Between 1983 and 2016, adjusting for inflation, median White wealth increased by 33%, according to the Institute for Policy Studies. The growing divide between White wealth and Black wealth is a product of economic systems designed to extract wealth from Black, Indigenous, and other people of color and redirect it to the wealthy, almost uniformly White elite. The Racial Wealth Divide Exists by Historical DesignSome of this extraction is obvious in a country built on stolen land with stolen labor. Financial literacy won’t address the wealth divide, because financial illiteracy didn’t create it; generations of wealth extraction and exclusion did. The scale of the problem of the racial wealth gap—and the harm—will ultimately require federal intervention.