Blacks and Latinos are more than twice as likely to live in poverty as whites. That's according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, but also according to any other number of studies and historical research.
Social mobility — the chance to move out of poverty — has remained flat for at least three decades and trails most other western countries. That mobility varies by region of the country, with the areas that see the least mobility overlapping heavily with the South and Southwest. Or: where blacks and Latinos make up more of the population.
Wages within the social classes that in which Americans (black and white alike) are stuck have also stayed flat. As The New Yorker's James Surowiecki pointed out:
"Between the late nineteen-forties and the early nineteen-seventies, median household income in the U.S. doubled. That’s what has really changed in the past forty years. The economy is growing more slowly than it did in the postwar era, and average workers’ share of the pie has been shrinking."
Blacks are more likely to pay a higher social cost for small offenses. Last year, the ACLU issued a report showing that blacks are 3.73 times more likely than whites to be arrested for possession of marijuana.
Young black people frequently also disproportionately face more stringent punishments for misbehavior at school. Earlier this year, the administration called for reducing the frequency with which black youth faced harsher punishment in schools. One study showed that a group of schools that was 18 percent black saw 39 percent of its expulsions involve black youth. Those arrests and expulsions can and do have significant long-term effects on career opportunities.
Black students are significantly less likely to be accepted at top-tier colleges. A report from Georgetown University in 2013 showed that the percentage of blacks attending the country's best schools has dropped since 2009. And as The Atlantic noted at the time, while "more blacks and Hispanics are in fact going to college than 18 years ago … they're not ending up at schools with high standards. Instead, they're heading to public, two and four-year open-enrollment colleges."
And, of course racism exists. A famous 2003 study by the University of Chicago sent equivalent résumés with different names to multiple employers. The result:
The authors find that applicants with white-sounding names are 50 percent more likely to get called for an initial interview than applicants with African-American-sounding names. Applicants with white names need to send about 10 resumes to get one callback, whereas applicants with African-American names need to send about 15 resumes to achieve the same result.
In 2012, 35 percent of blacks lived in poverty, compared to 13 percent of whites. In 1970, those rates were 33.6 percent and 10 percent, respectively. Poverty in the black community is higher, and has been consistently.
There exist three options for that persistence, if we assume that culture might play a role.
1)There is something about black culture that prevents black Americans from escaping poverty. We'll call this the black culture option.
2)There is something about the culture of being poor that prevents the poor, regardless of race, from escaping poverty. We'll call this the culture-of-poverty option.
3)There are no internal cultural forces at play. We'll call this, partly for the sake of stirring the pot, the racism exists option.
Put more simply, there are three options for why black people continue to experience higher levels of poverty: it's in part black people's fault, it's in part poor people's fault, and it's society's fault. The best answer, without question, is the latter.
Full article here
Social mobility — the chance to move out of poverty — has remained flat for at least three decades and trails most other western countries. That mobility varies by region of the country, with the areas that see the least mobility overlapping heavily with the South and Southwest. Or: where blacks and Latinos make up more of the population.
Wages within the social classes that in which Americans (black and white alike) are stuck have also stayed flat. As The New Yorker's James Surowiecki pointed out:
"Between the late nineteen-forties and the early nineteen-seventies, median household income in the U.S. doubled. That’s what has really changed in the past forty years. The economy is growing more slowly than it did in the postwar era, and average workers’ share of the pie has been shrinking."
Blacks are more likely to pay a higher social cost for small offenses. Last year, the ACLU issued a report showing that blacks are 3.73 times more likely than whites to be arrested for possession of marijuana.
Young black people frequently also disproportionately face more stringent punishments for misbehavior at school. Earlier this year, the administration called for reducing the frequency with which black youth faced harsher punishment in schools. One study showed that a group of schools that was 18 percent black saw 39 percent of its expulsions involve black youth. Those arrests and expulsions can and do have significant long-term effects on career opportunities.
Black students are significantly less likely to be accepted at top-tier colleges. A report from Georgetown University in 2013 showed that the percentage of blacks attending the country's best schools has dropped since 2009. And as The Atlantic noted at the time, while "more blacks and Hispanics are in fact going to college than 18 years ago … they're not ending up at schools with high standards. Instead, they're heading to public, two and four-year open-enrollment colleges."
And, of course racism exists. A famous 2003 study by the University of Chicago sent equivalent résumés with different names to multiple employers. The result:
The authors find that applicants with white-sounding names are 50 percent more likely to get called for an initial interview than applicants with African-American-sounding names. Applicants with white names need to send about 10 resumes to get one callback, whereas applicants with African-American names need to send about 15 resumes to achieve the same result.
In 2012, 35 percent of blacks lived in poverty, compared to 13 percent of whites. In 1970, those rates were 33.6 percent and 10 percent, respectively. Poverty in the black community is higher, and has been consistently.
There exist three options for that persistence, if we assume that culture might play a role.
1)There is something about black culture that prevents black Americans from escaping poverty. We'll call this the black culture option.
2)There is something about the culture of being poor that prevents the poor, regardless of race, from escaping poverty. We'll call this the culture-of-poverty option.
3)There are no internal cultural forces at play. We'll call this, partly for the sake of stirring the pot, the racism exists option.
Put more simply, there are three options for why black people continue to experience higher levels of poverty: it's in part black people's fault, it's in part poor people's fault, and it's society's fault. The best answer, without question, is the latter.
Full article here
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