For the past few years, Americans have been engaged in two big public conversations about inequality. One is about economic insecurity (stagnant wages, wealth concentration, Occupy Wall Street). The other is about racial inequality (incarceration rates, police brutality, disenfranchisement). Often, these two discussions are kept separate, but they are closely intertwined.

The economic trends that have battered Americans have been exceptionally hard on African Americans, making them perhaps the truest face of economic inequality. Much of the progress in the workplace and in schools that African Americans have made since the 1964 Civil Rights Act has now ground to a halt, or worse. Blacks are nearly three times as likely to be poor as whites and more than twice as likely to be unemployed. Compared to whites with the same qualifications, blacks remain less likely to be hired and more likely to earn lower wages, to be charged higher prices for consumer goods, to be excluded from housing in white neighborhoods, and to be denied mortgages or steered into the subprime mortgage market. Racial disparities in household wealth haven’t just persisted; they’ve increased. What’s more, the reasons for these divergences aren’t always outwardly apparent or easy to understand.

1. INHERITED WEALTH IS A MAJOR DIVIDER

The economist Thomas Piketty has shown that the growing concentration of inherited wealth is a huge driver of economic inequality. This trend shakes out especially badly for African Americans. When the researchers Robert Avery and Michael Rendall looked at inherited wealth across three generations of Americans, they found a substantial gap between blacks and whites. What was especially troubling was that, contrary to narratives of racial progress, the gap was even larger for the Baby Boomer generation than for earlier generations. Inheritance disparities, write Avery and Rendall, “threaten to become a source not merely of slowed convergence in economic status, but of divergence in overall economic status between black and white Americans.”

2. RACIAL DISCRIMINATION HAS GOTTEN SNEAKIER

Most Americans now repudiate overt forms of discrimination. But “implicit prejudice” is still rampant, according to a 2008 paper. In personal interactions, the economic lives of black Americans are still marred by “forms of racial bias that operate without conscious awareness yet can influence cognition, affect, and behavior.” And on the institutional level, structural sources of discrimination remain; policies that seem race neutral today can systematically disadvantage those who suffered under race-based policies in the past. Together, these more subtle forms of discrimination leave blacks at a major disadvantage in employment, housing, credit, and consumer markets. And because modern forms of discrimination tend to be less visible, they can be more difficult to remedy.