Black Neighborhoods Matter, Too
George Floyd’s pain didn’t begin on May 25th, and our racial reckoning doesn’t end with the police
Can Erbil, August 10th, 2020
George Floyd’s murder at the hands of a white Minneapolis Police officer last month has brought the reality of racism in the United States into the white mainstream. We would be remiss if we spent this moment focused only on violence caught on camera. Racism played a defining role in George Floyd’s life since long before his fatal encounter with Derek Chauvin on May 25th, 2020.
George Floyd grew up in the Cuney Homes, a housing project in the Third Ward in Houston known as the Bricks. By studying the lives of children raised in the same neighborhood to similar parents, we know George Floyd was more than four times as likely to be incarcerated as he was to earn a college degree.
According to Opportunity Atlas, 12% of the children who grew up in the lowest-income families in George Floyd’s neighborhood who are in their mid thirties today were in jail as of April 1st, 2010. This number rises to 22% for Black men from the lowest-income families. In other words, nearly one in four Black boys with poor parents growing up in George Floyd’s neighborhood were incarcerated on a given day.
Meanwhile, 36% of the children who grew up in low-income families in George Floyd’s neighborhood hold a four-year college degree. For Black men, this number is below five percent.
George was not one of the lucky five percent. He attended community college for two years as well as Texas A&M, briefly, but ultimately returned to his neighborhood without a degree.
After returning to the Bricks, George “fell into the things a lot of the guys in the neighborhood were doing” according to his friend Meshah Hawkins. He ran into trouble with the law in his 20s and 30s. He was incarcerated in 2009 for four years, making him part of the 22% of his peers who were incarcerated on the day of the 2010 Census.
George’s childhood neighborhood was nearly 100 percent Black. On average, Black men who grew up in George’s neighborhood to low-income parents earn only $13,000 in adulthood. The employment rate for children who grew up in George’s neighborhood was 71% as of 2015. For low income Black men, this rate was 63%. On May 25th, 2020, when he was killed, George Floyd was out of work.
At the time of the 2010 Census, there were 827 children living in George Floyd’s childhood neighborhood. Of these children, only 38 went on to earn more than their parents. In other words, George Floyd had only a five percent chance of achieving the American Dream of upward mobility.
The striking patterns described here represent the reality in Black neighborhoods across the United States. In 99% of neighborhoods, Black boys earn less in adulthood than white boys who grow up in families with comparable incomes. This fact is illustrated by the map below, which shows the income in adulthood for low income Black and white men raised in low income families. When you look at these two maps, it might look like they are on two different color scales, but if you look at the legend at the bottom, you can see that they illustrate a striking fact about racial disparities in the United States. According to Opportunity Insights, “The distribution of upward mobility across areas for Black men is almost non-overlapping with the distribution of upward mobility across areas for white men. One way to think about it is it’s almost like you have two Americas with completely different rates of upward mobility for white and Black men.”
The discrepancies are more than economic. Many young Black men, in many neighborhoods across the U.S., regardless of the income levels of their parents are more likely to go to prison than college. According to Census data, only 15.7% of Black males between the ages of 25 and 29 completed 4-year college or more between 1998 and 2002 when George Floyd was in that cohort, whereas there is a 21.4% chance that a Black man with a high school diploma will be imprisoned by his mid-thirties.
This pattern repeats in many neighborhoods; for a Black male from a low income family, the chances of receiving a 4-year college degree versus going to prison looks like this: in Chicago, IL, it is less than 5% versus 20%, in Denver, Colorado it is 7% versus 27%, in Reno, NV it is less than 5% versus 44%, in Minneapolis, MN where George Floyd was killed, it is 7.2% versus 19% and in Atlanta, GA, in Fulton County, in the neighborhood were Rayshard Brooks was killed, it is 12% versus 15%…
Policymakers working to uphold the truth that Black Lives Matter have a duty to address these rampant inequalities. In addition to fighting systemic racism and police brutality, we need sound structural change to provide more economic and distributive justice, more educational opportunities and ultimately a more equitable society. The momentum of today provides an opportunity for a long-term cure and we should not miss it.
Note: I would like to thank Raj Chetty (Harvard University) and Abigail Hiller (Opportunity Insight) for their suggestions and assistance with the Opportunity Atlas dataset.
Can Erbil is a Professor of the Practice of Economics at Boston College. He has been teaching 25 years and has publications on applied economic policy issues. His current focus is economic inequality and raising awareness to the widening equality gap in the U.S.
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