Study Shows Racial Disparities in Children’s Well-Being

[azrom]

Two Colorado cities rank among the best metropolitan areas for black children to live in, according to a new study on children’s living conditions.

Denver, Colorado Springs and Raleigh, N.C., were rated the best metropolitan areas for black children based on factors such as poverty rates, health at birth, home ownership, and school and residential segregation.

Other top-ranking cities for minority children included Washington, Cincinnati and Austin, Texas. At the bottom of the list were Chicago, New York and Bakersfield, Calif.

The report, released Wednesday by the Harvard School of Public Health, scored living conditions of children in the 100 largest metro areas in the U.S.

The data is available at DiversityData.org, a project that began five years ago with the aim of “providing a snapshot of urban inequality,” said Barbara Krimgold, one of the report’s authors and co-director of the Kellogg Health Scholars Program.

“We expected to see some disparities, but we were stunned,” Krimgold said.

The study showed that black children across all the cities scored worst of four ethnic groups for neighborhood income and home ownership, school poverty, segregation, health and family income. Hispanic children fared slightly better, Asians were next, and whites fared best.

The study showed trends of racial segregation in schools. Although less than half of elementary school students in the largest metro areas are white, the study found that the average white student attends a school where most of his or her fellow students are white. Similarly, black children make up 20 percent of elementary-school students but attend schools with mostly black populations in 40 percent of the cities studied.

Perhaps the most alarming finding of the study showed stark disparities along racial lines, said researcher Dolores Acevedo-Garcia, an associate professor at the Harvard School of Public Health. Even the best-scoring areas for black and Hispanic children didn’t measure up to the worst-scoring areas for whites and Asians.

In half of the studied cities, the childhood poverty rate for blacks was more than 30 percent. The childhood poverty rate for white children was more than 16 percent in only one city.

http://inverted-world.com/index.php/news/news/study_shows_racial_disparities_in_childrens_well_being/

[Fruit of thy loins]

The majority of worst-off people in Western countries are white.