Race And Wealth

There is a large and comprehensive study out of the intergenerational social mobility along racial and ethnic lines.  Interestingly, it finds that if you control for variables, the income and wealth gap between black women and white women is very small.  The income and wealth gap between black men and white men is huge, and what is more, being wealthy to start out doesn't help.  Usually, the best way to be wealthy is to be born into wealth, yet for black men, that isn't a guarantee.

First, as is noted in the article, this should put the "nail in the coffin" of the odious racism of The Bell Curve.  If blacks were simply inferior to whites, then we would see the same gap that we see between black men and white men between black women and white women.  A few African American activists and scholars have decried this as pathologizing the black male or mythologizing the black female. 

I think that's wrong.  This isn't drawing any conclusions, it's simply measuring what exists.  What this study does is measure the effects of racism on black men.  While black women are incarcerated at higher rates than white women, both numbers are relatively low.  While incarceration alone can't explain the difference in black men and white men, we can look at the high rates of incarceration of black men as a proxy for how white society looks at black men as threatening.  That feeling of threat pervades the black male's world. 

If racism is more than simply bigotry, if it is in fact a power system, then racism towards black men is being measured in this study, not explained.