NATIONAL GAPS
By BURT HUBBARD
I-News Network
By some of the most important measures of social progress, black and Latino residents of the United
States have lost ground as compared to the nation’s white residents in the decades since the civil rights
movement.
Some gains made by the nation’s two largest minority groups during the 1960s and 1970s have eroded
with time, an analysis of six decades of demographic data from the U. S. Census Bureau found. In other
categories, the gaps between whites and minorities have steadily widened since 1960.
The analysis, undertaken by I-News, the public service journalism arm of Rocky Mountain PBS, focused
on family income, poverty rates, high school and college graduation and home ownership. Apart from
the Census data, health and justice records examined also revealed stark inequities.
According to most experts, racial and ethnic inequality will pose a significant future handicap for a
nation in which minorities are the fastest rising population.
“I was actually shocked,” said Eric Nelson, a Colorado NAACP official, after examining the I-News
analysis. “You would think we as a nation would have overcome a lot of things since then. It’s like,
‘Wow! We’re spinning our wheels going in reverse.’ ”
Latino and black families nationally earn only about 60 percent of white family incomes today, the
analysis found. Latino adults graduate from college at less than half of the rate of white adults with black
adults lagging almost as much. Both groups are generally twice as likely to live in poverty. Less than half
of minority households own their own homes compared to almost three-fourths of white households.
“The idea that has been propagated by proponents of civil rights and kind of accepted by the white
majority was, ‘We did it. There were a lot of problems. Martin Luther King made a speech and we
enacted some laws and it’s OK now,’ ” said Gary Orfield, co-director of the Civil Rights Project at the
University of California, Los Angeles School of Law.
“That’s just not true. We didn’t do it.”
There are important caveats, of course, including the rise of professional classes among both blacks and
Latinos and striking examples of individual wealth and achievement. Minorities have made gains in a
number of categories, as well, but in most have not kept pace with their white counterparts.
By the broad gauge of the census measures, recent decades have not been kind to aspirations of
equality by the nation’s Latino and black residents. Almost 50 years after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
delivered his generation defining “I have a dream” speech, income and education gaps remain
stubbornly high.
The Census partitions the country into four broad regions – Northeast, South, Midwest and West – with
nine sub-regions, and the I-News analysis shows the ethnic and racial inequities fluctuating by region
during the past decades. Most recently, some of the largest widening of the gaps has emerged in the
Midwest, while minority gains, especially among African Americans, are most evident in the South.
I-News reviewed six decades worth of census data from 1960 to 2010, nationally and among all 50
states. Among the findings:
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Gains made by black households nationally between 1960 and 1980 in narrowing the gaps in
median family income and home ownership have been erased and are wider now than then.
During the same period, black adults have fallen further behind in college degrees, as
compared to whites.
Blacks have gained ground in the percentage of those with high school degrees and have cut
the gap with whites in poverty levels. Still, the difference in the percent of black and white
residents living in poverty remains high – 16 percentage points.
Latinos, whose population has surged in the U.S. with immigration, have fallen further and
further behind their white counterparts in most economic and educational areas. The gaps
have steadily grown wider between 1960 and 2010 for median family income and college
graduation rates. Gaps in homeownership and high school degrees are higher today then
they were 50 years ago. Only the gaps in poverty rates have narrowed since the 1960s and
1970s.
Among more positive trends, 82 percent of black adults had graduated from high school in 2010,
compared to 20 percent in 1960. Latinos have also improved high school graduation rates through the
decades, but still lag badly in 2010 at 62 percent, compared to 91 percent for white adults.
Poverty, income and education gaps in the U.S. parallel other important disparities outlined in one
critical measure of health after another. Blacks, for example, experience significantly higher rates of
infant mortality, and both blacks and Hispanics experience higher death rates from diseases such as
diabetes.
“Those disparities are real,” said Amitabh Chandra, director of health policy research at the Harvard
Kennedy School of Government. “Anybody who says, ‘Well, these disparities don’t exist,’ is living in
denial.”
There may be no more telling statistic about racial and ethnic health disparities that the rate of infant
mortality – the death of a baby in the first year of life. It is a number often cited to separate developed
nations from developing ones, and it is studied extensively because it is seen by many experts as a key
measure of overall health.
The infant mortality rate in the U.S. has been on a steady decline since 1958. Even so, black babies die at
a rate much higher than white babies, 11 deaths for every 1,000 births compared to 5 deaths for every
1,000 births, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“I find that deeply concerning,” said Dr. Amal Trivedi, a practicing physician and faculty member at
Brown University in Providence, R.I. “You know the rates have improved for both groups, but they’re still
sharply unequal, deeply unequal, and we can do better as a society.”
The widening of the gaps as measured by census data began in the 1980s and 1990s, well before the
last recession, which disproportionately impacted minorities’ wealth and incomes.
The stakes in not reducing the gaps are high, analysts and researchers say, as the U.S. moves closer to
becoming a majority-minority nation. Whiles whites remained a majority of 63.4 percent in 2011, the
census reported that as of July 1 that year 50.4 percent of all residents younger than one year of age
were minorities.
Two of the nation’s most populous states, California and Texas, are majority-minority, as are New
Mexico and Hawaii.
I-News explored the social phenomena behind the numbers with community activists and politicians,
researchers from liberal and conservative think tanks, educators, church leaders and people in the
street. The reasons given for the gaps were myriad and complex. They are rooted in history and
intergenerational in nature.
Among those cited:
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Civil rights era policies that provided a boost to minorities in the 1960s and ‘70s, such as
affirmative action, have been diminished or dismantled.
“For all intents and purposes, affirmative action has been wiped out,” said former
Denver Mayor Wellington Webb. “There is no longer a desire to assure that minorities are being
placed in jobs.”
Affirmative action programs, first envisioned by President John F. Kennedy in 1961 and
strengthened and expanded by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965, have been narrowed or
eliminated by U.S. Supreme Court decisions and, in individual states, by legislative action or by
voters.
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Good paying, blue collar manufacturing jobs – once a major path to the middle class –
have disappeared by the millions. A study by the Center for Economic Research found
that fewer than 1 in 10 black workers nationally had a manufacturing job in 2007, down
from 1 in 4 in 1979.
Support for K-12 education has diminished in many states. The cost of attending college
has skyrocketed.
The percentage of single-parent families and the number of births to single mothers has
soared among black households, exacerbating the gaps, and immigration and teen-age
births in the Latino population have also led to widening disparities, experts said.
The rise of the single-parent family has created ongoing economic disparity and impacts
general prosperity, said Alan Berube, senior fellow and research director for the Brookings
Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program. “In part, it’s about how many adults you have and the
income generating power these different households have,” he said.
The disproportionate incarceration of minority males contributes to a range of social problems,
including the single parent family, said Denver Mayor Michael Hancock and others. The family structure
has “disintegrated in a sense,” Hancock said. “That challenge is real.”
Nationally, one of every 33 black men and one of every 83 Latino men were behind bars in 2010,
according to an analysis of Bureau of Justice reports, compared to one in 150 white men.
Former Colorado U.S. Sen. Hank Brown, and others, said the creation of welfare and other government
subsidies led to lasting inequities.
“What we’ve done in America is design a system that rewards people for not working and locks them
into poverty,” Brown said. “It’s a tragedy of the first order.”
The I-News analysis found regional differences in how the gaps have changed during the decades.
Many Southern states have gone from having the largest economic and education gaps between white
and black residents in 1970 to some of the smallest in 2010. Nineteen states have narrowed the gaps
between median family incomes between 1970 and 2010. Nine of those states are in the South.
Blacks have narrowed the poverty gap in 11 of the 12 Southern states, as defined by the Census Bureau.
Four of the 10 states that have narrowed home ownership rates between whites and black are in the
South.
Three southern states – Tennessee, Kentucky and West Virginia – are among the five states with the
lowest gaps for black and white adults with college degrees.
UCLA’s Orfield said most civil rights laws were actively aimed at the South during the 1950s, ’60s and
’70s.
“We changed the South,” Orfield said. “The South was an apartheid system. We really did break it up
quite dramatically from the middle of the 1960s to the early 1970s. It was huge, huge social change that
very few Americans understand.”
Simultaneously, the South went through a period of rapid economic growth that elevated everyone’s
status.
During those same decades, the gaps in many of the Midwest states went in the opposite direction –
from some of the narrowest in the U.S. to some of the widest, the I-News analysis found. The income
gaps between white and black families in 10 Midwest states have generally steadily widened since 1960
or 1970 to their highest levels in 2010. For seven of the 10 states, the income gap narrowed during the
Civil Rights era, but has been widening ever since.
By 2010, four Midwest states – Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin and Nebraska – had four of the five largest
income gaps in the U.S. between white and black families.
Former Denver Mayor Webb said that partly reflects the severe downturn in manufacturing jobs in
many Midwest states and their metro areas.
UCLA’s Orfield said the demographics of many Midwest states have changed dramatically since 1970.
“Minnesota was a great leader in civil rights, in part, because it had a very small problem,” said Orfield
who grew up in the Minneapolis area. “It’s now very different and Minneapolis public schools are now
overwhelmingly non-white.”
Latino gains have been more elusive across the U.S. in education and income. The Census Bureau had
self-acknowledged problems with identifying Latinos in 1970 in some regions, and those problems make
many state comparisons unreliable before 1980. However, since 1980, the income gaps have steadily
widened in all but five states and the gaps in college degrees have grown larger in all but one state.
Latino homeownership rates narrowed in only 10 of the 50 states between 1980 and 2010.
“Essentially you are looking at a somewhat different population today than you were in 1980,” said
Berube. “Much of that growth is among Mexican immigrants, many of whom come to the United States
to work in low-skill jobs.”
Orfield said many Latinos missed out on the gains by blacks during the civil rights era because they did
not become a political force in the U.S. nationally until the 1980s. By that time, the nation had begun to
pull back on affirmative action and other policies, he said.
“Latinos were left on their own,” Orfield said. “The lack of having any sort of civil rights policy is
beginning to really devastate those communities economically and socially.”
Given the ever changing arc of national politics during the decades covered by the analysis, the
disparities aren’t “any kind of big surprise,” Orfield said. “It is quite clear there was an intentionality
both about the narrowing of the gap and the growing of the gap.”
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