© T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York Times
Will Jawando was raised in a low-income household in Silver Spring, Md. A lawyer and a former Obama White House staffer, he is among the rare black boys who reached the top fifth of the income distribution as an adult.
Will Jawando was raised in a low-income household in Silver Spring, Md. A lawyer and a former Obama White House staffer, he is among the rare black boys who reached the top fifth of the income distribution as an adult.
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.
"You would have thought at some point you escape the poverty trap," said Nathaniel Hendren, a Harvard economist and an author of the study.
Black boys - even rich black boys - can seemingly never assume that.
Comment: As the summary of the original study says: In the Implications section of the report, they write: The problem is, what specific ways can one attempt to "reduce racial bias"? Diversity courses don't work. Perhaps the best way is to do the other recommendations: mentoring programs and programs that promote interaction between racial groups.