Black Inequality Research Articles

Intra-racial Income Inequality: An Examination of Metropolitan Areas, 1990

I. INTRODUCTION The persistence of economic inequalities between blacks and whites in the U.S. is striking: blacks experience unemployment rates that are over twice that of whites, black poverty rates have been two to three times the white rate, and black median family income has consistently ranged between 50-60 percent that of white families. These racial disparities are important aspects of the discourse on distributive justice which has focused on the rise in income inequality over the last 25 years. Inter-racial measures of socioeconomic status, however, can easily overshadow the substantial inequality within the black population. It is a salient fact, often ignored in general discussions of income distribution, that the level of income inequality is higher within the black population than within the white population (Smith 1979). Thus, the dimensions of racial inequality extend to within group differences. In the past 25 years there has been a great deal of empirical research into the determinants of urban family income inequality (for example, Murray 1969; Danziger 1976; Hirsch 1982; Bartik 1994). The vast majority of this work has focused on overall family income inequality without respect to race. While some research has been done on income and earnings disparities between blacks and whites in metropolitan areas (Nord 1982, 1982a), there has been virtually no urban-based investigation into the determinants of inequality within the black and white populations.(1) In this paper, the determinants of the inter-urban variation in black and white intra-racial family income inequality are explored by examining metropolitan area data from the 1990 census. In the next section, the magnitude of income disparity within the black and white populations is presented using standard measures of income inequality. Section III develops an empirical model that associates intra-racial inequality with racial socioeconomic characteristics and nonracial urban and regional variables. Section IV contains the regression results and discusses significant differences between the black and white models. The higher level of inequality within the black population is attributed to (1) differing socioeconomic characteristics between blacks and whites; and (2) differences in the marginal impact these variables have on inequality. Section V contains a summary and conclusion. II. INEQUALITY WITHIN THE BLACK AND WHITE POPULATIONS Table 1 reports levels and correlations between measures of intra-racial family income inequality for 148 Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) that had at least 5,000 black families in 1990. Since it has been shown that statistical results can vary depending on the measure of inequality employed (Braun 1988), two measures of inequality are reported. In addition to the commonly utilized Gini coefficient, the ratio of the 90th percentile income to the 10th (P90/P10) is considered as an alternative measure of inequality, focusing on the tails of the distribution. The mean values of inequality in the 148 MSAs highlight the significantly higher level of inequality among black families than among white families. The black and white Gini coefficients are 0.429 and 0.375, respectively, and the percentile ratio shows that the black 90th percentile income is 13.11 times that of the black 10th percentile income, while for whites it is substantially lower at 5.92. The correlations between the intra-racial inequality measures reported in Table 1 reveal that the GINI and P90/P10 measures are not perfect proxies for inequality within the black and white populations. More [TABULAR DATA FOR TABLE 1 OMITTED] importantly, the low correlation between the two Gini coefficients (0.219) and the two percentile ratios (0.186) suggests that the intra-racial socioeconomic characteristics responsible for inequality and the impact these characteristics have in generating inequality may be significantly different for blacks and whites. …

City of Brotherly Hate

The city of Philadelphia is known as the City of Brotherly Love, but for black people in the nineteenth century this was not the case. Between 1832 and 1849 the tranquility of Philadelphia was shattered by five major and numerous smaller interracial battles.' White mobs called terrorizing the city's black population hunting the nigs.2 As Roger Lane argued in his earlier book, Roots of Violence in Black Philadelphia, 1860-1900, antiblack violence in Philadelphia constituted a particular type of urban disorder. In a city where rival gangs of young white males regularly battled for turf, assaults on blacks cut across class, gender, and age lines. I mention this book because it must be read with Lane's William Dorsey's Philadelphia and Ours. Together these two studies present the most ambitious, detailed, and provocative analysis of urban northern postbellum black life in print. In brief, the Dorsey volume is a welcome addition to and revision of W. E. B. Du Bois' classic study, The Philadelphia Negro (1899). In Roots of Violence in Black Philadelphia, Lane dealt with the unique problem of criminality in black Philadelphia during the last forty years of the nineteenth century (p. 3). This was a strong thesis-driven book that examined the consequences of blacks' failure to enter the urban industrial order. William Dorsey's Philadelphia is a more complex and detailed exploration of this same problem. The new book details the interaction of blacks and whites in postCivil War Philadelphia and examines the institutions black people created to sustain themselves in a hostile environment. William Dorsey's Philadelphia shows that blacks never passive victims of white supremacy. Even though they possessed limited resources and often faced defeats in their quest for equality, the Negro citizens of Philadelphia were more inclined to emphasize progress than pain (p. 309). But having said this I think it should be noted that Lane presents a subtle and nuanced analysis of black inequality in the Quaker City. According to Lane, black deprivation after the Civil War

The Differing Effects of Economic Inequality on Black and White Rates of Violence

VioLit summary: OBJECTIVE: The goal of this study by Harer and Steffensmeier was to test the relationship between economic inequality and rates of violent crimes disaggregated by race for Standard Metropolitan Statistical Areas (SMSAs). METHODOLOGY: A quasi-experimental method was employed for this study. Secondary analysis was performed on data obtained for the 125 largest SMSAs in the United States in 1980. Arrest data (transformed into natural logs) for 1980 were taken from the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports. These data were aggregated by SMSA, year, and race. Analyses were also done with estimates of offending (see article for further details on computations). Income inequality was measured in several ways. A measure of total inequality was defined as an overall societal measure (Gini coefficient) for all families. A measure of white to black income difference was used and was defined as the difference between the logged means of white and black family income. Within-race inequality was calculated for both whites and blacks and consisted of Gini coefficients of income among black or white families. Control variables included poverty, percent black, age, police per capita, population size, and geographic region. Poverty was disaggregated by race. Age was disaggregated by percentage of race aged 15-24. Multiple regression was used to analyze the data. FINDINGS/DISCUSSION: The offense rates were found to be strongly correlated with the corresponding arrest rate. Total inequality was found to be strongly correlated with each of the violent crime categories for both offense and arrest data. White to black inequality was less strongly correlated. Overall poverty and percent black were strongly correlated with all the violent crimes. Regression was done for aggregate offense rates for 1980. Total inequality and percent black were significantly and positively related to homicide (p AUTHORS' RECOMMENDATIONS: The authors stated that more theoretical work needs to be done considering the way inequality contributes to exceptionally high levels of black violence in urban areas. Other structural or community sources of variation in black rates of violence should be investigated, the authors argued. EVALUATION: The design of this study is of high quality, and its findings are as solid as the data from which they come. There is a lot to be said for analysis of disaggregated data and the closer examination of variables applied to specific groups which may differ. However, there are a couple of cautions to be taken. First, while the data are taken from the FBI and represent the best available data, the authors' claims that there is virtually no bias in the data disregards the problems of data collection which are dependent on police observation of offenses and citizen reporting for offense rates and police arrest behavior for arrest rates. These have not been shown to be completely bias free. More troubling are the authors' conclusions that there may still be this subculture of violence among blacks, although their own data do not even address this. The question for these authors comes back to black violence, although their study shows the clear connection between inequality and white violence rates. I would have liked to seen a more thorough discussion of the issue at hand rather than the speculation about subcultures of black violence. (CSPV Abstract - Copyright © 1992-2007 by the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence, Institute of Behavioral Science, Regents of the University of Colorado) Crime Rates Socioeconomic Factors Caucasian Offender Caucasian Violence African American Violence African American Offender Violence Rates Income Inequality Poverty Socioeconomic Status Black-White Comparison Racial Comparison Racial Differences Racial Factors 04-00

Black Visibility, Early Political Victories, and Income Inequality

Racial income inequality has long been viewed as an indicator of discrimination against blacks and as reflective of their subordinate group status in the United States. Researchers have tried to isolate the structural, demographic, and geographic catalysts of discrimination and, hence, of racial income inequality in U.S. urban areas. Much attention has been paid to the influence of minority group presence-that is, percent black-on income inequality. The impetus for this attention has been that percent black may be determinant of the threat perceived by the white population and, therefore, of the discrimination initiated against the minority (see Blalock, 1956: 584). Several control variables, such as region, percent employed in manufacturing, and white median income have been found to affect the strength of the relationship between percent black and racial income inequality. However, very little attention has been paid to the effect of the political power and representation of blacks on this relationship. This may be due to the fact that most of the research in this area has used the

Black Capitalism and Black Inequality: Some Sociological Considerations

Though economists have demonstrated that, in theory, black capitalism should have little direct impact on the well-being of black noncapitalists, indirect and non-economic effects have not been investigated. Empirical tests of this relationship have been inadequate. Though not denying that black economic well-being may affect black business, we argue that the effect is at least reciprocal, and probably stronger in the other direction. We find that, for cities, the extent of black entrepreneurial activity has a strong statistical effect on the well-being of the black population, even when controls are introduced for the many other factors that affect aggregate black welfare. We argue that the apparent effect is a sociological one, operant through variables such as group status and group power. The introduction of intervening measures of black “clout” into the model produces results that support this hypothesis.

Black Capitalism and Black Inequality: Some Sociological Considerations

Black Capitalism and Black Inequality: Some Sociological Considerations

Minority Composition, Inequality and the Growth of Municipal Police Forces, 1960–71

Abstract Recent studies, in finding that community variables such as percentage Black and income inequality have significant effects on police size and expenditures, call into question the findings of earlier research. However, these recent studies are themselves subject to serious methodological limitations and leave open the question of whether it is class or racial conflict which affects the deployment of police resources. In this study we estimate several simultaneous equation models of police size per capita in 1971 for 88 non-Southern cities. Bach of these models holds constant the effects of per capita police size in 1960. Racial composition and racial inequality are found to be the only significant predictors of the growth in the number of police per capita.

Urban Public School Desegregation: The Reproduction of Normative White Domination

Although prominent desegregation researchers have not believed that public school desegregation is a cure-all for Black inequality in America, they seem to think something magical occurs when Blacks and Whites are placed. in the same physical plant. The magical folkwisdom of many students of school desegregation is apparent in the large number of now-classic studies which attempted to assess the effects of school desegregation only one or two years after the event.' Inspired by the intergroup contact literature, researchers have come to assume that, under specific conditions, interracial contact leads to racial integration in public schools without regard for what happens outside school walls.2 The magical qualities of the desegregation literature can be attributed to the liberal faith in the American creed which optimistically predicts the eventual assimilation of dissimilar groups. As the research of social scientists has shifted from first generation to second generation desegregated schools, numerous racial resegregation problems have appeared. Recent published and unpublished ethnographic studies have revealed that even in schools where the racial gap in achievement is closing, there are still extensive racial resegregation patterns. Such observations were missed in earlier studies which used survey methods that could not tap deep experiential data or which

Book Review: Economics of Racism, U.S.A.: Roots of Black Inequality

Book Review: Economics of Racism, U.S.A.: Roots of Black Inequality

Inequality in the Military: An Examination of Promotion Time for Black and White Enlisted Men

Military sociologists have relied on a theory which is grounded in the universalistic standard argument to explain black inequality in the Army. This argument, which is a component part of the institutional racism perspective, argues that blacks do not do as well as whites in the Army because of their failure to do well on universalistic criteria such as civilian education or the Armed Forces Qualification Test. Taking promotion time as a measure of inequality, this paper presents data which suggest that universalistic criteria are not sufficient to explain black inequality vis-a-vis promotion time. When black and white enlisted men are matched on key universalistic criteria (civilian education, Armed Forces Qualification Test and occupation type), blacks consistently take more time to make grade than whites. The findings suggest the salience of the notion of ascription: when ascription is based on race, it becomes a component part of racism. Thus, one unavoidably is led by the data in this paper to conclude that the black enlisted man is subject to inequality, which is not the result of failure to meet universalistic criteria but, rather, a result of the racist actions of real-life people.

Economics of Racism, USA: Roots of Black Inequality by Victor Perlo; Race and Economics by Thomas Sowell

Economics of Racism, USA: Roots of Black Inequality by Victor Perlo; Race and Economics by Thomas Sowell