Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

by Arlie Russell Hochschild

But what has caused this stall? Have blacks leapt ahead of whites in education and income? To judge by our daily exposure to images of African Americans as television news anchors, film stars, football and basketball stars, one could easily gain the impression that for a group that’s only 13 percent of the population, blacks have enjoyed spectacular success, leaving whites behind, and one might assume that things like Ray Bowman’s affirmative action pie chart were the cause. But images can mislead. For over the last thirty years, average blacks have not gained relative to average whites in education, jobs, or wealth. Shockingly, in 2015, black freshmen were more underrepresented at the nation’s top one hundred universities than they were in 1980. In 2015, 15 percent of American eighteen-year-olds were black, but at elite colleges only 6 percent of (noninternational) freshmen were black. The gap in household income has also remained about the same today as it was thirty years ago—with black households earning roughly 55 percent of that earned in white households. The 2008 financial crash also hit African Americans much harder than it hit whites. In 2004, the median wealth of white households was eleven times higher than that of blacks; in 2009 it was nineteen times higher.