RACE, NOT JOB, PREDICTS ECONOMIC OUTCOMES FOR BLACK HOUSEHOLDS

During the decade-long economic recovery following the Great Recession, Black households lost much more wealth than white families, regardless of class or profession, according to new research from Duke University’s Samuel DuBois Cook Center for Social Equity. 

“One of the important contributions of this study is our conscious effort not to treat everyone who engages in paid labor as members of the working class,” says co-author William A. Darity Jr., founding director of the Cook Center and the Samuel DuBois Cook Professor of Public Policy, African and African American Studies and economics at Duke University. “We separate the working class from the professional-managerial class and demonstrate this has strong implications for uneven recoveries from the Great Recession and uneven access to wealth across households.”

The paper is available online in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences. Read more here.