By Dedrick Muhammad, August 14, 2008

Despite the possibility of electing a black president, America still faces severe racial chasms.

On a fundamental level, our economy continues to give crumbs to blacks and Latinos.

Since 1968, the year Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, the income gap between blacks and whites has narrowed by just three cents on the dollar.

In 2005 the median per capita income in the United States stood at $16,629 for blacks and $28,946 for whites. At this slow rate of progress, we will not achieve income equality for 537 years.

Wealth disparities are even greater.

African-American families in the United States have a median net worth of $20,600, only 14.6 percent of the $140,700 median white net worth. The median net worth for Latino families is $18,600, only 13.2 percent of median white net worth. Between 1983 and 2004, the most recent year for which official federal data are available, median black and Latino wealth inched up from 7 percent to 10 percent of median white wealth. At this rate, we will not achieve wealth equality for 634 years.

As the subprime mortgage meltdown continues to spread, blacks and Latinos are taking a disproportionate hit. Blacks are three times as likely as whites to have received a subprime loan and four times as likely to have refinanced from a subprime lender, according to Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data,

Latinos will lose between $75 billion and $98 billion in home-value wealth from subprime loans, according to the Center for Responsible Lending. And blacks will lose between $71 billion and $92 billion. The nonprofit group United for a Fair Economy has called this family net-worth catastrophe the "greatest loss of wealth for people of color in modern U.S. history."

Our nation needs to make a dramatic reinvestment in broadening wealth and opportunity — for all Americans.

In the decades after FDR's New Deal, such investments — including low-interest home-buyer loans, grants for college education and small-business subsidies — helped tens of millions of families enter the middle class. But these wealth-building programs directly or indirectly excluded people of color. They thus bolstered the economic supremacy of whites.

Since the end of legal segregation and discrimination, we have not seen comparable government investment programs that could benefit people of color.

We urgently need such programs, including matching savings plans to build assets and purchase homes. We can afford them — but only if we stop investing America's resources in the wealthiest people, leaving the rest of us to survive on a trickle.

Dedrick Muhammad is the Senior Organizer and Research Associate for the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies. For more information see www.extremeinequality.org. A version of this piece originally appeared in The Nation magazine. Muhammad can be reached at pmproj [at] progressive [dot] rg.