Familial poverty can be overcome if you live in communities with resources. It almost never is when your disadvantage is not just family income, but neighborhood, schools, jobs, transit, safety.
What the data show is that the ability to pull one’s self out of poverty is not about race, nor culture, nor willingness to work hard, but about whether your poverty is merely how much money your family has or about the type of communal and concentrated disadvantage you live in.
I think a lot about how public education for most poor white children truly stands up to the creed of the great equalizer because for white children free common ed gets them access to middle-class schools & the class-mixing Horace Mann envisioned. Black children get the opposite.
Poor black children get access to nearly uniformly poor caste schools that mostly ensure they’ll remain in their circumstances. And most do.
