
The largest wealth gaps by race were seen in Washington D.C. (#1), Wisconsin (#2) and Minnesota (#3). The smallest wealth gaps were seen in West Virginia (#51), Hawaii (#50) and Montana (#49).
“Some key factors driving the racial wealth gap include unequal access to higher education and employment for minorities, as well as residential segregation that still persists,” WalletHub reported.
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NEW JERSEY’S WEALTH GAP
New Jersey’s massive racial wealth gap is something that advocates have been warning about for years.
According to the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice (NJISJ), the median net worth of white families in the state was $309,000 in 2019, while the median for New Jersey’s Black families is $5,900 and Latinx families is $7,020 – one of the worst gaps in the nation.
Demelza Baer, a former senior counsel member with the NJISJ, called the statistics “shocking” in a 2019 news release.
“It would take a Black family 228 years and a Latino family 84 years to achieve the wealth that an average white family has in 2018,” Baer wrote. “These disparities are driven by differences in home ownership, because the most significant asset that most Americans own is their home.”
Want to compare the gap in terms of “individual net worth?” The median net worth for white people in New Jersey is $106,210 – contrasted to just $179 for Black and Latina/Latino residents.
New Jersey’s racial wealth gap is also evident in its pay gap between genders, experts say.
The Center for Women and Work at Rutgers University recently released an eye-opening study, which claims that Latina women are paid less in New Jersey than almost any other state in the U.S. How bad is it? In New Jersey, for every dollar that non-Latino, white men earned, Latinas made a measly 46 cents.
