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A Tale of Two Cities 3 to own assets than whites. Black asset owners tend to own assets at lower levels than whites. The racial gap in the types of levels of assets owned is due to a host of factors, including public policies and private practices. The treatment of people of African ancestry as chattel slaves is just one state-sanctioned example. The further treatment of people of African ances- try as second-class citizens following the abolition of slavery in America is another. One of the most glaring examples is the exclusion of blacks, and other people of color, from the single largest mass accumulation of wealth in American history, which occurred during the first half of the twenti- eth century. Redlining, restrictive covenants, and other nefarious strategies resulted in the segregation of blacks in markets dotted with vertical ghet- toes or rental properties, or in neighborhoods where homes depreciated in value over time, at the same time that white homes in other communities appreciated in value. A person’s home represents the single largest asset that most Americans own. Equity from homes may be used to leverage other assets and can be used to set future generations on pathways to asset ownership. Through gifts and inheritances, parents may elect to use the equity in their homes, or other assets, to ensure their offspring enjoy a relatively debt-free educa- tion, or assist their children in purchasing a home, for example. Whites are not only more likely to own homes than blacks, but even accounting for the effect of a number of social and demographic variables, such as age, educational attainment, marriage, gender, region, and income, homes owned by whites are worth more. Additionally, blacks face discrimina- tion at virtually every stage of the home-buying process. Blacks are, fur- thermore, steered toward subprime lending markets more often than their white counterparts, all things being equal. Blacks are also more likely to be unbanked than whites and to live in communities where payday lending and other predatory financial practices are normative. Diversity in the Black Population: Race, Class, and Nativity Clearly, blacks lag behind whites in the types and levels of assets owned, but there are important differences within the black population to be con- sidered. For one, there are social-class differences. Class differences, espe- cially the growth of the black middle class over time, have led some to the conclusion that class matters more for blacks today than race. On the con- trary, evidence shows that blacks with similar levels of education, occu- pational prestige, and income have fewer assets than comparable whites, and research shows that black assets are, on average, worth less than assets owned by whites.