The results are supported by one of the most extensive studies in our nation’s history. Researchers looked at the earnings of 20 million children born between 1978-83 and combined it with census data and linked children to parents who claimed them as dependents on income tax returns from 1989 – 2015.
According to the study, led by researchers at Stanford, Harvard and the Census Bureau, income inequality between Blacks and whites is driven entirely by what is happening among these boys and the men they become. Though Black girls and women face deep inequality on many measures, Black and White girls from families with comparable earnings attain similar individual incomes as adults.
Family characteristics
The study, based on anonymous earnings and demographic data for virtually all Americans now in their late 30s, debunks a number of other widely held hypotheses about income inequality.
Black children are much more likely to grow up in a single parent household with less wealth and parents with lower levels of education – all factors that have received attention as potential explanations for Black-White disparities. But, when the researchers in this study compared the outcomes of Black and White men who grow up in two –parent families with similar levels of income, wealth, and education, they still found the Black men had substantially lower incomes in adulthood.
Perhaps more controversially, some people choose to contribute the differences in racial disparities to cognitive ability. Gaps in test scores on standardized tests are often used to support this position. These test gaps are substantial for both men and women. If such inherent differences existed between races, the fact that Black women have outcomes comparable to White women –despite having much lower test scores — suggest that standardized tests do not provide accurate measures of difference in earning ability.
A more likely possibility, the authors suggest, is that tests scores don’t accurately measure the abilities of Black children in the first place.
If this inequality can’t be explained by individual or household traits, much of what matters probably lies outside the home – in surrounding neighborhoods, in the economy and in a society that views Black boys differently from White boys, and even from Black girls.
“One of the most popular liberal post-racial ideas is the idea that the fundamental problem is class and not race, and clearly this study explodes that idea,” Ibram Kendi, a professor and director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University told the New York Times. “But for whatever reason, we’re unwilling to stare racism in the face.”
Other races
The research makes it clear there is something unique about the obstacles Black males face.
They studied the earning potential of five racial and ethnic groups – Hispanics, Whites, Black, Asians and American Indians. By analyzing rates of upward and downward mobility across generations for these groups, they quantified rates of upward mobility by race.
They found Hispanic Americans are on a path that has them moving up substantially in income distribution across generations. While the Hispanic rate of upward income mobility across generations is slightly below those of Whites, they have the potential of closing that gap.
Asian immigrants have much higher levels of upward mobility than all other groups, but Asian children whose parents were born in the U.S. have levels of intergenerational mobility similar to White children.
In contrast, Black and American Indian children have substantially lower rates of upward mobility than the other racial groups. For example, Black children born to parents in the bottom household income quintile have a 2.5% chance of rising to the top quintile of household income, compared with 10.6% for Whites.
Hyper-stereotyped
Other studies show that boys, across races, are more sensitive than girls to disadvantages like growing up in poverty or facing discrimination. While Black women also face negative effects of racism, Black men often experience racial discrimination differently. As early as preschool, they are more likely to be disciplined in schools. They are pulled over or detained and searched by police officers more often.
“It’s not just being Black but being male that has been hyper-stereotyped in this negative way, in which we’ve made Black men scary, intimidating, with a propensity toward violence,” Noelle Hurd, a psychology profess at the University of Virginia, told the New York Times.
She said this racist stereotype has particularly hut Black men economically, especially in a new economy where service-sector jobs have replaced many of the manufacturing jobs that previously employed men with less education.
The study also showed 21% of Black men raised at the poverty level were incarcerated, according to the 2010 census. Black men raised in the top 1% by millionaires, were as likely to be incarcerated as White men raised in households earning about $36,000.
Fathers and mentors
The study looked at differences in earning potential based on neighborhoods and found only a few neighborhoods were poor Black boys did as well as Whites. While there were few of these neighborhoods, they found these neighborhoods had two things in common: low levels of racial bias among Whites and high rates of father presence among Blacks.
Black men who grew up in tracts with less racial bias among Whites – measured by testing for implicit bias