Income inequality for African Americans can be tied to multiple factors. Simply put, income inequality for African Americans is when income and income opportunities are less for African Americans than for others; in particular when compared to their white counterparts. Those include centuries worth of wealth building for white Americans during slavery, generational wealth and inheritance of that wealth, implicit biases such as when white employers won’t hire black candidates even with the same qualifications, continued racism and discrimination, and lack of educational opportunities among others.
Wikipedia
Racial wage gap in the United States | Black
Causes of income inequality in the United States | Race and gender disparities
Wealth inequality in the United States | Racial disparities
Video
Blacks and Latinos Will Be Broke in a Few Decades (Fortune)
The Racial Wealth Gap in America (Urban Institute)
Further Reading
50 years after the riots: Continued economic inequality for African Americans (Economic Policy Institute)
Systematic Inequality How America’s Structural Racism Helped Create the Black-White Wealth Gap (Center for American Progress)
Whites Have Huge Wealth Edge Over Blacks (but Don’t Know It) (New York Times)
The Wage Gap Between Black and White Workers Is Growing (Time)
The wage gap between blacks and whites is the largest since 1979 (Business Insider)
U.S. Income Inequality Hits a Disturbing New Threshold (Bloomberg)
The Income Gap Between Blacks And Whites Has Only Gotten Worse Since The 1960s (Bloomberg)
In the U.S., black-white income gap has held steady since 1970 (Pew Research Center)
*cover image from Pew Research Center