By in Rhode Island's Future
It’s hardly a surprise that White people are doing better than
Black people in the Ocean State and elsewhere.
Only Minnesota and Wisconsin ranked lower.
Here’s the section on RI:
- Pct. residents black: 6.4%
- Black homeownership rate: 29.4% (10th lowest)
- Black incarceration rate: 1,884 per 100,000 people (11th lowest)
- Black unemployment rate: 16.0% (6th highest)
- Unemployment rate, all people: 9.2% (2nd highest)
While typical black households earned 62.3% of the
white median household income across the nation, black Rhode Island households
made just 52.5% of white households in the state. Such disadvantage can lead to
a variety of negative outcomes, including higher poverty and death rates.
Last
year, there were 234 more deaths per 100,000 people among the black population
in Rhode Island than among the white population, nearly the largest gap
nationwide.
More than 23% of black Rhode Islanders lived in poverty last year,
while less than 11% of white residents lived in poverty, a difference of than
12 percentage points, among the larger gaps nationwide.
Another particularly
detrimental area of inequality is the housing market. While 67.2% of white
households in the state were homeowners, only 29.4% of black households were.
The 38 percentage points was wider than the gap nationwide of nearly 30
percentage points.
The percentage of Black Rhode Islanders who own their homes is
less than half that of White Rhode Islanders while the rate of poverty among
Black Rhode Islanders is twice as high as among White Rhode Islanders,
according to the study.
Bob Plain is the
editor/publisher of Rhode Island's Future. Previously, he's worked as a
reporter for several different news organizations both in Rhode Island and
across the country.