Kai Wright at Colorlines discusses an “arresting” graph demonstrating downward class mobility among black and whites. The bars represent the proportion of parents’ children that end up in the bottom fifth of income earners by race and income of the parent. On the far left, you see that 31% of whites and 54% of blacks born into the bottom fifth remain the bottom fifth. Poor black children, then, are more likely than poor white children to stay poor.
The remainder of the bars represent downward mobility. You can see that, in every case, black children are more likely to be poor as adults than white children, no matter what class they were born into. Among those born into the middle fifth, the statistically middle class, 16% of whites and 45% of blacks end up in the bottom fifth of income earners. For the richest white Americans, the chance of ending up poor is statistically zero; while nearly one in ten of black children born rich will end up poor.
Wright summarizes:
Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.…economic mobility is not the same for everybody in America, and to the degree we can talk about a genuine black middle class, it’s not a terribly secure one.
Comments 20
Molly W. — January 3, 2011
Something's wrong with either the analysis or the graph.
The copy says, "For the richest white Americans, the chance of ending up poor is statistically zero; while nearly one in ten of black children born rich will end up poor."
But according to the chart, one in 10 *white* people born rich (the blue column at 9%) will end up poor, and (statistically) no black people (the red column -- or rather, the lack thereof).
N — January 3, 2011
Molly's right, the trend reverses for the 4th and 5th fifths. Richer white americans are more likely to fall to the bottom fifth than the richer african americans.
Jay Livingston — January 3, 2011
N is correct -- for those born to the 2nd highest quintile, whites are slightly more likely to wind up in the bottom quintile (8% vs. 6%). But if you expand that from bottom 20% to bottom 40%, the percentages are much different. Of those born to the 2nd highest quintile, 22% of whites wind up in the bottom two quintiles, but among blacks the proportion is twice that (46%), although you can't see that from this graph. You can find the full chart in the Brookings report (here). It uses the same PSID data that this graph is based on. It also has data on intergenerational mobility by sex and education, international comparisons, wealth mobility, and lots more.
Kat — January 3, 2011
I would hazzard a guess that the % of blacks in the top 5th is so small, that even if a roughly equivalent % of their children showed downward mobility, the resulting % is close to 0. I.e., If only 1% of blacks are in the top quintile, and 8% of their children end up in the bottom quintile, you get less than 1% of the population, which wouldn't show up on the graph.
Patrick — January 3, 2011
Another unfortunate reading of the fact that the red bars are taller than the blue ones: the bottom quintile is getting blacker over time. Regardless of wealth at birth, 16.8% of white children will end up in the bottom quintile, while at least 30.6% of black children will. Across all races, the average must be 20% (that's what quintile means, after all), so today's bottom quintile is blacker than a generation ago.
Matt — January 3, 2011
Let's go back to the intent of the graph and talk about WHY this is happening. My republican "friends" would blame drugs and the culture of poverty. I can throw mountains of data on institutional discrimination at them, but they refuse to believe it (or read it or understand it). I try to make it simple and they still don't believe it. Privilege allows you to ignore the reality of inequality when it's not convenient and that's easy because it doesn't fit the ideology of the "American dream" that anyone can "make it" if you just work gosh-darn hard enough. I think ending that myth is vitally important and information like this helps. This won't be reported in the media just like they never talk about black unemployment versus white unemployment. They only average it out which does a huge disservice to understanding where blacks really stand in this country (and a disservice to sociologists trying to teach students about inequality).
Sociological Images « Y's Going on?! — January 6, 2011
[...] Differential Downward Mobility Between Black and Whites [...]
Gomer Wumphf — January 19, 2015
Gee - does anyone think this could possibly be connected to blacks having soooo many singly parent "families these days? What percent of the middle class black families had two parents and what percent of the families of their offspring are single parent?