The first article, "African American, Hispanic, and White Beliefs about Black/White Inequality, 1977-2004" by Matthew O. Hunt, is a study on why blacks are more disadvantaged. The data was from the General Social Surveys and was from the years 1977 to 2004. The dependent variables were person centered and "structuralist" attributions, which were determined by a multiple-choice question asked. There was a good amount of people who fell into both categories as well. The independent variables were race/ethnicity, social class, education, gender, region (liberal/conservative), and religious fundamentalism. One of the biggest jumps throughout the years studied was with non-Hispanic Whites, and the question stating that blacks had "less in-born ability" as the reason to their disadvantage. From 1977 to 1994, Whites were pretty steady between 26 and 15 percent, but in 1996 to 2004 there is a major decrease in whites that believe this. Non-Hispanic Whites were equally or less likely to believe that blacks have "less in-born ability," than Blacks or Hispanics. Another interesting finding was the gap between non-Hispanic Whites and blacks when it came to the reasoning being discrimination for Blacks disadvantages. As the years went on, all three races studied steadily went down in percentage in this category. It is interesting to note that in 1985-89, 39.2% of Whites believed that Blacks were disadvantaged due to discrimination, while 76.6% of Blacks believed that the disadvantage was due to discrimination.
The second article is titled "Segregation by race and income in the United States 1970-2010" and is by Jake Intrator, Jonathan Tannen, and Douglas S. Massey. In their research, they looked at residential segregation and spatial interactions. They found that as income goes up in minorities, it gives them more access to more interactions with white and integrated neighborhoods. The interesting part of their finding was that although this does happen for minorities, it happens much less for blacks than for the other minority groups. The data in this article is from Brown University's Longitudinal Tract Data Base, which is a census tract. The independent variables used were racial prejudice, minority composition, population, industrial organization, urbanism, and geography. The findings were that since 1970 the segregation levels of blacks and whites have steadily decreased. Levels between Asian and whites, and Hispanics and whites have increased throughout the years. Segregation by income has risen and so have inequalities of income and wealth. Since there is still high black segregation and limited ability to have residential contact with whites, even as income rises, means that Blacks are not as able to separate themselves from the poor.
References
