The racial wealth gap is a straightforward issue that almost nobody can agree on how to fix. White people have way more money than everyone else, and it’s not just income: Although there are persistent differences in wage, salary, and benefits between races, much of the wealth gap is attributable to real estate and other individual assets, as well as disparities in familial assets and incomes. As described in a graphic in Warren’s video, and confirmed by recent studies of economic data, the median wealth of white families sits north of $100,000, while black median wealth hovers around $10,000, and for many families in poverty might even be negative.* And while the differences between white and black Americans are the most extreme, other underrepresented minority groups also face vast deficits relative to white families.

The cause of those wealth gaps is relatively straightforward, too: racism. According to Sandy Darity, a Duke University economist and one of the country’s leading researchers on race, wealth inequality, and economic policy, the enduring black-white disparities trace all the way back to slavery. “I would start with the failure to grant the formerly enslaved the 40 acres and a mule that they were promised,” Darity told me. “Had those land grants been made, I think we would be talking about a very different America from the one that we are experiencing now.” To that history, Darity adds the theft of black life and wealth by lynch mobs and perpetrators of more common acts of violence.

He and other economists also point to the racism baked into the policies that built the American middle class over the past century, including the New Deal and the G.I. Bill, and joint public-private ventures in racism, such as school segregation and housing discrimination. All are ways in which people of color were carved out of massive transfers of wealth that their white peers used to buy homes and pass money down to their children, exacerbating disparities over time.

Read: The unfulfilled promise of black capitalism

What to do about those disparities? That’s another matter altogether. Legislative proposals include variations on standard progressive-policy ideas, such as universal basic income, cash transfers, housing vouchers, child savings accounts, tax breaks, a federal jobs guarantee, and free college tuition. Many of these policies are updates on ideas found in the Freedom Budget, a sweeping and ambitious set of anti-poverty policies first proposed by Martin Luther King Jr., the black labor leader A. Philip Randolph, and the civil-rights organizer Bayard Rustin in 1966, with the help of dozens of economists.

Warren’s preferred fix during her tenure in the Senate has been increasing universal access to affordable, equitable housing and homeownership, and her introduction in September of the $450 billion American Housing and Economic Mobility Act teed up the issue for her on the campaign trail. As my colleague Madeleine Carlisle has written, that legislation “is perhaps the most far-reaching assault on housing segregation since the 1968 Fair Housing Act.” It would use revenues from higher estate taxes—restored to levels before a dramatic tax cut went into effect in 2010—to fund a massive expansion of federally subsidized housing.