Historically, one of the major contributors to the Black-White earning gap was geography. Black workers disproportionately lived in the South, and the South, on average, had lower pay scales for most jobs, so the national Black-White disparity was in part a reflection of that geographic difference.19 Over time, however, this relative Black concentration in the South has become smaller, and economic differences among regions have also become smaller. As a result, the effect of geography on the Black-White pay gap has largely disappeared and in 2017 accounted for only about 1 percent of the
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