Why the UK racial wealth divide matters: a call for action
Tackling wealth inequality must be at the heart of any work towards racial justice.
Structural and historic wealth imbalances - rooted in slavery and colonialism - still impact the wealth of people of colour in the UK today.
From home ownership rates to household wealth, and practices of sending money to relatives abroad, our new perspectives paper from colleagues at the LSE International Inequalities Institute explores how historic structural wealth barriers are hindering people of colour today.
The report demonstrates that the scale and nature of racial inequity in the ownership of wealth assets in the UK is a major issue of racial justice:
- The booming of asset prices in recent decades has meant that wealth inequality has become a huge socioeconomic divide. However, so far the entrenched racialised aspects of wealth inequality have not been sufficiently recognised.
- The long-term historical trajectory of wealth assets left at death indicates that wealth assets remain strongly skewed towards white Britons and a few other predominantly European ethnicities.
- Increasing immigration to the UK since 1945 has not entailed a significant amount of wealth being owned by communities of colour.
- Probate data also suggests that the relative advantages of White British and European ethnicities over communities of colour might have intensified during the twentieth century.
It is vital that we recognise the long-term colonial and imperial underpinnings of variations in wealth across ethnic and racial groups. This report evokes the concept of the racial wealth divide not simply because of the sheer scale of racialised wealth inequality, but also because it points to the reinforcing circuits which link racialised wealth inequality to fundamental socioeconomic fractures.
