Although college grads across the board make more money than their less-educated peers, the report found that whites and Asians with four-year degrees not only tend to outearn their black and Latino counterparts, but they also better withstood the impact of the Great Recession. “Based on two decades of detailed wealth data, we conclude that education does not, however, protect the wealth of all racial and ethnic groups equally,” the report’s authors wrote.

According to the study, white and Asian American families with four-year college degrees were more likely to have accumulated much more wealth over the longer term than their less-well-educated counterparts. Ditto for African American and Latino families, although their earnings and wealth were typically lower than that of whites and Asian Americans.

“This is certainly partially a story about intergenerational inequality,” S. Michael Gaddis, an associate professor of sociology and demography at Penn State University, wrote in an email to TakePart.

One factor: “Research shows that minority and low [socioeconomic status] students don’t attend the best possible colleges they could (based on grades, etc.) and that lack of the best degrees translates into a substantial workforce that is underutilized,” wrote Gaddis, who authored a study released in March that found minority students who attend elite schools such as Harvard don’t fare better in the job market compared with less-well-educated whites.

Enough.

Let Jamyla’s death touch a region’s heart. Let her be memorialized in the conversations about inequality in the greater St. Louis region that have been taking place in the past year. Let it not end with conversation. Let conversation become conversion.

Change is happening, but not nearly quickly enough.

We may never know who killed Jamyla, but that doesn’t mean we can’t find justice for a 9-year-old child who wanted to do better than her best.

A year after #Ferguson, the schools that serve its children are still underfunded and failing. The housing is still unequal and unsafe. Guns are rampant. Jobs are few. In a community where blindly fired bullets can kill a little girl in the safety of her home, hope is scarce. Justice is only a word.

Until St. Louis invests in its children — and it’s going to take a whole lot more than $26 million — the promise of a positive future will be trapped in the casket of a child.

It’s not good enough to go home and hug our own 9-year-old daughters a little tighter, to let that kiss goodnight on the top of the forehead linger. It’s not good enough to march and light another candle, to go to church and temple and mosque, holding hands and calling for calm and peace and healing.

Those actions get us through the day. But what about tomorrow?

Tomorrow, Jamyla’s classmates, those innocent children left behind in the Riverview Gardens School District, will go to school and before the bell rings be eons behind 9-year-olds in other parts of the city. Their chance at success, and a long life, is limited by their ZIP code.

The For the Sake of All report published by Washington University last year under the direction of assistant professor Jason Purnell tells us they will die a full 15 years earlier than people who live just one or two ZIP codes to the south, just because of where they live. The same report tells us that Jamyla’s friends, those who graduate high school, at least, will earn about half what their white counterparts in St. Louis will earn. They’ll be more than twice as likely to be unemployed. They will be more likely to have heart disease or cancer. Their ability to move out of the social strata into which they were born is severely limited, Harvard University’s recent study on social mobility tells us.

They are stuck in a community in which dying of a gunshot wound is not an unusual event.

This is the reality that too many St. Louisans of color, particularly on the north side of the city and county, have been living for too long. It’s costing us more than lost lives; it’s costing the entire region billions of dollars in economic opportunity. We continue to allow an entire region, one generation of people after another, to suffer because in a divided St. Louis, some people have theirs and that’s just the way it’s going to be.

Enough.

Let Jamyla’s death touch a region’s heart. Let her be memorialized in the conversations about inequality in the greater St. Louis region that have been taking place in the past year. Let it not end with conversation. Let conversation become conversion.

Change is happening, but not nearly quickly enough.

We may never know who killed Jamyla, but that doesn’t mean we can’t find justice for a 9-year-old child who wanted to do better than her best.

A year after #Ferguson, the schools that serve its children are still underfunded and failing. The housing is still unequal and unsafe. Guns are rampant. Jobs are few. In a community where blindly fired bullets can kill a little girl in the safety of her home, hope is scarce. Justice is only a word.

Until St. Louis invests in its children — and it’s going to take a whole lot more than $26 million — the promise of a positive future will be trapped in the casket of a child.

The Clock Is Ticking

Changes like those I’ve described need to happen, the sooner the better. #BlackLivesMatter has approached critical mass, but risks deflating itself much like Occupy Wall Street and other temporarily buzzing movements did (I’d argue that this has happened to the Tea Party, which has been co-opted by the GOP mainstream and the hucksters who made a lot of money using it as a fundraising tool).

It isn’t enough to have Hillary Clinton and others say “black lives matter.” They’re aware of it, we’re aware of it. But now you need to pummel them into doing something that truly shows black lives matter and have them in fear of the consequences if they don’t enact what is being asked of them.

These social movements are important. They change the fabric of the American experience. This idea is more important than others, and it cannot be allowed to simply whither on the vine.