The Economist magazine, citing a 2011 Chicago Federal Reserve study, noted that “roughly 60% of black Americans whose parents had an above-average income fell below the average as adults. The figure for whites was 36%.”25 An earlier Pew study found that some 45 percent of blacks (versus 15 percent of whites) who were born into the middle class in the 1960s had slid into poverty or near-poverty. Since it is unlikely that the effects of slavery and Jim Crow are hopscotching generations, perhaps something else is to blame.
