The study also looked at for Hispanic, white, Asian, and Native Americans, finding that over generations, Native Americans have the second-lowest rates of upward mobility after African-Americans and Latinos and Asian-Americans are experiencing upward mobility opportunities given a few caveats. So in the greater community, the presence of fathers in a neighborhood is crucial, especially for black children: researchers say that the presence of mentors, even “mentors who aren’t children’s parents, but who share those children’s gender and race,…may indicate other neighborhood factors that benefit families, like lower incarceration rates and better job opportunities.” In high-poverty neighborhoods, 1 percent of white children had only a few fathers present while 66 percent of black children did. Census data found that 63 percent of white children living in low-poverty neighborhoods had fathers present, while only 4 percent of black children do. They are pulled over or detained and searched by police officers more often.” In the home, one “pathbreaking finding” of the study, according to Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson is the “the presence of fathers in a given census tract” on the economic outcomes for black boys. The reasons for that are manifold, researchers say.While black women also face racism and sexism, black men often experience individual and structural racism differently: “As early as preschool, they are more likely to be disciplined in school. The study revealed a profound gender disparity within black families.”Though black girls and women face deep inequality on many measures, black and white girls from families with comparable earnings attain similar individual incomes as adults,” writes the NYT. The national average unemployment rate is 5.3 percent in the United States and 7 percent in Philadelphia. The study highlights Silver Spring, Maryland as one of “the rare neighborhoods where black and white boys appear to do equally well ” noting that these neighborhoods “mostly had low poverty rates… were the places where many lower-income black children had fathers at home.” That’s compared to unemployment rates for African Americans at 9.6 percent nationally and 10.5 percent in Pennsylvania, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The findings resonate in Philadelphia, where 44.2 percent of the population is African American and 17.7 percent of African Americans are unemployed, according to Philadelphia Works. The study “undermines the widely held belief that class, not race, is the most fundamental predictor of economic outcomes for children in the U.S,” says NPR in a story about the study. And the gaps only worsen in the kind of neighborhoods that promise low poverty and good schools,” the NYT reports. “Even when children grow up next to each other with parents who earn similar incomes, black boys fare worse than white boys in 99 percent of America. Researchers analyzed de-identified census data on 20 million children and their parents over decades to find that a deep racial income gap persists. No matter how wealthy their upbringing, black boys raised in America are more likely to end up poor in adulthood than white peers, according to an explosive new study conducted by researchers at Stanford, Harvard and the Census Bureau, the New York Times reports.
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