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ANN ARBOR — The map of racial inequality in America is changing. While the income gap between Black and white families isn’t closing much on a national level, locally, things have moved quite a bit — and in surprising places, too.

New research from Robert Manduca, assistant professor of sociology and a faculty associate in the Institute for Social Research’s Population Studies Center, Survey Research Center and the Stone Center for Inequality Dynamics, charts the changes in family income in both Black and white families since 1969. In “Shift, Not Stasis: The Geography of Post–Civil Rights Racial Inequality,” Manduca notes that in 1969, a Black family in America made, on average, 53% of white families nationwide. With some fluctuation in between, that number rose to 60% as of 2017, according to American Community Survey Estimates.

“Fifty years after the Civil Rights movement, I think the slow pace of change has  been a source of disappointment and frustration for a lot of people, and rightly so,” Manduca said.

But at the local level, there has been movement, for better and for worse. The happier part of the story is in the American South, where income disparities, though still present, have narrowed considerably. Incomes for Black families in the South increased from a median ratio of a little bit less than 50% (and as low as 30 to 35% in some specific places) to 63% as of 2017.

Why the increase? Relative to the rest of the country, incomes for both Black and white families have gone up, but they’ve gone up faster for Black families than white families, leading to something resembling a convergence.

“We’re not anywhere near true parity yet, but nonetheless it is a big change from where it had been and a meaningful improvement.”

To Manduca, this suggests some level of success to Civil Rights-era reforms, which were targeted more pointedly at the South. However, these gains have been offset by backsliding in other parts of the country, like the Northeast and Midwest. While the median income ratio outside the South was 67% in 1969, it fell to 59% by 2017. This means that racial income disparities today are smaller in the South today than in the rest of the country, an inversion of much conventional wisdom about racial inequality in the United States. 

Manduca points to two possible reasons for the change. First, parts of the Northeast and Midwest have rapidly deindustrialized, leading to significant income loss for both Black and white families, but faster declines for Black families.

Second, in some places that have experienced economic booms, the prosperity has not been equally shared. 

“In San Francisco, for example, incomes for white residents have grown almost 50% faster than in the rest of the country, but incomes for Black residents have grown more slowly than Black incomes for the country overall,” Manduca said. 

All of these factors swirl together to create a complex picture of race and inequality, one that has shifted dramatically over the last half century of American life. 

“At the national scale, it looks like nothing has changed, but really what’s happened is that there’s been a pretty big shift in the geography of which places are more racially unequal and which places are less racially unequal.”

“Shift, Not Stasis: The Geography of Post–Civil Rights Racial Inequality” is available online from the University of Chicago Press Journals.