Why are African Americans Unproportionally Impoverished? Why are their family net worths so much lower than those of whites?

Today in class we watched the first part of the documentary “Race: The Power of Illusion” and in the documentary it was noted that “the net worth of the average white family is eight times that of African American Families”.   Also, as of 2010, 27.4 percent of African Americans were impoverished, while on the other hand only 9.9% of whites were living below the poverty line. This raised the question "Why are African Americans unproportionally impoverished and why are their family net worths so much lower than those of whites?". During a previous class I was assigned to read sections of “White-Washing Race: The Myth of a Color-Blind Society”,  and as the sections explained, the passing of legislation such as the Wagner, and Federal Housing Acts has contributed greatly to the racial disparities in wealth we see today.  The Wagner Act legalized the right to enter into closed shops agreements, which stated that employers could only hire members of a certain union.  By not allowing African Americans to join certain unions they were kept out of work or left working in undesirable jobs. The Housing Act made it easy for lower income individuals to buy homes by requiring low down payments and offering easier qualification criteria. However, as mentioned in class, loans were not approved in areas with large African American populations which made it harder for them to become homeowners. As a result African Americans were not able to accumulate wealth. They could not get good jobs and they could not afford homes, they could not afford to send their children to college, and so their children also got poor jobs, and could not afford homes and this process has repeated for generations.  Whites, on the other hand, have historically benefited from legislation such as the Wagner and Housing Acts. This has allowed whites to accumulate wealth and to send their children to college so that they get good jobs which allows the process to repeat itself.  The systemic racial discrimination exhibited in the case of the Wagner and Housing Acts compounded with the fact that  African Americans where unable to accumulate any wealth at all while enslaved, Jim Crow, and general labor market discrimination,  has led African Americans to be unable to accumulate as much wealth as whites. Today African Americans are unproportionally impoverished, and the net worths of their families are much lower than those of whites.