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Singletary: Our black sons face hard road to success

By Michelle Singletary

Published: March 23, 2018, 6:05am

My son will turn 20 at the end of the month, and there is one thing that is causing him a great deal of stress. He’s concerned about finding the right career path and making enough money to live well.

By any reasonable measure, my son should have an upper hand in life. He’s the product of a two-parent household. He lived all his life in upper-income neighborhoods. He attended private school. Both my husband and I have advanced degrees. We earn good money.

But I’ve always known he has a harder road to walk. Even as a toddler, I began to see the differences in how my son was treated. Where his sisters were given grace for mistakes, he was handled more harshly. His tears met with “buck-it-up” responses. Although my son is on the autism spectrum, he’s always done well in school. Yet his ability to succeed was constantly questioned.

Now comes a new report that further feeds my concerns for my son.

In 99 percent of neighborhoods in the U.S., black boys grow up to earn less than white boys who are raised in families with comparable income, according to a study from the Equality of Opportunity Project. Even black boys who come from wealthy families, living on the same block, still earn less as adults than white boys with similar upbringings.

My heart dropped. Here is confirmation from groundbreaking work on the economic gap between black and white males. The paper is called “Race and Economic Opportunity in the United States: An Intergenerational Perspective,” by Raj Chetty of Stanford University, Nathaniel Hendren of Harvard University and Maggie R. Jones and Sonya Porter, both from the U.S. Census Bureau.

The team analyzed rates of upward and downward mobility across generations using Census data on 20 million children and their parents. Researchers found that black children born to lower-income parents have difficulty improving their economic status compared with similarly situated whites. And the gap is substantial. For black children in the bottom rung of household income, there is a 2.5 percent chance of them rising to the top tier of household income, compared with 10.6 percent for whites.

But the most startling result from the research was this: Growing up in a high-income family doesn’t provide insulation from income disparities for black boys.

So, why is there a gap?

Could it be because the boys are more likely to come from a single-parent household?

No, marital status played only a limited role in explaining the disparity.

What about ability? Researchers dismissed this, too.

They found that when considering what their parents earn, black women have incomes and wage rates comparable to white women, despite having much lower test scores. This, the researchers said, “suggests that tests do not accurately measure differences in ability.”

If it’s not a matter of parental marriage or education level, or household wealth or test scores, then what?

It may be environmental, according to the research.

“These findings suggest that reducing the black-white income gap will require efforts whose impacts cross neighborhood and class lines and increase upward mobility specifically for black men.”

The odds are against my son and too much is at stake for us to watch from a distance as our black boys sink or swim. I have regular talks with his college counselor and, together with my son, we’ve developed a team approach to make sure he excels.

Call me a helicopter parent if you want, but this research proves that our black boys — including my son — can’t afford a hands-off approach.

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