With the Same People Having the Jobs and the Same People Determining our Wages. The following graphs appeared in the New York Times on Wednesday. Across a broad range of economic and demographic indicators, the data paint a largely depressing picture. Five decades past the era of legal segregation, a chasm remains between black and white Americans – and in some important respects it’s as wide as ever.
The unemployment gap is virtually unchanged over the last 40 years. The income and wealth gaps have actually widened. So has the gap in educational attainment. Through economic booms and busts, the unemployment rate has been persistently higher for African-Americans than for whites across the decades.
