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Nor should anyone imagine that fears of black men will not continue to be exploited by advocacy groups in search of contributions; ratings-hungry media outlets; and local, regional, and national politicians. Contrary to Larry King’s claim the day after Obama’s inauguration, that “there’s a lot of advantages to being black,” studies that came out around that time give lie to the Panglossian view. Among the more revealing was conducted by sociologists from the University of Oregon and University of California. In a clever analysis, they looked at how interviewers classified nearly 13,000 people they surveyed every year or two from 1979 to 2002. At the end of each survey, the interviewers, the great majority of whom were white women, were asked to classify the race of the person they’d interviewed. The results show that racial stereotypes of African Americans as criminals and on the dole are so powerful, they actually influence what someone’s race is assumed to be. A person the interviewers initially perceived as white was almost twice as likely to be classified as black the next time they were surveyed if they had become unemployed, impoverished, or incarcerated.63

Or consider another study released in the late ’00s, in which sociologists from Northwestern and Princeton looked at how Americans estimate various risks. Whites give realistic assessments of risks related to work and health, the researchers found, but greatly overestimate the likelihood of being the victim of crime, especially if they live in areas with substantial numbers of African Americans. “White respondents overestimate their risk of crime victimization more than twice as much in heavily black zip codes relative to areas with few black residents,” Lincoln Quillian and Devah Pager reported. Noting that the misperceptions come not from actual crime levels in these areas, they suggest the main cause is exaggerated emphases in the media on crimes committed by African Americans, and the sociologists point out how these biases are costly and self-perpetuating.

“African-American neighborhoods suffer from perceptions of high crime, beyond any actual association between race and crime. Even in the case of affluent blacks moving into white neighborhoods, white observers are likely to perceive elevated risks of crime. Likewise, in the location decisions of white households and businesses, the attribution of high crime rates to mostly black neighborhoods is likely to deprive these areas of local jobs and more affluent residents.”64

Add to all that studies that find that black men are significantly more likely to be stopped, searched, and arrested by police than are whites, and it is little wonder that African Americans are 13 percent of the U.S. population but 55 percent of the population of federal prisons. At the time of Obama’s election, one in nine black men between the ages of twenty and thirty-four was behind bars. In the late ’00s, though the statistics attracted little media attention, blacks also had the highest rates of poverty in the United States—24.5 percent, about twice the rate for the nation as a whole. During the economic crisis of that period, African American homeowners were two and a half times more likely to be in foreclosure than were whites.65

As well, there continue to be newsworthy, if underreported, health disparities of the sort I noted in chapter 5. Overall death rates are significantly higher for blacks than whites—1,027 per 100,000 for blacks and 786 for whites—and for some fatal diseases, things actually got worse since I wrote the earlier edition. In the mid-1900s, death rates from heart disease for blacks and whites were roughly equal. At the start of the twenty-first century, blacks had a 28 percent higher rate than whites. And even as prospects improved for AIDS patients, the gap in death rates between whites and blacks with AIDS was strikingly large. Blacks who died from HIV lost about eleven times as many years of potential life as whites.66

Each of these disparities resulted in no small measure from discrimination and unequal