Census: Widening Income Gap as Blacks Leave Cities

Affluent black Americans who are leaving industrial cities for the suburbs and the South are shifting traditional lines between rich and poor, according to new census data. Their migration is widening the income gap between whites and the inner-city blacks who remain behind, while making blacks less monolithic as a group and subject to greater income disparities.

“Reverse migration is changing the South and its race relations,” said Roderick Harrison, a Howard University sociologist and former chief of racial statistics at the Census Bureau.

He said a rising black middle class is promoting a growing belief among some black conservatives that problems of the disadvantaged are now rooted more in character or cultural problems, rather than race. But Harrison said most black Americans maintain a strong racial identity, focused on redressing perceived lack of opportunities, in part because many of them maintain close ties to siblings or other blacks who are less successful.

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The typical white person last year earned income roughly 1.7 times higher than that of blacks, the widest ratio since the 1990s. Census figures released Thursday show that cities such as Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia, Cleveland and Milwaukee in particular saw increases in inequality, hurt by an exodus of middle-class minorities while lower-skilled blacks stayed in the cities.

Low-income blacks also slipped further behind. The share of black households ranking among the poorest poor–those earning less than $15,000–climbed from 20 percent to 26 percent over the past decade; other race and ethnic groups posted smaller increases. {snip}

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Other findings:

–Counties with the greatest income gaps between non-Hispanic whites and Latinos included New York, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles and the Washington, D.C., suburbs, as well as smaller, more rural counties in the South and West where the numbers of Mexican immigrants have been growing.

–Thirteen percent of Latinos and 18 percent of blacks held at least a bachelor’s degree last year, compared with 31 percent of non-Hispanic whites and 50 percent of Asians. That is up from 2000, when 10 percent of Hispanics and 14 percent of blacks completed college.

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