Black. White. is an American reality television series that aired on FX. The series premiered on March 8, 2006, and supposedly documented two voluntary families of three, one white, and the other black, in which through studio-quality make-up, the two families would give off a facade appearance, of portraying a race that isn't their own, for social experiment purposes. It garnered controversy for its subject matter and perceived reinforcement of racial stereotypes.
Background: The black-white maternal mortality disparity is the largest disparity among all conventional population perinatal health measures, and the mortality gap between black and white women in New York City has nearly doubled in recent years. For every maternal death, 100 women experience severe maternal morbidity, a life-threatening diagnosis, or undergo a life-saving procedure during their delivery hospitalization. Like maternal mortality, severe maternal morbidity is more common among black than white women. A significant portion of maternal morbidity and mortality is preventable, making quality of care in hospitals a critical lever for improving outcomes. Hospital variation in risk-adjusted severe maternal morbidity rates exists. The extent to which variation in hospital performance on severe maternal morbidity rates contributes to black-white disparities in New York City hospitals has not been studied.
Objective: We examined the extent to which black-white differences in severe maternal morbidity rates in New York City hospitals can be explained by differences in the hospitals in which black and white women deliver.
Study design: We conducted a population-based study using linked 2011-2013 New York City discharge and birth certificate datasets (n = 353,773 deliveries) to examine black-white differences in severe maternal morbidity rates in New York City hospitals. A mixed-effects logistic regression with a random hospital-specific intercept was used to generate risk-standardized severe maternal morbidity rates for each hospital (n = 40). We then assessed differences in the distributions of black and white deliveries among these hospitals.
Results: Severe maternal morbidity occurred in 8882 deliveries (2.5%) and was higher among black than white women (4.2% vs 1.5%, P < .001). After adjustment for patient characteristics and comorbidities, the risk remained elevated for black women (odds ratio, 2.02; 95% confidence interval, 1.89-2.17). Risk-standardized severe maternal morbidity rates among New York City hospitals ranged from 0.8 to 5.7 per 100 deliveries. White deliveries were more likely to be delivered in low-morbidity hospitals: 65% of white vs 23% of black deliveries occurred in hospitals in the lowest tertile for morbidity. We estimated that black-white differences in delivery location may contribute as much as 47.7% of the racial disparity in severe maternal morbidity rates in New York City.
Conclusion: Black mothers are more likely to deliver at higher risk-standardized severe maternal morbidity hospitals than are white mothers, contributing to black-white disparities. More research is needed to understand the attributes of high-performing hospitals and to share best practices among hospitals.
The gap in the homeownership rate between black and white households is the highest it has been in 50 years. This report examines key variables that explain the black-white homeownership gap and estimates the role that income, education, credit score, and marital status play both nationally and locally in 105 MSAs with large black populations. The researchers determine that roughly 17 percent of the homeownership gap remains unexplained by observed variables and could be caused by differences in parental wealth, information networks or the vestiges of policies and structures that have made it difficult for black households to obtain and benefit from homeownership. The researchers also recommend specific policy actions for officials across federal, state, and local government as well as institutional policy changes.
African Americans score lower than European Americans on vocabulary, reading, and math tests, as well as on tests that claim to measure scholastic aptitude and intelligence. The gap appears before children enter kindergarten and it persists into adulthood. It has narrowed since 1970, but the typical American black still scores below 75 percent of American whites on almost every standardized test. This statistic does not imply, of course, that all blacks score below all whites. There is a lot of overlap between the two groups. Nonetheless, the test score gap is large enough to have significant social and economic consequences.
Second, even IQ scores clearly respond to changes in the environment. IQ scores, for example, have risen dramatically throughout the world since the 1930s. In America, 82 percent of those who took the Stanford-Binet test in 1978 scored above the 1932 average for individuals of the same age. The average black did about as well on the Stanford-Binet test in 1978 as the average white did in 1932.
Cultural differences associated with chronic poverty may account for some of the black-white test score gap, but they cannot be the main explanation, since the gap persists among affluent children. And while children raised by single mothers score lower on most standardized tests than children raised by married couples, this difference almost disappears once we take account of the fact that women who become single mothers come from less advantaged families, have lower test scores, and complete less schooling than women with husbands.
Second, instead of looking mainly for resource differences between predominantly black and predominantly white schools, successful theories will probably have to look more carefully at the way black and white children respond to the same classroom experiences, such as being in a smaller classroom, having a more competent teacher, having a teacher of their own race, or having a teacher with high expectations for those who perform below the norm for their age group.
Our argument that reducing the black-white test score gap would do more to move America toward racial equality than any politically plausible alternative rests on two problematic premises: that policies aimed at reducing the test score gap are in fact politically feasible and that such policies can in fact reduce the gap.
Research also suggests that black-white differences in parenting practices contribute to the test score gap. Improving parenting skills may therefore be as important as improving schools. The puzzle is how to proceed. Like teachers, parents are usually suspicious of unsolicited advice about how to deal with their children. But once parents become convinced that a particular practice really helps their children, many adopt it. As a practical political matter, whites cannot tell black parents to change their parenting practices without provoking charges of ethnocentrism, racism, and much else. But blacks are hardly the only parents who need help. We should be promoting better parenting practices for all parents in every way we can, including television, which reaches both blacks and whites.
My SAT scores might have remained a bit of trivia had I not become an education reporter. But my career has given me a reason to think a lot about testing, and what seems to be an intractable test-score gap between black students (as well as Hispanic and American Indian and Alaska Native students) and white and Asian students.
Teachers have one of the closest views of student performance, and Education Week recently asked them what they believe are the factors that explain why white students, overall, perform better academically than black students. (The survey respondents were predominantly white, like the teaching population as a whole, with 20 to 30 years in the classroom.) The teachers were given a number of factors to choose from: genetics, discrimination, school quality, student motivation, parenting, income levels, home environments, and neighborhood environments.
A notable minority, about 29 percent, said that genetics are somewhat to extremely significant in explaining academic gaps between black students and white students. (An even higher percentage of respondents, 38 percent, said genetics are a significant reason why Asian students in the aggregate have better academic outcomes than their white peers.)
And there are specific policy decisions that amplify the corrosive effects of poverty. Right now, majority-minority school districts get $23 billion less in funding nationally than majority-white school districts, according to EdBuild, a nonprofit organization working to overhaul school finance systems.
Just how large and persistent are these racial wealth gaps? As figure 1 shows, median net worth for white households has far exceeded that of Black households through recessions and booms over the last thirty years. While movements in white wealth are easier to see due to the larger scale, during the most recent economic downturn, median net worth declined by more for Black families (44.3 percent decline from 2007 to 2013) than for white families (26.1 percent decline). In fact, the ratio of white family wealth to Black family wealth is higher today than at the start of the century.
Wealth is the sum of resources available to a household at a point in time; as such it is clearly influenced by the income of a household, but the two are not perfectly correlated. Two households can have the same income, but the household with fewer expenses, or with more accumulated wealth from past income or inheritances, will have more wealth. Figure 3 shows median net worth at different points in the family income distribution. What is immediately evident is that the racial wealth gap remains even for families with the same income. For those in the top 10 percent by income (only 3.6 percent Black), the racial wealth gap is still quite large: median net worth for white families in this income group is $1,789,300 versus $343,160 for Black families. A racial gap exists in every income group except the bottom quintile (23.5 percent Black), where median net worth is zero for everyone.
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