The bottom’s a looong way to the top

Read this piece, originally run last October at Brookings, on a historic study of Baltimore and its opportunities. From author Karl Alexander:

White men without college degrees are better-off because they have access to relatively lucrative blue-collar jobs through social ties within their families and their largely segregated neighborhoods. Eighty-nine percent of white high school dropouts were working at age 22; the figure for black dropouts was 40 percent. Contrary to popular portrayals of inner-city Baltimore, this isn’t due to differences in drug use and related social maladies.  Higher- and lower-income white men were more likely than their African American counterparts to use hard drugs and marijuana, smoke, and binge drink.  These young men, poor white and black alike, had numerous problem encounters with the law, but a police record was less of an impediment to whites in the job market.  And in the industrial and construction trades, where 45% of whites were employed, but just 15% of blacks, whites earned practically twice what African American men earned.