Some forty years after the Civil Rights Movement, we as Americans like to think that racial inequality has been and continues to decline, if not eliminated altogether. To a large extent, significant progress has been made. However, even when it comes to such a basic measurement as income, as the Associated Press/MSNBC reports, the latest data show that the gap between Whites and Blacks is actually widening:

One reason for the growing disparity: Incomes among black men have actually declined in the past three decades, when adjusted for inflation. They were offset only by gains among black women. Incomes among white men, meanwhile, were relatively stagnant, while those of white women increased more than fivefold. . . .

Parents have long hoped that their children would grow up to be more successful than they were. Hopes were especially high for black children who came of age following the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

The reports found that about two-thirds of the children surveyed grew up to have higher family incomes than their parents had 30 years earlier. Grown black children were just as likely as whites to have higher incomes than their parents. However, incomes among whites increased more than those of their black counterparts.

The result: In 2004, a typical black family had an income that was only 58 percent of a typical white family’s. In 1974, median black incomes were 63 percent those of whites.

The graph above shows how incomes by race and gender have been distributed since 1974 and as noted in the article, it shows that the only group that has seen significant increases in their income since 1974 are White women.

It is sobering to see that on this basic measurement of success, Blacks are actually falling further behind Whites. At the same time, I think it’s useful to put this finding in the larger context of how wealth inequality in general is growing and getting worse in this country.

The point is, Blacks are hurting and we need to double out efforts to reduce the gap that separates them from Whites, but at the same time, their struggles are symptomatic of the larger and much more systemic illness of wealth inequality in the U.S. among all Americans.