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Although residential segregation is known to have declined for some racial groups in America, much less is known about change in the relative socioeconomic quality of the neighborhoods where different racial and ethnic groups live. Using census data for 1980-2010, we find that the neighborhoods where whites and minorities reside have become more alike in terms of neighborhood poverty and median income, largely because whites now live in poorer neighborhoods and because African Americans live in less-poor neighborhoods. The narrowing of black-white neighborhood inequality since 1980 has been sizable, far exceeding the narrowing of Hispanic-white neighborhood inequality; nonetheless, despite blacks' relative gains, the disparity in black-white neighborhood economic conditions remains very large. Asian Americans, on the other hand, now reside in neighborhoods that are economically similar to the neighborhoods where whites reside. Regression analyses reveal that racial neighborhood inequality declined the most in U.S. metropolitan areas where racial residential segregation declined the most. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The essay discusses income inequality in United States. Topics discussed include liberalism, economic mobility and employment. Other topics which includes household income, globalization and poverty are also discussed. Income of Black Americans, economic growth and economic recessions are also discussed.

This study compares the residential outcomes of affluent black and affluent white households using data from the 1990 and 2000 censuses and pooled data from the 2005-2009 American Community Survey. Results indicate that affluent black households are highly segregated from their white economic peers. Furthermore, affluent black households live in neighborhoods of lower average quality compared to affluent white households. Affluent black households are least segregated from affluent white households in the South, but the greatest equality in neighborhood-quality outcomes occurs in the West. The South, however, shows the greatest improvement in both average neighborhood quality for affluent black households and a substantial reduction in affluent black-affluent white segregation over the entire study period. The authors find that place stratification theory better describes the residential geography of affluent black households than does spatial assimilation theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although not universally appreciated, African-Americans have a long history of entrepreneurial achievements against the odds. African-Americans are more likely to start a business, yet, are less likely to succeed. Well-documented discriminatory practices by industry sectors exclude minorities from lucrative business opportunities. This paper examines participation of African-American owned businesses in key industries to assess implications for revenue generation and hiring potential. While the numbers of African-American owned businesses are increasing; and these firms are providing greater contributions to the socio-economic progress of African Americans and potentially other disadvantaged groups, evidence that African-American owned businesses suffer adversely from unequal access to capital markets and institutional barriers is prevalent. A wealth gap between African-American owned business and non-minority business owners exists and for some industries has widened, as survival of African-American owned business is threaten. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Southern Homestead Act of 1866 was a large-scale effort by Congress to make land ownership accessible for recently freed slaves by opening 46 million acres of public land exclusively for homesteading. Using new micro-data from Louisiana, we examine the factors that led to successful homesteading. We compare homesteaders to the agricultural population, finding few differences other than wealth. A disproportionate percentage of homesteaders were white. We substantiate some of the claims put forth in the earlier literature, such as large amounts of fraud. Further, we present a more nuanced interpretation of a greater success rate for African-Americans. Being local or non-local had no meaningful impact on white success rates but had a large impact on African-Americans. Local African-Americans were more likely to obtain title to their land while non-local African-Americans were less likely to succeed. We hypothesize that regional knowledge, kinship networks, and white resistance to non-local African-Americans are possible explanations for this racial difference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the hybrid nature of material and digital spaces, more decisions are being made online that have a direct effect on offline actions. This is increasingly true for the locations where people are choosing to consume goods and services such as restaurants or retail outlets. The growth of the GeoWeb-personal data uploaded to certain Internet sites such as social media platforms-has established large databases showing the locations where people go during their daily lives for the purposes of consumption. One such repository is the social network, Foursquare, which people use to display their physical location to their friends, digitally. In looking more closely at datasets from Foursquare overlaid with information on racial characteristics in census tracts, a pattern emerges: predominantly African-American tracts are increasingly left out of this type of online participation. This paper will compare Foursquare data from several U.S. cities to discuss the implications of being left off of social media platforms tied to economic activity. It is likely that these virtually invisible areas will have a direct impact on the economic vitality of their physical counterparts [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses what the author refers to as the specter of downward mobility in retirement for various middle-income and higher-income workers in America, and it provides advice for bridging a gap in retirement security between Black and White people in the U.S. The economic fears that are associated with old age are addressed, along with American Social Security, employer-sponsored pensions, and personal assets. Retirement savings and employment during retirement are assessed.

The contrast between Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld's The Triple Package (Chua & Rubenfeld 2.0) and Chua's previous work, World on Fire (Chua 1.0), is striking. Chua & Rubenfeld 2.0 contends that particular ethnic and religious groups are spectacularly successful in the United States because of a "triple package" of traits that are largely cultural; however, there is nary a word in Chua & Rubenfeld 2.0 about the role that law might play in contributing to wealth acquisition among the subject groups. In contrast, Chua 1.0 clearly acknowledges the role of law through "law-in-culture" when accounting for the wealth of those whom Chua calls "market-dominant minorities." "Law-in-culture" consists of binding rules, such as default contract terms, that often underlie market relations in perilous "third world" environments. While these rules are not enforceable by the state, they are powerful because those who ignore them risk ostracism by their co-ethnics, with whom they often contract. Perhaps because Chua & Rubenfeld 2.0 focuses on particular ethnic groups within the United States—a country that epitomizes the protection of property and contract rights—it overlooks the potential role of "law-in-culture" in accounting for wealth acquisition of particular groups. This oversight is significant. Many of the subject ethnic groups had contracting advantages underwritten by "law-in-culture" in their countries of origin. I am particularly concerned about the absence of a discussion of institutions—whether underwritten by "law" or "law-in-culture"—when Chua & Rubenfeld 2.0 discusses Black people. A case in question is Nigerian Americans. Given their focus on Nigerian American economic success, a comparison to African American economic success (or lack thereof) is foreseeable. The question is inevitable: if Nigerian immigrants do so well in the United States, what does this say about the continuing scholarly emphasis on institutional (as opposed to cultural) impediments to native Black, that is, African American economic success? Chua & Rubenfeld 2.0 acknowledges institutional impediments to African American success, but they say very little about institutional advantages that Nigerian Americans may have. In fairness to Chua and Rubenfeld, they are likely constrained by the dearth of scholarship on the pre- and post-migration trajectories of Nigerian Americans, who are largely recent migrants. Thus, to explore the potential relevance of institutional factors, I consider the original Black "triple package" group for which much more scholarship is available, West Indians. I contend that institutional background matters. For example, even the earliest turn-of-the-century Black West Indian migrants gained exposure to an institutional context for wealth acquisition through the extension of property and contract rights to slaves and their descendants in the West Indies. This stands in stark contrast to the institutional context that generally existed for African Americans, not only during slavery, but also in the pre-civil rights southern United States. Thus, despite the historical sociological focus on West Indian American success, I question the notion that West Indian Americans are necessarily a useful comparative sample to African Americans simply because they are Black—particularly given the historical disparity between West Indian Americans and African Americans in accessing institutions for wealth creation. The question then becomes if the same might be true of Nigerian Americans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented on historian W. E. B. Du Bois' outlook on the segregation in education system for African Americans. It states that Du Bois had both supportive and contradictory views on the race segregation in education. Topics include his knowledge of African economic and social cooperation, his response education researcher L. A. Pechstein's argument that supported segregation, his essay "The Crisis" on National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) non-opposition.

In her memoir, Bigmama Didn't Shop at Woolworth's (1996), set in the 1950s and '60s in segregated Texas small towns, Sunny Nash offers a sophisticated, contextualized spatial analysis, embedded in history, in which she locates routes to emancipation, making concrete Adrienne Rich's assertion that we must all "understand how a place on the map is also a place in history." Her text anticipates and further illuminates the work of recent influential scholars of spatial geography and injustice such as David Harvey, Edward Soja and Tim Cresswell By insisting on the centrality of African-American social spaces, it also disrupts Texas mythology and presents a little known version of Texas history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we use data on virtually all foreclosure events between 2005 and 2009 to calculate neighborhood foreclosure rates for nearly all block groups in the United States to assess the impact of housing foreclosures on neighborhood racial/ethnic change and on broader patterns of racial residential segregation. We find that the foreclosure crisis was patterned strongly along racial lines: black, Latino, and racially integrated neighborhoods had exceptionally high foreclosure rates. Multilevel models of racial/ethnic change reveal that foreclosure concentrations were linked to declining shares of whites and expanding shares of black and Latino residents. Results further suggest that these compositional shifts were driven by both white population loss and minority growth, especially from racially mixed settings with high foreclosure rates. To explore the impact of these racially selective migration streams on patterns of residential segregation, we simulate racial segregation assuming that foreclosure rates remained at their 2005 levels throughout the crisis period. Our simulations suggest that the foreclosure crisis increased racial segregation between blacks and whites by 1.1 dissimilarity points, and between Latinos and whites by 2.2 dissimilarity points. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Research has found wide disparities in loan denial rates among different racial/ethnic groups. Two competing explanations for these gaps arise. One argument is that these disparities result from underlying racial disparities in credit worthiness. A competing view is that the disparities arise from a pattern of racial discrimination among mortgage lenders. This paper adopts a stratification economics approach to evaluate these competing claims. Using Freddie Mac's Consumer Credit Survey dataset, we test the hypothesis that measures of discrimination disappear when one accounts for racial differences in credit scores. A novel contribution of the paper, built upon the premise that inter-group inequalities sustain themselves through self-fulfilling mechanisms, is to test the hypothesis that loan denials explain misperceptions of credit worthiness. We demonstrate that one cause of the appearance of poor credit risk among black applicants is that blacks with good credit risk underestimate their credit worthiness and apply for loans in lower numbers. Our findings suggest that even nondiscriminatory lending behavior has the unintended effect of screening out low-risk blacks and thereby yields higher denial rates among blacks. This in turn confirms prior beliefs about the poor credit of average black applicants. Much, but not all, of the racial disparity in loan outcomes can be explained by racial differences in credit scores and the resulting racial disparity in loan outcomes explains much of the racial difference in false perceptions about bad credit. Thus, a possible self-fulfilling mechanism remains within the credit market that perpetuates views about black bad credit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we describe how residential segregation and individual racial disparities generate racialized patterns of subprime lending and lead to financial loss among black borrowers in segregated cities. We conceptualize race as a cumulative disadvantage because of its direct and indirect effects on socioeconomic status at the individual and neighborhood levels, with consequences that reverberate across a borrower's life and between generations. Using Baltimore, Maryland as a case study setting, we combine data from reports filed under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act with additional loan-level data from mortgage-backed securities. We find that race and neighborhood racial segregation are critical factors explaining black disadvantage across successive stages in the process of lending and foreclosure, controlling for differences in borrower credit scores, income, occupancy status, and loan-to-value ratios. We analyze the cumulative cost of predatory lending to black borrowers in terms of reduced disposable income and lost wealth. We find the cost to be substantial. Black borrowers paid an estimated additional 5 to 11 percent in monthly payments and those that completed foreclosure in the sample lost an excess of $2 million in home equity. These costs were magnified in mostly black neighborhoods and in turn heavily concentrated in communities of color. By elucidating the mechanisms that link black segregation to discrimination we demonstrate how processes of cumulative disadvantage continue to undermine black socioeconomic status in the United States today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using state-level data from 1980-2010 we examine whether economic freedom, as measured by the Economic Freedom of North America Index, has had any impact in increasing or decreasing the ratio of median income for black households to the median income of white households. To our knowledge, there has been no research on racial income disparities and the role that economic freedom might have in alleviating or exacerbating the problem. We find evidence that economic freedom is associated with an increase in the racial income gap. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aptly described by Ira Berlin as slaves without masters, free people of color in antebellum North America were beset by laws and social conditions that rendered them little more than slaves. In recent years, however, scholars have explored free blacks whom sometimes challenged this status by achieving meaningful degrees of economic and social stability in the antebellum South. This essay examines such a group--a segment of free black farmers in the rural parishes surrounding Charleston, South Carolina, whose farming strategies, production, and rural lives were quite similar to their yeoman-class white neighbors. These free black farmers crossed the boundary between race and class by establishing economic self-sufficiency through farm production and then by cultivating important, yet often fragile and contingent, social advantages in their rural communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Progress in narrowing black-white earnings differences has been far from continuous, with some of the apparent progress resulting from labor force withdrawal among lower-skilled African Americans. This paper documents racial and ethnic differences in male earnings from 1950 through 2010 using data from the decennial census and American Community Surveys. Emphasis is given to annual rather than weekly or hourly earnings. We take a quantile approach, providing evidence on medians and other percentiles of the distribution. Treatment of imputed earnings greatly affects measured outcomes. Hispanic men have exhibited earnings growth similar to white men over several decades. Black men have been left behind economically due in large part to increased joblessness, a process exacerbated by weak labor market conditions. By 2010, joblessness had risen to over 40 percent and the median black-white earnings gap was the largest in at least 60 years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper critically assesses the empirical evidence on the relationship between immigration and African American employment. Studies using various methodologies and data are reviewed: natural experiments, time series, and cross-sectional studies of local labor markets and intertemporal changes in the national labor market. We find that for African Americans as a whole, immigration may have little effect on mean wages and probability of employment. However, there is some evidence that immigration may have had an adverse impact on the labor market outcomes of African Americans belonging to low education-experience groups. However, even this modest conclusion must be qualified: the literature has many unresolved econometric issues that might easily undermine the received wisdom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article looks at the impact of Title VII of the U.S. Civil Rights Act of 1964 banning employment discrimination based on race or sex, on the occasion of the law's 50th anniversary, focusing on the economic conditions of African Americans. Topics include deindustrialization, the black-white gap in unemployment rates, corporate affirmative action programs, and structural factors related to African American poverty and unemployment.

The article looks at Title VII of the U.S. Civil Rights Act of 1964 banning race discrimination in employment on the occasion of its 50th anniversary, focusing on the political and economic context in which it took effect and on its relevance to addressing the economic conditions of African Americans in the early 21st century. Topics include political activism, structural economic changes, and trends in the share of blacks in white-collar and blue-collar occupations by region.

Because homeownership continues to be a key mechanism underlying racial inequality in America, recent developments that led to the foreclosure crisis bring to the forefront issues concerning minority homeowners' ability to sustain ownership. This article uses longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to examine racial differences in the likelihood of homeownership exit over the last four decades. We find that black homeowners are at a significantly higher risk of transitioning to renter status than are white homeowners, even after accounting for life-course, socioeconomic, and housing characteristics, and the selection into homeownership. Most importantly, we show that the racial gap in ownership exit has widened substantially over time, especially among owners who purchased their homes in the 1990s or later. These findings are consistent with arguments that the nature of racial stratification in U.S. housing markets has shifted over time from overt market exclusion to market exploitation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite significant changes in American society, Blacks still lag behind Whites on several important socioeconomic indicators. Attributing this gap to structural reasons (e.g., racial discrimination) or to person-centered reasons (e.g., individual willpower) is highly correlated with the extent to which individuals feel that the government should implement policies to ameliorate racial disparities. Scholars have shown that Blacks have shifted their explanations of Black disadvantage from structural attributions to person-centered over the past three decades. Some suggest that this change is because all Blacks are becoming more conservative while others suggest that cohort replacement is undergirding the shift. I used a newly developed method, the intrinsic estimator, to determine whether period, age, and/or cohort effects are responsible for the shift. I find that, generally, Blacks are less inclined to suggest that discrimination is a credible explanation due to period effects, but the increase in person-centered attributions is primarily due to cohort variation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An essay is presented concerning gambling policy in the 1960s and 1970s, particularly in New York and Illinois, and the relationship between illegal gambling and the growth of centralized state government-administered lotteries. It discusses the impact of access to taxed gambling and the impact of such access upon African Americans, African American politicians such as then-U.S. representative Adam Clayton Powell Jr., and numbers gambling in major U.S. cities, particularly New York City.

The article discusses ideas about gender, sexual politics and economics within the African American community, focusing on these subjects and the figure of "Jody" in Blues music, prison narratives, and work songs. Other topics include the sexuality of women in "Jody" stories, the relationship between the Jody character's ability to obtain money without earning a wage and the economic stability of African American women, and the portrayal of Jody in the film "Baby Boy" by John Singleton.

How do private transfers differ by race and ethnicity, and do such differences explain the racial and ethnic disparity in wealth? Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, this study examines private transfers by race and ethnicity in the United States and explores a causal relationship between private transfers and wealth. Panel data and a family-level fixed-effect model are used to control for the endogeneity of private transfers. Private transfers in the form of financial support received and given from extended families and friends, as well as large gifts and inheritances, are examined. We find that African Americans and Hispanics (both immigrant and nonimmigrant) receive less in both types of private transfers than whites. Large gifts and inheritances, but not net financial support received, are related to wealth increases for African American and white families. Overall, we estimate that the African American shortfall in large gifts and inheritances accounts for 12 % of the white-black racial wealth gap. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores Black household affluence at the metropolitan scale and suggests that metropolitan-level opportunity structures shaped rates of Black affluence for the 100 largest American metropolitan areas in 2000. I hypothesize that affluent black households favored metropolitan areas of opportunity, those places characterized by having (1) economic opportunities, (2) favorable Black-White relational standing, (3) metropolitan diversity and residential opportunities, and (4) their location in the South, which serves as a Black homeplace. Results fail to suggest evidence regarding the role of the 'new South' for understanding metropolitan-level rates of Black affluence. More generally, findings from this study challenge our understanding of socioeconomic stratification by investigating diversity within America's Black community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author traces involvement in the wealth inequality movement since 1999 and the frustrations with realistically addressing wealth inequality and racial wealth gaps. This paper outlines the journey from understanding the importance of wealth in African American and other communities, to addressing collective structures for accumulating assets and wealth for low-income people of color. The author explores the role cooperatives play in creating community and collective wealth, and proposes alternatives to the mainstream savings strategies usually proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the relationship between blackness and capitalism in the U.S. Topics discussed include the chaos caused by the reactionary corporate advocacy group American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the localism of states' promulgation of anti-African-American laws, and the post-industrial security state. Also discussed is the downsizing of democracy by the information industrial complex.

The unequal exposure to industrial hazards via differential residential attainment and/or differential sitings of toxic facilities is a long-standing environmental justice issue. This study examines individual trajectories of residential exposure to the risk of industrial hazard over nearly two decades. Using a latent class growth analysis on longitudinal geocoded data merged with the neighborhood-level pollution measures, we discover large racial differences in trajectories of pollution exposure. A majority of individuals are exposed to above-average pollution levels at some point during the study period, but blacks are more likely than whites to experience persistent exposure to high pollution. These differences are only partially explained by racial differences in suburban neighborhood attainment, socioeconomic status, and the frequency of inter-neighborhood moves. Immobile blacks also saw their exposure increase. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Behavioral Health Initiative (BHI) was designed to address the well-documented persistent disparity between racial minorities and whites regarding access to care and utilization of behavioral health services. The goal was to reduce disparities in mental health utilization among African Americans by (1) engaging pastors of African American churches in the BHI, (2) training pastors to identify behavioral health symptoms among their members, and (3) getting pastors to refer church members to appropriate behavioral health and support services. This program was implemented over a two-year period in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and was a collaborative effort between the religious community and traditional and nontraditional providers. We concluded that pastors of African American churches were better equipped to refer individuals with behavioral health challenges and to assist the community in accessing and utilizing the appropriate behavioral intervention care as a result of the program. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information regarding the components of the Black Economic Empowerment Act (BEE) Generic Scorecard which connects to corporate social responsibility' (CSR) general notions. It mentions the element or components of the scorecard that could lead the achievement of BEE which include promotion of economic transformation, changes in racial composition of management structures and ownership, and promotion of investment programmes.