MLK Day: Income gap widens between whites, African Americans in California

The Sacramento Bee reports:

The income gap between African Americans and whites in California has reached its widest point in decades, a trend that reflects a broader, growing chasm between the state’s wealthy and poor, experts said.

It is also a sign, some advocates said, that many of the economic disparities decried by Martin Luther King Jr. persist, even as the nation observes his birthday today.

In 1970, shortly after King’s death, California’s white, non-Hispanic families had a median income 50 percent higher than its African American families, according to a Sacramento Bee review of U.S. Census data. In the decades that followed, incomes for both blacks and whites rose for a couple of decades – but incomes for whites rose faster.

Conversely, during the recent Great Recession, incomes fell sharply for both black and white families – but they fell faster for African Americans.

Yet, Blue America politicians like Nancy Pelosi want to lecture America about inequality while her own state is the poster child for inequality.