The income gap between blacks and whites has been growing
By one reckoning, it's as big as it was in 1950.
In 2012, when I published The Great Divergence, my book about income inequality, the consensus was that the black-white income gap stood where it had in 1979. That wasn’t good, but subsequent research has indicated that the gap was in fact growing, and continues to grow. One study concluded the gap now yawns as wide as it did in 1950.
That hasn’t gotten a lot of attention, because the focus, influenced perhaps by Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, has been on the even wider black-white wealth gap. But in a society where economic well-being is measured not by how much acreage you have behind your barn but by how many zeroes you have on your paycheck, I think income matters more than wealth. That’s the subject of my latest, for the New Republic, “The Black Wage Gap Matters.”