Census Data on Racial Income Gap

Posted on December 8, 2011 by townsend

• Income gap stays wide in District, narrows in suburbs, By Carol Morello and Ted Mellnik, December 7, 2011, Washington Post: “The income gap between whites and blacks living in the District is one of the widest in the country, new census statistics show. That stands in stark contrast to the Washington suburbs, where the gaps have become some of the nation’s narrowest. The per capita income for whites in the District is more than triple what it is for blacks, and the difference has only widened since 1990. In several suburbs, including Prince George’s, Loudoun and Stafford counties, incomes for blacks and whites are closer than ever, and today whites earn $1.30 or less for every $1 that blacks earn. Demographers and city activists say the difference reflects four decades of upper- and middle-class blacks abandoning the city for the suburbs, coupled with a more recent resurgence of affluent whites moving to the District. Some speak of the city’s middle class as a vanishing phenomenon, propelled in part by rising housing prices…”
• Census: Widening income gap as blacks leave cities, By Hope Yen (AP), December 8, 2011, Detroit News: “Affluent black Americans who are leaving industrial cities for the suburbs and the South are shifting traditional lines between rich and poor, according to new census data. Their migration is widening the income gap between whites and the inner-city blacks who remain behind, while making blacks less monolithic as a group and subject to greater income disparities. ‘Reverse migration is changing the South and its race relations,’ said Roderick Harrison, a Howard University sociologist and former chief of racial statistics at the Census Bureau. He said a rising black middle class is promoting a growing belief among some black conservatives that problems of the disadvantaged are now rooted more in character or cultural problems, rather than race. But Harrison said most black Americans maintain a strong racial identity, focused on redressing perceived lack of opportunities, in part because many of them maintain close ties to siblings or other blacks who are less successful…”