1. Income: In 1947, the ratio of median black family income to white family income was 51.1 percent. In 2009, it was 61.4 percent. After the heroic struggles of the Civil Rights Movement and the enactment of numerous civil rights laws, this seems a small gain, barely higher than the 59.2 percent of 1967.
2. Wealth: When we have assets, we have some security against unforeseen problems such as illness; assets can be sold and some of them generate income. In 2009, the median net worth (all assets, including homes, minus all debts) of black households (a household is not necessarily a family) was $2,200, while for whites it was $97,900. Black median wealth was 2 percent that of whites. If we confine our data to median net financial wealth (assets include mutual funds, trusts, retirement and pension funds, etc.), black households had $200, while whites had $36,100, for a ratio of black to white of .0056. I always do a double take when I see these numbers. Nearly twice as many black households as white had zero or negative net worth (39.2 versus 20.3 percent).
3. Wages and Jobs: Black workers earn less than their white counterparts; black men, for example, earn less that three-quarters the wages of white men. The black-white earnings ratio is less than one for every level of schooling. Part of this is due to the fact that blacks, no matter their level of schooling, are over represented in jobs with relatively low wages and under represented in higher-paying jobs. A report from the Economic Policy Institute tells us that “The average of the annual wages of occupations in which black men are overrepresented is $37,005, compared with $50,333 in occupations in which they are underrepresented.” Further, “A $10,000 increase in the average annual wage of an occupation is associated with a seven percentage point decrease in the proportion of black men in that occupation.” Another part of the reason for the relatively low wages of blacks is that they earn less money within the same occupations. A summary of data collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that “In 2010, median usual weekly earnings of . . . White men ($1,273) working full time in management, professional, and related occupations (the highest paying major occupation group) were well above the earnings of Black men ($957) in the same occupation group.” For women, the numbers were $932 for whites and $812 for blacks. Racial wage discrepancies exist in every occupational category. If instead of specific occupations, we look just at low wage work, we find racial disparities. About one-quarter of all jobs in the United States pay a wage that, for full-time, year-round work, would put a family of four below the poverty level of income. But for jobs held by black workers, this figure is nearly 35 percent.
4. Poverty: The United States officially defines the poverty level of income as the cost of the Department of Agriculture’s minimum food budget times three. It is a bare bones income, equal in 2010 to $22,491 (before taxes) for a family of four. In 2010, 46.2 million people lived in poverty, giving a poverty rate of 15.1 percent. This dreadful number, the highest in any rich capitalist nation, masked large differences by race. For non-Hispanic whites, the rate was 9.9 percent; for blacks it was 27.4 percent. 13.5 percent of blacks lived at less than one-half of the poverty level of income. For black children (less than eighteen), the incidence of poverty was 39.1 percent.
5. Unemployment: The official unemployment rate has almost always been about twice as high for blacks as for whites. Last month, these rates were 13.6 and 7.4 respectively. Double-digit unemployment rates are more common than not for black workers, a condition that would be unacceptable if it were true for white workers. Other labor market statistics, such as the underemployment rate (which includes involuntary part-time workers and those who want work but have given up looking), the employment rate (employment divided by noninstitutional population at least sixteen years of age) and the labor force participation rate (the labor force divided by the noninstitutional population at least sixteen years of age), all show racial disparities. In 2011, the underemployment rate was 13 percent for whites and nearly 25 percent for blacks.
6. Housing: Homes are the most important form of wealth for most households. Not unexpectedly, there is a racial gap here too. Whites are 25 percent more likely to own homes than blacks. In addition, the current meltdown in housing prices has disproportionately hurt black homeowners. In connection with housing, it is useful to mention the recent study by the Manhattan Institute, which has received a great deal of media attention, that housing segregation has dramatically declined. The authors use a “dissimilarity index” as a measure of segregation and show that this has fallen. An Economic Policy Institute (EPI) evaluation of the study explains: “They find a national dissimilarity (or segregation) rate of about 55 percent for African Americans—in other words, ‘only’ 55 percent of African Americans would now have to move to neighborhoods with more non-blacks in order to evenly distribute the black population throughout all neighborhoods in their metropolitan areas. This is a substantial decline from the segregation level of about 80 percent in 1970.” Against the optimistic gloss that has been put on the Manhattan Institute analysis, the EPI authors make several salient points. First, a 55 percent segregation rate is nothing to brag about, and it will rise now that black homeowners in white neighborhoods have been experiencing so many foreclosures. Second, the dissimilarity index is a somewhat indirect measure of black and white interaction. By another measure, the typical black person lived in a neighborhood that was 40 percent white in 1940; today this has fallen to 35 percent. And even for the dissimilarity index, some of the decline is due to an influx of Asians and Hispanics into black localities, while another part of it is the consequence of the greater economic mobility of the black middle class. Poor blacks have been left behind, stuck in almost totally segregated areas, without jobs as manufacturing left town, and unable to follow jobs to the suburbs. The “high poverty” neighborhoods are home to 40 percent of all poor blacks (only 15 percent of poor whites live in such neighborhoods).
7. Life Expectancies and Infant Mortality: There is no reason to expect that, other things equal, one group of people in a country should exhibit different life expectancies and infant mortality rates than another. In 2010, blacks could expect to live four years less than whites. Infant mortality rates are more than double for black than for white women. Perhaps one reason for this gap is that blacks are nearly twice as likely as whites to have no health insurance.
8. Prisons and the Criminal Justice System: Here the racial divide is startling. Michelle Alexander calls what has happened to blacks here “mass incarceration,” which functions much like Jim Crow: a “tightly networked system of laws, policies, customs, and institutions that operate collectively to ensure the subordinate status [of black Americans].” In 2010, 2,226,800 persons were incarcerated in the United States, and another 4,887, 900 were either on probation or parole. So, the United States has a criminal justice system population of over seven million people. Nearly 40 percent of this population is black; more than triple the black share of the U.S. population. At every step in the criminal justice system—arrest, arraignment, legal representation, plea bargaining, jury selection, verdict, sentencing, chance for parole, prospects after imprisonment—blacks fare worse than whites.