I thought this was important so I went to the US Census Bureau table on mean income over time against race to get mean incomes for whites and blacks from 1948-2001 (in fixed 2001 dollars). Then I created a graph of it.

http://cellar.org/2004/raceincome.gif

Conclusion: there is still a very large gap in income. However, percentage-wise, blacks ARE catching up. White income was about 100% higher than black income in 1948 and now is about 30% higher.

I also learned, in browsing around the tables at the census bureau, that in 2001 white women and black women's mean income was about the SAME. !!!

Rather illuminating.

Thanks for the extra effort. Graphs can be a bitch.

(Fixed 2001 dollars means adjusted for inflation, right?)

Wierd. An almost fixed difference of $7500 the whole way down. I wonder what accounts for something that constant.

Correlation can be hard to find sometimes. The trick is to avoid attribution, or spurious correlation, under those conditions.

And I agree, weird.

Those lines just seem too similar to me. Every wave and crest. I can't bring myselft to believe that blacks were doing that well relative to whites pre 1950. The $7,500 gap today seems believable but in 1950? That's almost laughable. Not questioning UT's work but the data itself.

You don't think they were making half salary on average, pre 1950? There were (and still are) a lot of poor whites to balance out the rich elites, and the number is mean salary, not average, so the robber barrons don't throw the number off too much.

thanks for that effort UT. good job.

It is adjusted for inflation, so the real numbers in 1950 were more like $2000 vs $1000.

Yeah, thanks for that UT that's very interesting