Black Americans Gain No Ground on Income and Wealth
Other measures such as employment and life expectancy paint a more encouraging picture, but the racial quality-of-life gap remains immense.
Black Americans aren’t closing the wealth gap with White ones.
Photographer: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
How long will it take Black Americans to catch up to their White neighbors’ quality of life? The headline answer is 320 years, at least according to a new report by the McKinsey Institute for Black Economic Mobility. Specifically, that’s the estimate based on a combination of economic, health and other metrics for the 8.7% of Black Americans who live in what McKinsey dubs “stable rural counties,” where the catch-up period is longest. The shortest catch-up time is 110 years, in “trailing rural counties” where residents of all races are struggling. In the “urban periphery” — the suburban counties that by most measures deliver the best quality-of-life outcomes for their Black residents — it’s 120 years. This is assuming things stand still for White residents, which outside of those trailing rural counties they probably won’t.
The report is invaluable in showing that the kinds of counties where Black Americans are most overrepresented and where almost half of them live, what McKinsey calls “megacities” (New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, etc.; estimated catch-up time: 160 years) and “stable cities” (Detroit, Pittsburgh, Birmingham, etc.; catch-up time: 240 years), don’t offer great quality of life for their Black residents. Wondering why Black people have been leaving many of these places? Here’s part of your answer.