Picture two American boys born into the best possible circumstances and given the best possible start at life.
If one boy is white and one boy is black, chances are their lives will diverge dramatically.
That's the result of a new study - "Race and Economic Opportunity in the United States" - which found white boys who grow up wealthy tend to stay that way, while black boys raised in rich families are more likely to become poor.
Black versus white
The study was a joint effort by Stanford and Harvard universities and used US Census Bureau data. Researchers traced the lives of 20 million American children and discovered that in 99 percent of American neighbourhoods white boys fare better than black boys even if their parents are on similar incomes.
"Black and white boys have very different outcomes even if they grow up in two-parent families with comparable incomes, education and wealth, live on the same city block, and attend the same school," the study said.
Interestingly, the study found that income disparity does not exist to the same extent between black and white girls from families with comparable earnings.
Racial disparities are still among the most visible and persistent features of American society and the obvious example is income. In 2016, the median household income of black Americans was $50,000 compared with $84,000 for non-Hispanic white Americans.
Low rates of 'upward income mobility'
The study noted that a defining feature of the "American Dream" is upward income mobility: "the idea that children have a higher standard of living than their parents."
Researchers looked at ethnic income disparities using de-identified (protecting a person's identity from being connected to information) longitudinal data covering nearly the entire US population from 1989-2015.
The study's authors, Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren, said the research found Hispanic Americans "are moving up in the income distribution across generations," and that Asian immigrants have levels of upward mobility greater than all other racial groups.
In contrast, black Americans have substantially lower rates of upward mobility and higher rates of downward mobility than whites, leading to the large income differences that persist across generations.
Meanwhile black boys who move early in their life to districts with lower poverty levels, less racism and strong paternal presence were found to have lower levels of incarceration and higher incomes as adults. Yet fewer than 5 per cent of black children grow up in such environments.
Reducing the black-white income gap
Authors Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren have suggested US policy makers use the study to help devise new strategies to close the black-white income gap for males.
"This finding suggests that many widely discussed proposals may be insufficient to narrow the black-white gap themselves, and suggest potentially new directions for policies to consider."
They have offered up a range of options including mentoring programs for black boys, efforts to reduce racial bias among whites and discrimination in the criminal justice system, as well as measures to promote interaction across racial groups.
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