What is the racial wealth gap?

“Around the Corner” is a PhillyCAM show that offers local social impact leaders the opportunity to share what impact their work is having on the Philadelphia area.

Wealth is about more than income. It’s about systems, too.

Clarifi, a 50-year-old financial services nonprofit with 18 offices in the Delaware Valley, advises about 5,000 education clients and 13,000 individual counseling clients per year on personal finance issues such as debt reduction and credit improvement.

Part of that work is done through its financial bootcamps for low- to moderate-income people, which Director of Community Engagement Soneyet Muhammad said pivoted this year to address the racial wealth gap.

“The racial wealth gap is essentially the argument that, through the country’s systemic racial discrimination policies that have been indoctrinated in federal policy,” she said, “Black and Latinx people have just been forced to fall behind. It’s been purposeful, it’s been intentional.”

Muhammad outlined some of this in a guest post on the topic this fall, but it’s best to hear it straight from her for the full explanation, as well as what Clarifi recommends people do to counter the effects of the racial wealth gap in their own lives. Watch her “Around the Corner” interview below.

PhillyCAM is Comcast channel 66/966 HD/967 and Verizon FIOS channel 29/30 in Philadelphia.