Black. White. is an American reality television series that aired on FX. The series premiered on March 8, 2006, and supposedly documented two voluntary families of three, one white, and the other black, in which through studio-quality make-up, the two families would give off a facade appearance, of portraying a race that isn't their own, for social experiment purposes. It garnered controversy for its subject matter and perceived reinforcement of racial stereotypes.
Black White
The gap in the homeownership rate between black and white households is the highest it has been in 50 years. This report examines key variables that explain the black-white homeownership gap and estimates the role that income, education, credit score, and marital status play both nationally and locally in 105 MSAs with large black populations. The researchers determine that roughly 17 percent of the homeownership gap remains unexplained by observed variables and could be caused by differences in parental wealth, information networks or the vestiges of policies and structures that have made it difficult for black households to obtain and benefit from homeownership. The researchers also recommend specific policy actions for officials across federal, state, and local government as well as institutional policy changes.
Background: For every maternal death, >100 women experience severe maternal morbidity, which is a life-threatening diagnosis, or undergo a life-saving procedure during their delivery hospitalization. Similar to racial/ethnic disparities in maternal death, black women are more likely to experience severe maternal morbidity than white women. Site of care has received attention as a mechanism to explain disparities in other areas of medicine. Data indicate that black women receive care in a concentrated set of hospitals and that these hospitals appear to provide lower quality of care. Whether racial differences in the site of delivery contribute to observed black-white disparities in severe maternal morbidity rates is unknown.
Objective: The purpose of this study was to determine whether hospitals with high proportions of black deliveries have higher severe maternal morbidity and whether such differences contribute to overall black-white disparities in severe maternal morbidity.
Study design: We used a published algorithm to identify cases of severe maternal morbidity during deliveries in the Nationwide Inpatient Sample of the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project for 2010 and 2011. We ranked hospitals by their proportion of black deliveries into high black-serving (top 5%), medium black-serving (5% to 25% range), and low black-serving hospitals. We analyzed the risks of severe maternal morbidity for black and white women by hospital black-serving status using logistic regressions that were adjusted for patient characteristics, comorbidities, hospital characteristics, and within-hospital clustering. We then derived adjusted rates from these models.
Results: Seventy-four percent of black deliveries occurred at high and medium black-serving hospitals. Overall, severe maternal morbidity occurred more frequently among black than white women (25.8 vs 11.8 per 1000 deliveries, respectively; P
Conclusion: Most black deliveries occur in a concentrated set of hospitals, and these hospitals have higher severe maternal morbidity rates. Targeting quality improvement efforts at these hospitals may improve care for all deliveries and disproportionately impact care for black women.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This study revisits the trend analysis that dominated the literature from the 1960s through the 1990s, and we update and extend previous studies by examining what has happened to the black-white wage gap since the late 1990s. Our analysis affirms that the black-white wage gap among men expanded during the 1980s and narrowed significantly during the 1990s. Our contribution is a detailed assessment of what has been the pattern or trend for men since the late 1990s and women since the late 1980s.
Patterns in imprisonment might put pressure on the wage gaps among the young and less educated to narrow, or at best remain the same. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, although the ratio of the imprisonment rate of white men and black men sat at 5.9 in 2014, it fell from 7.7 in 2000. The ratios among white women and black women fell from 6.0 in 2000 to 2.1 in 2014. For both, much of the drop was from 2000 to 2007 because the white imprisonment rate rose while the African American imprisonment rate fell. Because the ratio remains so large, imprisonment and its labor market scarring effects will definitely contribute to wage gaps in a given year, but their pattern over time since 2000 should assist in narrowing the wage gap.
Unionization has historically provided a wage advantage to black workers, since union members receive higher wages than otherwise similar non-union workers and union membership rates are highest among black workers. Bound and Freeman (1992) documented the effect of declining unionization on wage losses among black men during the 1980s. Since then, the share of workers with union representation has continued to decline, falling 11 percentage points among blacks and 8 percentage points among whites between 1989 and 2015.6 We expect that this ongoing downward trend in overall union density and the convergence of membership rates among black and white workers has contributed to either flat or worsening racial wage gaps in the years since 2000.
Figure B plots the trend in log hourly wage gaps (the percentage disadvantage) between black and white workers by gender since 1979. The graph includes four series, an adjusted and unadjusted series each for men and women. The unadjusted wage gaps are simply the average differences reported in the survey, while the adjusted series present wage gaps among full-time workers after controlling for racial differences in education, potential experience, region of residence, and metro status.
The adjusted estimates also help us to more clearly identify periods of wage convergence that are less obvious from observing trends in the average (unadjusted) gaps. The adjusted series for men and women in Figure B both show a brief period of progress toward racial pay equity between 1996 and 2000. During this period, the adjusted black-white wage gap falls from 23 percent to 20 percent among men and from 10 percent to 7 percent among women. During the late 1990s, macroeconomic growth was sustained and broad-based, and public policy became more favorable for reducing racial wage inequality. For example, the Bureau of Labor Statistics unemployment rate fell and remained below 5.0 percent from July 1997 to September 2001, and the federal minimum wage was increased in 1997 and 1998. Also, the number of states that set their minimum wage in excess of the federal minimum wage increased. The convergence of the wage gap during this period ended with the start of the short and shallow recession of 2001. 2ff7e9595c
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