Black Culture Discussion Thread

I got alotta love for Jim Brown man. He's done so much for our community. I just hate seeing him being used as pawn by these people. But if were gonna keep it a buck, then let's keep it a buck.

Too many celebs from the CRM era have been living off that legacy for decades without acknowledging the times were in and how the system has not only become sophisticated in the way discriminates against our people but how it strategically uses black folk (Black celebs, politicians, and intellectuals) to perpetuate it.
 
I could imagine how depressing it would be to be a black civil rights leader at the time fighting for equal treatment for people then end up seeing the government unleash that horror on another population. Can you imagine how defeating that would feel?

Why would they treat black folks better if they can justify dropping a friggin nuclear weapon on people man.


I can see why there were so many hippies and dropouts in that era.
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D Nice said:
I got alotta love for Jim Brown man. He's done so much for our community. I just hate seeing him being used as pawn by these people. But if were gonna keep it a buck, then let's keep it a buck.

Too many celebs from the CRM era have been living off that legacy for decades without acknowledging the times were in and how the system has not only become sophisticated in the way discriminates against our people but how it strategically uses black folk (Black celebs, politicians, and intellectuals) to perpetuate it.
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that brings up an interesting aside, it doesn't seem as though those people or organizations of the crm have modernized...why does whatever the 'black lives matter' movement is, & the decentralized nature of all of its various voices seem so apart from those legacy people & organizations?

Mark Antony said:
I'm not sure what history you're relying on that makes you hopeful that he's more than a pawn.
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you know what, that is good question...never really had a reason to think he was anything other than good dude, given how outspoken of an athlete he was in his day...maybe that was being too presumptuous/naive...
 
Yall wanna discuss economics? Let's do it......
[h1]The Unfinished March[/h1]
The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Millions of Americans know that speech well enough to paraphrase its concluding passages. But there were nine other speeches that day, calling not just for legal rights, but for jobs and a living wage. On this 50th anniversary year of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, it is critical to revisit this forgotten history of the march.

Yes, the march galvanized the nation, and the civil rights struggle it heralded was among the most inspiring and effective social movements in American—if not world—history. Today, we can celebrate blacks’ equal access to public accommodations, a law against racial discrimination in employment, and black voting rights because of the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

But the hard economic goals of the march, critical to transforming the life opportunities of African Americans, were not fully achieved. The organizers of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom also demanded decent housing, adequate and integrated education, a federal jobs program for full employment, and a national minimum wage of over $13.001 an hour in today’s dollars.2

The key organizers of the march, A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, understood that improving the socioeconomic position of African Americans required an end to both race- and class-based injustices in America (Anderson 1997, 239–240; March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom 1963b, 3). In his speech at the march, Randolph, president of the Negro American Labor Council, stated:
We have no future in a society in which 6 million black and white people are unemployed and millions more live in poverty. Nor is the goal of our civil rights revolution merely the passage of civil rights legislation. Yes, we want all public accommodations open to all citizens, but those accommodations will mean little to those who cannot afford to use them. Yes, we want a Fair Employment Practice Act, but what good will it do if profit-geared automation destroys the jobs of millions of workers black and white?
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For Randolph and other marchers, expanding rights without significantly expanding economic opportunity would still leave African Americans economically disadvantaged.

Given that a societal commitment to four of the seven demands was not secured, the March for Jobs and Freedom is incomplete. Blacks in America today are:
  • Still in ghettos of poverty. The decent housing that marchers called for is still lacking. In 1963, Whitney M. Young Jr., executive director of the National Urban League, called for African Americans to “march from the rat-infested, over-crowded ghettos to decent, wholesome, unrestricted residential areas disbursed throughout our cities.” But today, nearly half of poor black children live in neighborhoods with concentrated poverty; however, only a little more than a tenth of poor white children live in similar neighborhoods.
  • Still in segregated and unequal schools. Marchers demanded adequate and integrated education, but that has not been achieved. In 1963, Roy Wilkins, executive secretary of the NAACP, noted that in the nine years since the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, “our parents and their children have been met with either a flat refusal or a token action in school desegregation.” In the late 1960s, 76.6 percent of black children attended majority black schools. In 2010, 74.1 percent of black children attended majority nonwhite schools. These segregated schools do not have the same resources as schools serving white children, violating the core American belief in equality of opportunity.
  •  
  • Still twice as likely to be unemployed. Jobs for all have not been created. In 1963, Walter Reuther, president of the United Automobile Workers of America, asserted, “We will not solve education or housing or public accommodations as long as millions of Americans, Negroes, are treated as second-class economic citizens and denied jobs.” From the 1960s to today, the black unemployment rate has been about 2 to 2.5 times the white unemployment rate. In 2012, the black unemployment rate was 14.0 percent, 2.1 times the white unemployment rate (6.6 percent) and higher than the average national unemployment rate of 13.1 percent during the Great Depression, from 1929 to 1939.
  •  
  • Still struggling for a living wage. A minimum wage sufficient to lift working families out of poverty is not in place. In 1963, John Lewis, national chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, said, “We march today for jobs and freedom, but we have nothing to be proud of, for hundreds and thousands of our brothers are not here—for they are receiving starvation wages or no wages at all.” After adjusting for inflation, the minimum wage today—$7.25—is worth $2.00 less than in 1968, and is nowhere close to a living wage. In 2011, a full-time year-round worker needed to earn $11.06 an hour to keep a family of four out of poverty. But more than a third of non-Hispanic black workers (36 percent) do not earn hourly wages high enough to lift a family of four out of poverty.
  •  
  • In this 50th anniversary year of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, we must recommit to the “unfinished march.” This includes constant vigilance to sustain the march’s clear, but still vulnerable, victories. But just as important as sustaining the civil rights goals achieved, we must confront the goals still unmet.
 
[h2]Still in ghettos of poverty[/h2]
In his speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Whitney M. Young Jr., executive director of the National Urban League, stated:
[Negro Americans] must march from the rat-infested, over-crowded ghettos to decent, wholesome, unrestricted residential areas disbursed throughout our cities. . . . They must march from the play areas in crowded and unsafe streets to the newly opened areas in the parks and recreational centers.
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Fifty years later, African Americans still lack full access to decent, wholesome, and safe housing, in large part because black poverty remains high and is very concentrated.

Black poverty, as with poverty overall, declined dramatically through the 1960s, falling from a rate of 55.1 percent in 1959 to 32.2 percent in 1969. Since then, progress in reducing black poverty has been agonizingly slow and uneven. By 1989 the black poverty rate had only declined to 30.7 percent. While the tight labor markets of the late 1990s pushed black poverty to its lowest rate on record—22.5 percent in 2000—the black poverty rate drifted back up in the early 2000s during the anemic recovery from the 2001 recession. The Great Recession that began in December 2007 drove the black poverty rate back up to 27.6 percent by 2011. This was nearly three times the white poverty rate of 9.8 percent that year (U.S. Census Bureau 2012).

Arrested progress in the fight against poverty and residential segregation has helped concentrate many African Americans in some of the least desirable housing in some of the lowest-resourced communities in America. In addition to much higher poverty rates, blacks suffer much more from concentrated poverty. Nearly half (45 percent) of poor black children live in neighborhoods with concentrated poverty, but only a little more than a tenth (12 percent) of poor white children live in similar neighborhoods (Figure A).

Concentrated poverty is correlated with a host of social and economic challenges. Children in neighborhoods with concentrated poverty experience more social and behavioral problems, have lower test scores, and are more likely to drop out of school (Kids Count 2012). Poorer cities tend to have higher crime rates (Kneebone and Raphael 2011, 12), and this relationship likely partially explains why black youth have the highest homicide mortality rates (National Center for Health Statistics 2012, 158–159).

Poor black neighborhoods also have environmental hazards that impact health. A very serious one is higher exposure to lead, which impedes learning, lowers earnings, and heightens crime rates (Acevedo-Garcia 2006, 131; Gould 2009; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2013). While rates of lead exposure have been declining for all races, African American children continue to have the highest exposure rate (Gould 2009; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2013). Poor black neighborhoods also “have a higher prevalence of alcohol and fast food outlets compared to wealthy and predominantly white neighborhoods” and their residents have “fewer opportunities to be physically active, due to higher crime rates and limited availability of green space” (Acevedo-Garcia 2006, 132).

Among poor children, white children have the lowest likelihood of residing in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty, and thus the best opportunity to access middle-class community resources. In contrast, poor black children have the highest likelihood of living in concentrated poverty, and thus the worst access to middle-class community resources.

African Americans not only disproportionately lack decent housing in neighborhoods of opportunity, a significant number simply lack any housing. In recent years, blacks have made up nearly 40 percent of the population living in homeless shelters although they make up only about 13 percent of the U.S. population (HUD 2012, 16). Undoubtedly, blacks are overrepresented among America’s homeless because they have the highest rate of “severely cost-burdened” renters. Individuals paying half or more of their total income on housing—the severely cost-burdened—are more likely to end up homeless.3

While decent housing is an important goal in and of itself, housing is also linked to health, education, employment, and wealth outcomes. For example, severely cost-burdened renters and homeowners, who are spending at least half of their income on housing, are much less able to save for things such as continued education for themselves or their children, and are thus less likely to reap the employment and wealth benefits advanced education brings. Thus, without greater access to decent housing, the struggle for black socioeconomic advancement will be dramatically harder.
 
[h2]Still in segregated and unequal schools[/h2]
Speakers at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom addressed the need for black children to gain access to adequate and integrated education.

“We will not stop our marching feet until our kids…can study a wide range without being cramped in Jim Crow schools,” vowed James Farmer, national director of the Congress of Racial Equality.4

“[Negro Americans] must march from the congested ill-equipped schools, which breed dropouts, and which smother motivation to the well-equipped integrated facilities throughout the cities,” argued Whitney M. Young Jr.

Roy Wilkins, executive secretary of the NAACP, pointed out that in spite of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, “for nine years, our parents and their children have been met with either a flat refusal or a token action in school desegregation. Every added year of such treatment is a leg iron upon our men and women.”

Many more years have been added to the delay Wilkins decried. Nearly 60 years after the Brown decision, more than 50 years after the “Little Rock Nine” were escorted by federal troops into Little Rock Central High School, nearly three-fourths (74.1 percent) of black students still attend segregated schools, defined as majority nonwhite (as of 2010, as shown in Figure B). This is nearly the same share as in the late 1960s, when 76.6 percent of black children attended majority black schools.

Although the share of black children in segregated schools had dropped to 62.9 percent by the early 1980s, the subsequent lack of commitment by the federal government and multiple Supreme Court decisions antagonistic to school desegregation have led to a reversal (Orfield, Kucsera, and Siegel-Hawley 2012, 4–5).

This does not discount the positive changes over the last 50 to 60 years. The share of black students in schools that are “intensely segregated,” defined as 90–100 percent nonwhite, was basically cut in half from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. However, there has since been a slight uptick in this key measure: The share of black students in intensely segregated schools rose from the early 1990s to the early 2000s, and stagnated over the following decade.

Promoting school integration is important because—now as a half century ago—segregated schools are unequal schools. The more nonwhite students a school has, the fewer resources it has. A 10 percentage-point increase in the share of nonwhite students in a school is associated with a $75 decrease in per student spending (Spatig-Amerikaner 2012). In comparison with the average school with 90 percent or more white students, the average school with 90 percent or more nonwhite students has $443,000 less to spend on students during the school year, “funding [that] could pay the salary for 12 additional first-year teachers or nine veteran teachers . . . [or] for any number of other useful personnel or resources such as school counselors, teacher coaches, or laptop computers” (Spatig-Amerikaner 2012, 7). Gary Orfield, founder of The Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles, observes:
In most metropolitan areas, if one were to randomly choose two high poverty segregated high schools and two middle class white and Asian schools, and visit for a day each of the classes purporting to teach the same subject and grade level, the inequalities would become so apparent they would shock the conscience of anyone who truly believes in equal opportunity. (Orfield, Kucsera, and Siegel-Hawley 2012, xvi)
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Segregation is fundamentally about the differential distribution of resources. If majority black and majority white schools were equal in the educational opportunities they provided, there would be no reason for them to be racially separate.

Americans view education as an important mechanism for upward mobility, and since the civil rights movement, they largely see equality of opportunity as a right of Americans of all races and ethnicities. Yet in practice, 60 years after the Brown decision, the opportunities offered white children and those offered to black children remain starkly unequal.
 
[h2]Still twice as likely to be unemployed[/h2]
At the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Walter Reuther, president of the United Automobile Workers of America, proclaimed that black liberation could not be fully secured without a jobs program to achieve full employment:
We will not solve education or housing or public accommodations as long as millions of Americans, Negroes, are treated as second-class economic citizens and denied jobs. And as one American I take the position, if we can have full employment and full production for the negative ends of war then why can’t we have a job for every American in the pursuit of peace?
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Reuther and other march organizers believed that the United States had the wealth to provide a job to everyone who wanted to work, but lacked sufficient political will to do so. They launched the march in part to build that political will. It is shocking how relevant their complaint is today. Recent research shows that economic growth over the last three-and-a-half decades has been more than sufficient to raise living standards for all Americans, but that policies channeled the rewards of economic growth to the top. Among those policies is federal monetary policy that rather than keeping unemployment low, has focused on keeping inflation extremely low, which benefits owners of capital wealth, not workers (Mishel et al. 2012).

Over the last half century, black Americans have always suffered more from high unemployment. In 1963, the unemployment rate was 5.0 percent for whites but 10.9 percent, or 2.2 times the white rate, for blacks.5 The ratio of the black unemployment rate to the white unemployment rate has changed little in the intervening decades, ranging from about 2 times to 2.5 times the white rate (Figure C). It settled at 2.1 times in 2012 (with a black unemployment rate of 14.0 percent, compared with a 6.6 percent rate for whites).

Indeed, black America is nearly always facing an employment situation that would be labeled a particularly severe recession if it characterized the entire labor force. From 1963 to 2012, the annual white unemployment rate averaged 5.1 percent, while the annual black unemployment rate averaged 11.6 percent (Figure D). This was 4.9 percentage points higher than the average annual national unemployment rate during the recessions in this period—6.7 percent.

Even when the national unemployment rate has been low, the African American unemployment rate has been high. For example, in 2000, when the national unemployment rate was 4.0 percent, and the non-Hispanic white unemployment rate was 3.1 percent, the unemployment rate of non-Hispanic blacks was still 7.6 percent. Put another way, even when the economy was booming in 2000, the black unemployment rate was still higher than the average national unemployment rate during recessions.

And when the U.S. economy is in a recession (or still scarred by one), unemployment rates in the black community reach levels seen among the nation as a whole in a depression. For example, in the aftermath of the Great Recession, non-Hispanic white unemployment peaked at 8.0 percent, while the non-Hispanic black unemployment rate rose to 15.9 percent, with non-Hispanic black male unemployment peaking at 18.4 percent. The national unemployment rate averaged 13.1 percent from 1929 to 1939, and peaked at 22.9 percent in 1932 (see the Darby estimates in Margo 1993, 43).

The potential of full employment to lift the economic status of African Americans is hard to overstate. During the late 1990s, when the overall labor market was clearly tight and when black unemployment was at its lowest levels in a generation, black household income relative to white household income rose substantially—more than during any other period since the height of the civil rights movement. In short, equalizing unemployment rates of whites and minorities, and lowering the unemployment rate overall, has enormous potential for fostering economic equality among races.

Without full employment for blacks, it will be impossible for blacks to have low poverty rates. Without full employment for blacks, it will be a tremendous challenge for black children to live up to their potential in school, because parental unemployment impedes children’s educational attainment (Stevens and Schaller 2009; Kalil 2010).

And without full employment for blacks, it will be difficult for many blacks to gain access to decent housing in neighborhoods with resources. As Reuther correctly observed, jobs are the number one prerequisite to solving other social and economic problems confronting blacks.
 
[h2]Still struggling for a living wage[/h2]
One of the key participants of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was John Lewis, who is now the U.S. Representative for Georgia’s 5th congressional district, which he has served since 1987. In 1963, Lewis, who was then the national chairman for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, stated:
We march today for jobs and freedom, but we have nothing to be proud of, for hundreds and thousands of our brothers are not here—for they are receiving starvation wages or no wages at all. While we stand here there are sharecroppers in the Delta of Mississippi who are out in the field working for less than $3.00 a day, twelve hours a day. . . . We need a bill that will ensure the equality of a maid who earns $5.00 a week in the home of a family whose total income is $100,000 a year.
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March organizers demanded a minimum wage that could realistically be expected to lift a family out of poverty. Specifically, they demanded a minimum wage of $2.00 an hour (up from $1.15 an hour). We are nowhere near that goal today. Adjusting for inflation, that wage would be more than $13.00 an hour today, close to twice the current federal minimum wage of $7.25. In fact, the inflation-adjusted value of the minimum wage today is about $2.00 less than it was at its peak value in 1968 (Cooper and Hall 2013).

A higher wage floor would provide benefits to economically vulnerable Americans of all races and ethnicities. In 2011, a full-time year-round worker needed to earn $11.06 an hour to keep a family of four out of poverty. But in 2011, more than a third of non-Hispanic black workers (36 percent) did not earn hourly wages high enough to lift a family of four out of poverty (Mishel et al. 2012, 193), even if they worked full time. An astounding 43.3 percent of Hispanics earned poverty-level wages, as did just under a quarter of non-Hispanic whites.

In addition to the minimum wage, Lewis touched on other issues that, had we more effectively addressed, would not still plague American livelihoods today: wage theft and income inequality.

Clearly, wage theft, whereby workers are not paid what they are legally entitled, is still a problem. A recent study of low-wage workers in Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City found that employers often violated minimum-wage and overtime-pay laws. Nearly one in five black workers (19.1 percent) were paid below the legal minimum wage, and nearly two-thirds (63.9 percent) were not paid the proper wage rate for overtime work (Bernhardt et al. 2009). Thus, some of the lowest-paid black workers are having their earnings effectively stolen by employers.

More generally, income inequality in the United States has grown sharply over the last few decades as households at the top have reaped most of the benefits of economic growth, leaving lower- and middle-class households further behind. For example, from 1979 to 2007, 63.1 percent of total income growth in the American economy went to the top 10 percent of households, leaving 36.9 percent to share among the bottom 90 percent. During this period incomes were relatively stagnant at the bottom and the middle compared with huge growth at the top. Over the 28 years, real annual household income grew 10.8 percent for the bottom fifth of households, 19.2 percent for the middle fifth of households, and a staggering 240.5 percent for the top 1.0 percent of households. This pattern of income growth contrasts sharply with the postwar period, when income growth was broadly shared. (Mishel et al. 2012)

One reason American income inequality is so much more extreme today is because we have allowed the real value of the minimum wage to decline. A minimum wage of $13.00 would allow all full-time, full-year workers to lift families of four out of poverty. Because too many Americans’ expectations about what the U.S. economy can deliver to them have been battered in recent decades, many would see this minimum-wage demand as unrealistically high. But as high as this wage may seem, it is still lower than what the minimum wage would be if it had merely risen in step with gains in economy-wide productivity (Gordon and Schmitt 2013)—a reasonable benchmark for wage increases.

We need policies that ensure workers share in the wealth they help to create. One important step was identified in the demands of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom—a minimum wage that can realistically be expected to lift a family out of poverty. Additionally, more-stringent enforcement of labor laws on the books would go further to protect the wages workers do earn. And income inequality is also “fixable,” through addressing the policies that funnel the rewards of economic growth and productivity gains to the top (Mishel et al. 2012).

http://www.epi.org/publication/unfinished-march-overview/
 
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[h1]Black-white wage gaps expand with rising wage inequality[/h1]
What this report finds: Black-white wage gaps are larger today than they were in 1979, but the increase has not occurred along a straight line. During the early 1980s, rising unemployment, declining unionization, and policies such as the failure to raise the minimum wage and lax enforcement of anti-discrimination laws contributed to the growing black-white wage gap. During the late 1990s, the gap shrank due in part to tighter labor markets, which made discrimination more costly, and increases in the minimum wage. Since 2000 the gap has grown again. As of 2015, relative to the average hourly wages of white men with the same education, experience, metro status, and region of residence, black men make 22.0 percent less, and black women make 34.2 percent less. Black women earn 11.7 percent less than their white female counterparts. The widening gap has not affected everyone equally. Young black women (those with 0 to 10 years of experience) have been hardest hit since 2000.

Why it matters: Though the African American experience is not monolithic, our research reveals that changes in black education levels or other observable factors are not the primary reason the gaps are growing. For example, just completing a bachelor’s degree or more will not reduce the black-white wage gap. Indeed the gaps have expanded most for college graduates. Black male college graduates (both those with just a college degree and those who have gone beyond college) newly entering the workforce started the 1980s with less than a 10 percent disadvantage relative to white college graduates but by 2014 similarly educated new entrants were at a roughly 18 percent deficit.

What it means for policy: Wage gaps are growing primarily because of discrimination (or racial differences in skills or worker characteristics that are unobserved or unmeasured in the data) and growing earnings inequality in general. Thus closing and eliminating the gaps will require intentional and direct action:
  • Consistently enforce antidiscrimination laws in the hiring, promotion, and pay of women and minority workers.
  • Convene a high-level summit to address why black college graduates start their careers with a sizeable earnings disadvantage.
  • Under the leadership of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, identify the “unobservable measures” that impact the black-white wage gap and devise ways to include them in national surveys.
  • Urge the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to work with experts to develop metropolitan area measures of discrimination that could be linked to individual records in the federal surveys so that researchers could directly assess the role that local area discrimination plays in the wage setting of African Americans and whites.
  • Address the broader problem of stagnant wages by raising the federal minimum wage, creating new work scheduling standards, and rigorously enforcing wage laws aimed at preventing wage theft.
  • Strengthen the ability of workers to bargain with their employers by combatting state laws that restrict public employees’ collective bargaining rights or the ability to collect “fair share” dues through payroll deductions, pushing back against the proliferation of forced arbitration clauses that require workers to give up their right to sue in public court, and securing greater protections for freelancers and workers in “gig” employment relationships.
  • Require the Federal Reserve to pursue monetary policy that targets full employment, with wage growth that matches productivity gains.
 
[h2]Introduction and key findings[/h2]
Income inequality and slow growth in the living standards of low- and moderate-income Americans have become defining features of today’s economy, and at their root is the near stagnation of hourly wage growth for the vast majority of American workers. Since 1979, wages have grown more slowly than productivity—a measure of the potential for wage growth—for everyone except the top 5 percent of workers, while wage growth for the top 1 percent has significantly exceeded the rate of productivity growth (Bivens and Mishel 2015). This means that the majority of workers have reaped few of the economic rewards they helped to produce over the last 36 years because a disproportionate share of the benefits have gone to those at the very top. While wage growth lagging behind productivity has affected workers from all demographic groups, wage growth for African American workers has been particularly slow. As a result, large pay disparities by race have remained unchanged or even expanded.

This study describes broad trends and patterns in black-white wage inequality and examines the factors driving these trends as the growing wedge between productivity growth and wage growth has emerged. We do so by updating and extending similar analyses that dominated the literature from the 1960s through the 1990s. The analysis is performed for men and women overall, as well as by experience and educational attainment, during the 1980s, 1990s, and post-2000. In this report, the black-white wage gap is the percent by which wages of black workers lag wages of their white peers. (It is also often expressed in academic and popular literature as an earnings ratio—black workers’ share of white workers’ earnings—by subtracting the gap from 100 percent.) Our major contribution to the existing research is an assessment of the pattern or trend in the black-white wage gap for men since the late 1990s and for women since the late 1980s. In addition to filling this void in the research on racial wage gaps, our analysis also affirms previous studies showing that the black-white wage gap among men expanded during the 1980s and narrowed significantly during the 1990s.

Our primary finding is that there continues to be no single African American economic narrative. Black-white wage gaps are larger today than they were in 1979, but the increase has not occurred along a straight line, nor has it affected everyone equally. Indeed, the post-2000 patterns show that the diversity of experiences has expanded. While young black women newly entering the workforce have fallen furthest behind their white counterparts since 2000, the work experience of older African Americans continues to partially insulate them from macroeconomic and structural factors associated with growing racial inequality. However, this is cold comfort for members of this older cohort who experienced a major loss in their relative wages during the early 1980s, when many of them were first entering the labor market. They have yet to fully recover from the damage of the 1981–1982 recession and the cutbacks, in the 1980s, to political and financial resources to fight labor market discrimination.

We also show that changes in unobservable factors—such as racial wage discrimination, racial differences in unobserved or unmeasured skills, or racial differences in labor force attachment of less-skilled men due to incarceration—along with weakened support to fight labor market discrimination continue to be the leading factors for explaining past and now the recent deterioration in the economic position of many African Americans.

The main results that support these findings are summarized as follows:
  • The black-white wage gap has widened more among women but it is still larger among men. Black men’s average hourly wages were 22.2 percent lower than those of white men in 1979 and declined to 31.0 percent lower by 2015. With an average hourly wage gap of 6.0 percent, black women were near parity with white women in 1979, but by 2015 this gap had grown to 19.0 percent.
  • Differences in observable factors such as education and experience levels can explain more than a quarter of the black-white wage gap for men and over a third of the gap for women. The average (unadjusted) differences in pay between blacks and whites are partially explained by racial differences in education and experience as well as the fact that black workers are more concentrated in the South and in urban areas. These differences account for a fairly consistent portion of the estimated gaps among men (from 5.3 of 22.2 percentage points in 1979 to 9.0 of 31.0 percentage points in 2015), but account for a growing portion of the estimated gaps among women over time (from 1.5 of 6.0 percentage points in 1979 to 7.3 of 19.0 percentage points in 2015).
  • Although racial differences in pay are smaller among women than men, black women face a large disadvantage associated with gender differences in pay. In 1979, black women’s wages were 42.3 percent lower than those of white men and 25.4 percent lower than those of black men. By 2015, these differences had narrowed, but remain significant—34.2 percent and 12.2 percent lower than white and black men, respectively.
  • Just as there are clear differences in racial wage gaps by gender, patterns also vary by experience (age) and level of education. In general, college graduates have fared the worst when it comes to the widening of the gap while black men with more work experience have fared worse when it comes to the overall size of the gap today:
    • The adjusted male black-white wage gap has expanded since 1979 for both new entrants (0 to 10 years of potential experience) and the more experienced (11 to 20 years), but the gaps in each year are always smaller among new entrants. The new-entrant wage gap started at 11.2 percent in 1979 and rose to an 18.7 percent disadvantage in 2015. On the other hand, more experienced black men started with a larger disadvantage of 19.5 percent and ended in 2015 with a 23.5 percent disadvantage.
    • For new entrants, a large wage gap existed for men with no more than a high school diploma in 1980, and it expanded by 2014. Also troubling is the finding that black male college graduates (both those with just a college degree and those who have gone beyond college) started the 1980s with less than a 10 percent disadvantage relative to white male college graduates but by 2014 similarly educated new entrants were at a roughly 20 percent disadvantage.
    • Despite the fact that black women in both experience categories were near parity in 1979, adjusted black-white wage gaps increased so sharply among more experienced women during the 1980s and early 1990s that experienced black women went from having smaller wage gaps than new entrants to having larger gaps. New-entrant women start with a black-white wage gap of 3.7 percent in 1979 and end at 10.8 percent in 2015. On the other hand, more experienced black women start at a 1.5 percent disadvantage that rises to 12.6 percent in 2015.
    • All new-entrant women with a high school diploma or more start the 1980s with similar wage gaps (between 3.0 and 5.0 percent). Among more experienced black women, wage gaps are nearly nonexistent as the 1980s begin or, in the case of college graduates, actually favor black women. In both experience categories, however, the largest increases occur among college-educated women.
  • The widening of racial wage gaps since 1979 is best characterized by three distinct periods of change—expansion during the 1980s, improvement during the 1990s, and expansion since 2000—with the largest shifts generally occurring among new entrants and college graduates. While there are multiple causes, discrimination has consistently played a major role:
    • Between 1979 and 1985, the main sources of expansion of black-white wage gaps among new-entrant men and women were a worsening in discrimination and/or growing differences in unobserved skills, and the decline in relatively good-paying jobs for workers with less than a college degree. Among new-entrant men, these effects far outweighed the positive effects from narrowing the education gap. Increased discrimination was the sole cause of growing racial wage gaps for college graduates during this period.
    • Between 1979 and 1985, racial wage gaps widened most in the Midwest and among men working in the manufacturing industry. Shifting patterns of employment across industries and occupations also contributed to growing racial wage gaps among new-entrant men during this period.
    • The narrowing of new-entrant racial wage gaps during the second half of the 1990s was largely due to a reduction in discrimination as labor markets tightened and public policy became more favorable for reducing racial wage inequality. Continued progress in narrowing education gaps between young black and white men also contributed to improvements during this period.
    • Between the Great Recession of 2007–2009 and 2015, gaps among new-entrant women expanded more than among any other experience/gender group. The same factor that dominated prior to 2000—growing labor market discrimination—is the primary source of the erosion. Another major contributor has been the growing racial gap in college completion.
    • While the effects of changing occupational patterns on trends in women’s racial wage gaps are minor in most periods, they have had the largest effect since 2000.
    • Growing earnings inequality has impacted young black college-educated men’s and women’s wage deterioration more in the years since the Great Recession than during any other period.
  • Black-white wage inequality among less-educated workers is becoming less of a regional issue but a greater problem for Americans overall. Since 1979, black-white wage gaps across regions have converged, but at higher levels of inequality. The deterioration of regional economies has been very bad news for less educated blacks. Inasmuch as they could move to better regions, at least from a wage standpoint, this is no longer possible, or as feasible. Racial wage gaps have grown most in the Midwest (where gaps were smallest in 1979) and least in the South (where gaps were largest in 1979).
  • Declining unionization has had a role in the growing black-white wage gap, particularly for men newly joining the workforce. Between 1983 and 2015, the years for which data on union membership by race are available, the black-white wage gap grew 1.6 percent among new-entrant men and 3.0 percent among experienced men. The decline in unionization (membership and state union density) accounts for about one-fourth to one-fifth of this growth, regardless of experience. Among new-entrant men, a diminishing union wage premium (the percentage-higher wage earned by those covered by a collective bargaining contract) accounts for 43 percent of the total growth in the men’s racial wage gap; among experienced men it accounts for one-third.
Our analysis of black-white wage gaps proceeds as follows. In Section 2, we place the black-white wage gap into the broader context of overall wage trends since 1979. Section 3 describes the literature on black-white wage inequality and the contributions of this study. Section 4 describes the data used in this analysis, and Section 5 describes broad trends and patterns in black-white wage inequality for men and women overall, as well as by potential experience and educational attainment. Section 6 breaks down these trends in a detailed analysis that includes regional and industry variations, the effects of declining unionization, and changing patterns of employment across industries and occupations. Section 7 concludes with an overview of the major themes and policy recommendations.
 
[h2]Wages, wage growth, and wage inequality since 1979[/h2]
Income inequality and slow growth in the living standards of low- and moderate-income Americans have become defining features of today’s economy, challenging the popular notion that with hard work anyone can get ahead in the United States. At the root of these economic challenges is the near stagnation of hourly wage growth for the vast majority of American workers over the last three-and-a-half decades. The salience of these issues is evidenced by the fact that terms like economic inequality, stagnant wages, and rebuilding the middle class are frequently used in national discourse on the state of the American economy, as well as by people in both political parties.

The fingerprints of several policy decisions and business practices, including eroded labor standards, weakened labor market institutions, and excessive executive pay growth, can be found in the history of wage growth in the past generation (Bivens et al. 2014; Bivens and Mishel 2015; Mishel and Eisenbrey 2015). A key measure of the potential for pay increases is productivity growth, and since 1979 wages have grown more slowly than productivity for everyone except the top 5 percent of workers, while wage growth for the top 1 percent has significantly exceeded the rate of productivity growth. The disconnect between wage and productivity growth means that the majority of workers have reaped few of the economic rewards they helped to produce over the last 36 years because most of the benefits have gone to those at the very top of the wage scale.

While this experience has not been limited to any single group of workers, African Americans have been disproportionately affected by the growing gap between pay and productivity. Figure A shows that since 1979 median hourly real wage growth has fallen short of productivity growth for all groups of workers, regardless of race or gender. At the same time, wages for African American men and women have grown more slowly than those of their white counterparts. As a result, pay disparities by race and ethnicity have remained unchanged or have expanded.

Figure A

Table 1 further demonstrates the intersection of class and racial inequality, presenting trends in real wages and wage growth at the 10th, 50th, and 95th percentiles, as well as at the mean, of the wage distribution by race. We present these data for the business cycle peak years of 1979, 1989, 2000, and 2007, as well as for 1995 (the point during the 1990s business cycle after which wages grew dramatically) and for 2015 (the last year for which data are available).

One of the reasons that the average black-white wage gap has continued to expand is the fact that very few African Americans earn wages that place them among the top 5 percent of all wage earners, where most growth has been concentrated. Only 3 percent of all chief executives are African American, and a disproportionate number of them are employed in the public or private nonprofit sectors, where salaries are lower and more likely to be capped than they are in the private for-profit sector.1 In 2015, the hourly wages of the top 5 percent (95th percentile) of black earners was 31.2 percent less than the top 5 percent of white earners, corresponding to hourly wages of $42.07 for blacks and $61.12 for whites. These wage gaps are smaller among moderate earners, but they don’t go away completely. At the 50th percentile (median), blacks earn 26.2 percent less than whites, and at the 10th percentile blacks earn 11.8 percent less than whites. In addition to these racial differences in pay, Table 1 also makes clear that, over the last 36 years, strong wage growth has eluded most workers, regardless of race, and, to the extent that wages have grown at all, most of the growth happened in a single episode between 1995 and 2000. In almost every economic cycle preceding and following the late 1990s boom, wage growth of black and white low- to middle-wage earners was either flat or negative. Between 1979 and 2015, wages declined 8.5 percent for blacks in the 10th percentile and grew only 0.7 percent for whites. At the median, the wages of blacks grew a meager 1.8 percent, while those of whites grew only 11.9 percent. This compares with growth of 36.1 percent and 26.7 percent for 95th percentile whites and blacks, respectively.

These patterns suggest that addressing the problems of stagnant wages and racial wage inequality has now become a dual imperative. While wage inequality is largely understood as a class issue, it is also important to understand how the stagnation of wages for the vast majority of all workers has contributed to measured racial wage inequality. At the same time, any effort to fully remedy racial wage gaps in a way that boosts wages and improves living standards for African American families must end the decades of broad-based wage stagnation that has had the most damaging effects on African American workers. This report focuses on trends in black-white wage gaps since 1979, including an analysis of the role that growing overall wage inequality has played.

Read the rest here  http://www.epi.org/publication/black-white-wage-gaps-expand-with-rising-wage-inequality/
 
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