IMHO, this is closely akin to William Julius Wilson's "the declining significance of race"—i.e., the rising significance of class: Robert Manduca: How rising U.S. income inequality exacerbates racial economic disparities: "In 1968... median African American family income was 57 percent of the median white American family income. In 2016, the ratio was 56 percent. The utter lack of progress is striking...
....puzzling because racial gaps in many other social outcomes have contracted since the 1960s: College attainment, high school test scores, and life expectancy all have seen some convergence between blacks and whites, though progress in these areas is by no means complete.... The intransigent racial income gap is the result of two opposing trends. On the one hand, blacks have made real progress climbing to higher positions on the income distribution. From 1968 to 2016, the median African American climbed from the 25th percentile of the national family income distribution to the 35th percentile. While this progress is nowhere near complete, it was enough to narrow the gap in income ranks between blacks and whites by almost a third. In the 1960s, the large majority of whites earned more than the typical black person. By 2016, that proportion had declined substantially. This progress came despite continued racial disparities in parental wealth, access to educational resources, and treatment in the labor market.
On the other hand, just as African Americans were entering the ranks of the middle class in large numbers for the first time, broader economic forces were undermining the financial security of families across all races. Starting in the 1970s, changes to the economy and to public policy began concentrating a larger and larger share of national income in the pockets of the richest members of society. Incomes for the middle class and the poor have hardly grown at all, while incomes for the richest 1 percent almost tripled. These changes to the income distribution mean that as more African Americans succeed in overcoming the many obstacles to reaching the middle class, the payoff is not as great as it had been for social groups that climbed the income ladder earlier in U.S. history...
#shouldread
