10 Shocking Graphs That Prove Black People Have Made Little Progress in America

Net Wealth by Race The above chart, which was created by Matt Bruenig of Demos using 2010 data, breaks down wealth in the U.S. by race. The chart indicates that while white Americans make up only 64 percent of the country’s population, they possess more than 88 percent of its wealth. Median Household Income Gap For the last few decades, the large disparity between African-Americans' median household income and that of whites has mostly stayed the same. The comparatively low incomes of Black households are made worse by the fact that across all races, most Americans are making less today than they were in 2000. Family Wealth Gap Median household income is one way to measure a given demographic’s economic well-being. However, the Urban Institute reports, the racial wealth gap is three times greater than the racial income gap. Wealth is a measure of all the money a family has, including assets — such as a house. In 1983, for every dollar held by the average Black or Hispanic family, the average white family had five. Instead of shrinking, the gap has increased from the 1980s through today. Now white families lay claim to nearly six times as much as Black families. Mass Incarceration of Black Males Although more Americans of all races are imprisoned today than 50 years ago, the increase has been more dramatic among African-American males. For every one white man of 100,000 imprisoned in 1960, 2.6 are imprisoned today. For every one Black man out of 100,000 imprisoned in 1960, 3.3 are imprisoned today. Although in 1960, there were still states maintaining “separate but equal” schools, disenfranchising African-Americans and barring interracial marriage, a larger share of the Black population is behind bars today. According to the Pew Research Center, for every white man imprisoned in 2010, 6.4 Black men were incarcerated. The rise in incarceration has been especially prominent among young Black males who are also high school dropouts. As shown in the graph above, a staggering 37 percent of those who are both young Black males and high school dropouts are now in prison or jail -- a rate that's more than three times higher than what prevailed in 1980. It’s been 60 years since the Supreme Court ruled against the concept of “separate but equal” schools in Brown v. Board of Education, however, today, the majority of Black students still attend schools that are majority non-white. Today, 74. 1 percent of Black students attend majority non-white schools. This is little changed from the numbers in the 1960s (76.6 percent). Almost 40 percent of Black children attend schools that are more than 90 percent non-white. Housing is another way segregation is implemented in America. Presently, it is not as overt as in the past, but its more subtle and modern forms still have a devastating impact on the wellbeing of the Black community. One way this occurs - depicted in the chart above - is that Latinos and African-Americans with good credit scores still receive high interest rate mortgages far more often than whites. These mortgages, which are purposed for risky borrowers, are harder to pay off, and are more likely to be foreclosed on. This phenomenon also helps explain why minorities were hit harder by the Great Recession, and illuminates the modern-day racism that maintains a gaping wealth disparity. Another inequality that leads to disparity is the unemployment rate differences between Blacks and whites. Research by the Economic Policy Institute, a labor-focused think-tank, found that the unemployment rate among Black Americans has remained at least twice as high as that of white Americans for 50 years. Back in 1963, the unemployment rate was 5 percent for whites and 10.9 percent for Blacks — or 2.2 times as high for Blacks as for whites. That difference has changed very little up through today. As of 2012, the unemployment rate of Black job seekers was 2.1 times as high as for whites -- 14 percent for African-Americans, 6.6 percent for whites. The race-based economic inequities that exist in America place a far greater proportion of Black and Hispanic people below the poverty line than whites. Today, about one in 10 white Americans lives in poverty compared to roughly one in four Hispanic-Americans and African-Americans. The Great Recession hit Black people particularly hard, with poverty rising from 24.2 percent to 27.5 percent among African-Americans between 2006 and 2011. Racial poverty figures are even more stark in an examination of child poverty. Children of all races are more likely to live in poverty than adults. But for America's racial minorities, the statistics are disturbing. In 2011, a family of three was living in “poverty” if their income was less than $18,530 a year. About 37.4 percent of Black children and 34.1 percent of Latino children lived in families with incomes below that amount. That same year, 12.5 percent of white children were considered living in poverty.

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