Addressing the U.S. racial economic mobility and inequality divides

Key resources

This post features graphics on Black-White disparities in wages, intergenerational mobility, wealth, homeownership, incarceration, and health. The post demonstrates how policy decisions and racial discrimination created and continue to perpetuate economic disparities between White and Black Americans and offers policies to address the structural barriers driving these disparities.

This post explains that geographic and racial differences in economic mobility are particularly important from a policy perspective for three reasons. First, racial differences in mobility can exacerbate racial differences in other areas such as in housing, education, and health. Second, inequalities in opportunity are antithetical to our nation’s creed of equal opportunity for all. And third, structural differences in mobility limit the potential for overall U.S. economic growth.

This essay first examines the historic links between intergenerational economic mobility and race and income inequality—trends heavily influenced by changing patterns in geographic mobility—and how these trends are tied to explicit policy decisions in the past that persist today in terms of housing, education, and health inequality among low- and middle-income Black Americans. The authors discuss educational, housing, and income remedies for persistently low intergenerational economic mobility among Black Americans and how these policies could be put into action and paid for.

This essay discusses how the exponential growth in incarceration in the United States over the past 50 years has been due to more punitive criminal justice policies that tried to address racial and economic inequality through the criminal justice system instead of social programming. Cox calls for U.S. policymaking to shift toward addressing the root causes of racial inequality and poverty. One first step would be to conduct an audit of current federal crime-control policies and funding to eradicate policies that lead to greater racial disparities within the criminal justice system.

This research analysis compares intergenerational mobility in the United States versus Canada. The author highlights findings showing that despite the United States having higher average incomes than Canada, areas of particularly low mobility are concentrated on the U.S. side of the border, cover a large proportion of the U.S. population, and are driven by racial disparities in mobility between Black and White Americans. One explanation for why this pattern is observed almost exclusively in the United States is offered in another piece of research (opens in a new tab) by University of California, Berkeley economist and Equitable Growth grantee Ellora Derenoncourt , who finds that as Black Americans migrated from the South, Northern cities decreased their investments in all public goods other than policing.

Top experts 

• Liz Hipple, senior policy advisor, Washington Center for Equitable Growth
• William Darity, Jr., Samuel DuBois Cook professor of public policy, African and African American studies, and economics, Duke University
• Darrick Hamilton, incoming Henry Cohen professor of economics and urban policy, The New School
• Bradley Hardy, associate professor of public administration and policy, American University
• Ellora Derenoncourt, assistant professor in the Department of Economics and the Goldman School of Public Policy, University of California, Berkeley
• Trevon Logan, Hazel C. Youngberg Trustees distinguished professor of economics, The Ohio State University
• Robynn Cox, assistant professor at the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work

To view the other policy sheets in this series, please click here.