I've always had mixed feelings about Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. I feel that he is better than the previous chairman, Alan Greenspan, but the Fed Chairmanship (like the presidency) is almost never given to the right man. Just the fact that it is almost always given to a man is problematic enough, and the truth is that only white men need apply for the job.

Well, when you are limited in your option pool for the top job, bad leadership and flat out ignorance can sometimes be the result. While Fed Chairman Bernanke might know some nuts and bolts about economics, he appears to be shockingly misinformed about economic disparities between blacks and whites. His embarrassing and highly inappropriate statements at Morehouse College serve as a significant case in point.

In a recent interview at Morehouse, the Fed Chairman was asked what he felt to be the reason for the wealth gap between blacks and whites. In response, Bernanke said that the gap was due to a lack of "financial literacy" and "financial education" on the part of African Americans. That's all he mentioned.

What? Sorry Ben, but did you ever hear of this little thing called "slavery"? What about this other thing called "Jim Crow laws," which made it nearly impossible for African Americans to pass wealth onto their children? Wealth disparities are not created in a day, as inheritance levels (which vary substantially for whites and blacks) not only change your starting point in life, but also have a significant impact on your trajectory.

According to the 2007 Survey of Consumer Finances, the median household wealth of white Americans is 10 times greater than that for African-Americans. Additionally, other forms of inheritance, such as access to managerial positions, education and business ownership are far more likely to accrue to whites than African Americans. For example, Bill Gates claims that his wealth was self-made, but his mother was connected with board members at IBM, who gave him his first major contract. So, statistically speaking, if Bill Gates had been born a black man, he would not be a billionaire today. And in spite of what the Fed Chairman might believe, wealth disparities are not due to the fact that black people are financially ignorant. Rather, they are due to leaders such as Bernanke who refuse to acknowledge how 400 years of racially-biased wealth distribution can impact structural and financial inequality.

The other point that Mr. Bernanke fails to mention is that white American saving and investing habits are incredibly problematic as well. The recent financial crisis was due to the fact that the American savings rate had become negative for the first time since the Great Depression. Additionally, Americans (not just black people Ben) were borrowing money for homes they could not afford and not preparing for retirement. So, the idea that Chairman Bernanke would sum up the black/white wealth gap as "White people smart....black people illiterate" is a shocking disappointment and a glaring reminder of the fact that our economic captains in the Obama Administration have almost no understanding or respect for the unique economic challenges of the African American community.

I won't even get into Obama's appointment of Lawrence Summers as the Head of the National Economic Council, given that Summers disrespected Dr. Cornel West, one of the most significant black scholars in American history. During a spat when Summers was president of Harvard, he criticized Dr. West's work as not representing "appropriate" scholarship. Translation: you are doing something that white scholars don't understand, which thus implies that you must be inferior -- I get it all the time here at Syracuse, a school that hasn't tenured a black man in Finance in their entire 140-year history. Professor Summers is also the one who implied that women might have a natural deficiency in their ability to understand mathematics. Back to the point made earlier about inheritances of social and financial capital, Summers is the nephew of Paul Samuelson, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics. Do you REALLY believe that Summers would be in the position he is in had his uncle not won the Nobel Prize? No. Some might consider him to be a moderately intelligent version of George W. Bush.

The idea that Obama supports individuals who continue to embrace mindsets reflective of white male supremacy should be problematic to us all. The financial team within his administration needs a makeover, and their "expertise" and qualifications should be questioned by the American people. This is not to undermine the president or his ambitious goal of helping our country out of a recession. But it must be honestly and accurately noted that it's no coincidence that members of his economic team are so inclined to bail out wealthy white men on Wall Street and appear to have almost no concern for struggling black men on Martin Luther King Boulevard.

A note to Chairman Bernanke: The present around us has been created by a set of tasks that were performed in the past. If you are only able to see wealth disparities through a lens created in the year 2009, one that is blurred by your own biases as a white male in an elitist profession, you are missing 99% of the picture. To cite African American ignorance as the sole driver of wealth gaps in America is a reminder that our leadership still thinks of black people as second class citizens. Rather than presuming cultural superiority on the part of whites, why not engage in creative and intelligent policy analysis that might actually fix the problem that America has created? It was not the flaws of black America that created structural inequality; it was poor decision-making on the part of the very institutions that employ men like Bernanke and Summers over more qualified women and minorities who deserve equal access to those positions. It's time for some personal responsibility - black people didn't create racial inequality in America.


Dr. Boyce Watkins is a Finance Professor at Syracuse University and author of the forthcoming book, "Black American Money." To have Dr Boyce commentary delivered directly to your email, please click here.