Black Child National Agenda, Policy 2
Address Racial Disparities in Wages & Career Advancements
A major part of creating economic equity, eliminating poverty, and securing the lives of black children and families is eliminating racial disparities in wages and career advancement opportunities. If parents are not earning enough or are encountering barriers toward increasing their income through employment, it threatens the health, safety, education, and overall livelihood of black children. This in turn creates negative impacts that ripple throughout generations. The dashboard below shows statistical information relevant to career opportunities, employment, and wages of Black Americans.
Key Insights & Analysis
- Black American’s are employed in lower paying career fields at higher percentages.
- In states where higher percentages of Blacks are employed in higher paying career fields, food stamp recipiency is lower.
About the Data
The data used in the above dashboards are from the following sources:
IPUMS USA, American Community Survey – https://usa.ipums.org/usa/
Bureau of Labor Statistics – https://www.bls.gov/
US Census Bureau – https://www.census.gov/
Child Opportunity Index – https://www.diversitydatakids.org/child-opportunity-index
When working with data from the American Community Survey, because Chinese & Japanese are the two largest subgroups of Asian-Americans, those two groups were isolated & combined in order to present a more concise representation. As a result, the label “Chinese & Japanese” was used in the data visualizations rather than “Asian”.
Race/Ethnic Descriptors
We use the term “Black” as a pan-ethnic description of anyone having any ancestral heritage from Africa. This includes individuals who identify as African American—those who were primarily born in America and are descendants of enslaved Africans—as well as those living in America who identify as Black African or Afro-Caribbean. “Black” also includes those who reported being Black alone or in combination with one or more races or ethnicities in their responses to the U.S. Census, such as Afro-Latine.
Consistent with experts in the field, we use Latine to refer to individuals whose cultural background originated in Latin America. While Latinx is being used as a gender-inclusive term to refer to people with Latin American backgrounds, Spanish-speakers find that Latinx is unpronounceable in Spanish. Therefore, we have opted to use the gender-inclusive term Latine, commonly used throughout Spanish-speaking Latin American.