Segregation’s Long Shadow
By Colin Gordon
As the ongoing protests in Ferguson, Missouri subside from national attention, the conditions that fostered them have only come into clearer view. Greater St. Louis, as I noted in my last blog post at Dissent, has always been a remarkably segregated city; in this regard, it epitomizes the broader patterns of inequality crisscrossing the United States.
By almost any economic metric, the gap between white and black Americans is sustained and substantial. It’s no secret that African Americans earn less; more telling still, the wage gap has widened over the last three decades. In 1979, the median black wage was $13.57, or 82.5 percent of the white median ($16.44). Since then, the median white wage has grown to just over $18.00, while the black median ($14.08 in 2013) has barely budged—slipping to just 76.6 percent of the white median.
The gap widens further when we move from individual wage earners to family or household incomes. In 1967, median black family income was $29,032, or 59.2 percent of the white median of $42,492. In 2012, median black family income ($40,517) was 61.5 percent of white median income ($53,706).
But the jaw-dropping gap is that of wealth. Depending on the survey instrument and the exact definition of “wealth” used, median black wealth sits somewhere around 10 percent of median white wealth. So while the black worker earns about three-quarters the wages of his or her white counterpart and the black family or household claims just under two-thirds the income of its white counterpart, the gap in wealth—with all of its implications for economic security and intergenerational mobility—is dramatically wider. New data from the Survey of Consumer Finances, released earlier this month, confirms this dismal fact.
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http://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/segregations-long-shadow-ferguson-poverty-inequality
