There are many ways to convey the effect that Thomas Piketty, the cover-boy economist, has had on the global debate over inequality. But a good one is to imagine a building uprooted from its foundation and moved, overnight, to the other side of the street. Before the publication of his blockbuster, Capital in the Twenty First Century, the collective consciousness was fixated on the problem of divergent incomes, particularly the runaway compensation of the 1 percent. Piketty argued that the more important factor driving the divide was not compensation but assets. The machinery of a market economy, he demonstrated, grinds out returns on wealth that are higher than income, summed up in the simple formula: r > g. Thus it is ultimately stocks, real estate, and so forth, even more than fat paychecks and bonuses, that produce ever greater economic stratification. “Once constituted, capital”—that is, wealth—“reproduces itself faster than output increases,” Piketty writes. “The past devours the future.”

But Piketty’s analysis does miss a few things. The product of an economist’s class-based view, his elegant formula fails to capture—is not meant to capture—the ways in which historical circumstances might affect how wealth is accumulated by different groups in the first place. And in the United States, one of the most glaring examples of those circumstances is race. Accordingly, the global tax on wealth that Piketty endorses as a solution would do nothing to address the race-based factors that are fueling the economic divide.

As if on cue, two months after Piketty’s book, Ta-Nehisi Coates published his powerful essay on racial discrimination in the June issue of The Atlantic. Though not intended as an addendum to Capital, it proved to be a useful one. In the piece, Coates frames centuries of discrimination against African Americans as a story of wealth stolen or denied. Retracing 250 years of ugly U.S. history, he inventories the many ways blacks have been suppressed economically, and sometimes violently: slavery, Jim Crow, predatory lending scams, barriers to advancement— both legal and de facto—of astonishing variety. Government programs that gave white families a leg up, he reminds us, either excluded or shortchanged African Americans, from Social Security’s omission of agricultural and domestic workers (among whom blacks were overrepresented) to the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation’s redlining of black neighborhoods during the New Deal. Any serious push for economic justice in the United States, Coates asserts, must take the different experiences of the races into account.

For him, that process would begin with the passage of a long-stalled bill by Representative John Conyers that would formally explore potential reparations for African Americans. Deliberately leaving open what the actual reparations might entail, Coates emphasizes the benefits of opening a necessarily painful, potentially cathartic conversation about race in American society.

Setting aside the fact that the Conyers bill remains a nonstarter politically, there’s a conceptual problem here: In the African American context, reparations are invariably associated with redressing wrongs from a distant era. But obstacles to wealth (i.e., methods of gross discrimination) remain very much in place for blacks today. Notwithstanding its undeniable historical roots, the bulk of the black-white wealth gap can be traced to current policies and structures that have made the wealth divide grow at an accelerating pace over the past 25 years.