Extensive Data Shows Punishing Reach of Racism for Black Boys

[WhiskeyGrinder]

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/19/upshot/race-class-white-and-black-men.html

Black boys raised in America, even in the wealthiest families and living in some of the most well-to-do neighborhoods, still earn less in adulthood than white boys with similar backgrounds, according to a sweeping new study that traced the lives of millions of children.

White boys who grow up rich are likely to remain that way. Black boys raised at the top, however, are more likely to become poor than to stay wealthy in their own adult households.

Even when children grow up next to each other with parents who earn similar incomes, black boys fare worse than white boys in 99 percent of America. And the gaps only worsen in the kind of neighborhoods that promise low poverty and good schools.

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.

Devastating and breathtaking. Also some fantastic data visualization at the link.

[unblock]

1. i would call that data dramatization rather than data visualization, and i think it sucks.

i'm a big fan of good data visualization and tufte has some great examples (see, e.g., https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/a50f/335f700ccfe31ad4c0873eaa305ab15fc6b8.pdf)

but making me wait 5 minutes for data points to flow into their buckets so i can see the final numbers is really idiotic.


looks cool, sure; but really, i'll not be using this technique when i present data, ever.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

3. Lol okay!

[unblock]

4. sorry for the digression ;)

pet peeve i guess.

to the main point, this is an interesting study and does illustrate an elephant in the room. it's not about the lingering effects of past racism (though that certainly does have an effect); it's that racism is ongoing and real.

[Anon-C]

2. Thanks for sharing this, this is my my story! Nt

[qwlauren35]

5. Wow. This sunk real fast.

The quote that did it for me:

“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,” said Ibram Kendi, a professor and director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University. “But for whatever reason, we’re unwilling to stare racism in the face.”

I remember when there were so many people on this site who were convinced that solving the class problem would solve the race problem. Nope. It doesn't. Not one bit.

I think this quote puts a finger on part of the problem.

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 school. 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,” said Noelle Hurd, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia.

She said this racist stereotype particularly hurts black men economically, now that service-sector jobs, requiring interaction with customers, have replaced the manufacturing jobs that previously employed men with less education.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

6. Thanks for kicking. I'll admit for years that I thought that if we could solve economic problems,

then other -isms would take care of themselves. But it's just not true. These problems are intersectional, but solving one will not solve others.

The NYT had an excellent article recently about the struggles black women in particular face in the Chicago UAW plants. They're harassed on the regular and can't get satisfaction from either the union or the employer. So, so frustrating.