Using data from Opportunity Insights, a Harvard-based institute that works to better understand US social mobility, we looked at intergenerational mobility, defined as where in the income distribution the typical child born to parents in the 25th percentile of earners ended up as an adult in several large cities.
For their city-based analysis, Opportunity Insights focused on the commuting zones that had the largest black populations as of the 2000 decennial census.
Opportunity Insights considered children who were born between 1978 and 1983 and whose parents' incomes fell below the average, specifically at the 25th percentile of the income distribution (that is, families that earned more than 25% of all families, but less than the remaining 75% of the population.)
They then looked at where in the income distribution those children ended up when they were 31 to 37 years old, compared to other children born in the same range of years.
In the 14 cities with the largest black populations, that income rank was higher for white children than black children using their 2014-2015 average earnings. This means that upward economic mobility was higher for white families than black families.
In New York, the commuting zone with the largest black population in 2000, there was a difference of 17 percentage points between where white and black children whose parents were at the 25th percentile ended up in the income distribution. Washington, DC, had the smallest difference among the 14 cities with the largest black populations, of about 11 percentage points.