Inside Iowa State

Feb. 10, 2006

He said

"What you see if you look at the data, from the '60s up until now, you'll see incredible progress being made by blacks in this country. There are many more in middle-income neighborhoods. The income gap has converged considerably. The education gaps are large, but they've certainly decreased since the '60s.

"Here's what you have to be careful to notice. This convergence has not been monotonic. It has not been steady. So, basically blacks and whites were converging in terms of income and education and all these things up until about 1985. Then, the depressing fact is, they start to diverge.

"Black youth homicide, which had been decreasing for years, quadrupled between '85 and '89. Infant mortality, which had been declining for decades, largely because of the integration of hospitals, started to increase. Test scores today are where they were in 1988 ...

"I show statistically that one factor can explain the breaks in trend of infant mortality, of fetal death, of youth homicide ... I call it crack."

Roland Fryer Jr., Harvard economist

Roland Fryer Jr., Harvard economist, gave a lecture titled "Toward a Unified Theory of Black America" Jan. 31.