Mobility, in black & white

Sisyphus, it seems, is a black man in America. So suggests a huge new study by leading researchers who crunched numbers on the economic fortunes of 20 million children over the course of a quarter century. The team, led by Stanford economist Raj Chetty and Harvard’s Nathaniel Hendren, found stubborn and pernicious income gaps between blacks and whites that suggest the foundational national promise of equal opportunity is cracked.

White children whose parents are in the top income quintile have a four-in-10 chance of staying there as adults. For black children, it’s just 18%.

In fact, black children born into upper- or upper-middle-class families are roughly as likely to fall onto the bottom fifth of the income ladder as they are to stay at the top.

The stark disparities between black and white outcomes hold when controlling for whether a child is in a single- or two-parent household.

Here’s the especially puzzling, and depressing, part. The gap between blacks and whites is almost all on one side of the gender divide. A black man growing up in a two-parent wealthy family earns about the same, on average, as an adult as a white man raised by a single mother.

Meantime, black women earn a bit more than white women when born into equally wealthy homes. Factoring in parental income, black women go to college at higher rates than white men.

Which is not to say that black women are immune to racism — it is real, with consequences documented throughout the study — but that its effects have less relative financial cost over time.

What is the nature of the problem that’s haunting black men in America, even when they start out in relatively economic comfort?

Are they struggling to swim against too-powerful cultural and sociological tides? Is discrimination focused mainly on black men still so rampant throughout the economy?

Chetty and Co. suggest lower high-school graduation and college attendance rates, and higher incarceration rates, play strong roles. But even those can’t explain such significant differences.

This suggests that while racism — individual, institutional and systemic — remains an oppressive challenge, its effects are increasingly hard to identify, much less eradicate.