The relationship between where people start out in life (class origin) and where they are likely to end up (class destination) is central to any question about the fairness of contemporary society. Yet we often don’t have a good picture—literally or metaphorically—of the contours of that relationship. Further, work on class mobility in the United States often glosses over the large differences between white and Black Americans’ class positions and mobility trajectories. This visualization, based on data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, shows the association between occupational class origin and destination for Black and white employed Americans ages 25 to 69. Stark racial inequality, produced by the legacy and ongoing operation of white supremacy, is evident in each aspect of these figures

Chernoff, C.

Dow, D.

Laurison, Daniel

English

Works

https://doi.org/10.1177/2378023120960959Socius: Sociological Research for  a Dynamic WorldVolume 6: 1 –3© The Author(s) 2020Article reuse guidelines:sagepub.com/journals-permissionsDOI  10.1177/2378023120960 59srd.sagepub.comCreative Commons Non Commercial CC BY-NC: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages  (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).Data VisualizationQuestions of inequality and fairness in society hinge on the relationship between where people start out in life (class ori-gin) and where they are likely to end up (class destination). Yet we often don’t have a good picture—literally or meta-phorically—of the contours of that relationship. Further, work on class mobility in the United States often glosses over the large differences between white and Black Americans’ class positions and trajectories produced by the legacy and ongoing operation of white supremacy.Scholars examining social mobility frequently use sophis-ticated models that are difficult for most people to interpret. This can leave researchers (and everyone else) without an intuitive grasp of how much parental occupation and race predict the jobs people get.This visualization, based on data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (Brady and Kohler 2019; Survey Research Center 2020), shows the association between occupational class origin and destination for Black and white employed adults ages 25 to 69. Details about the construction of the three class-groups, the role of education, cohort differences, and the representativeness of the data are in the supplemental material.Stark racial inequality is evident in each aspect of these figures.First, there is a profound difference in the class distribu-tions of Black and white Americans. Overall, Black Americans are twice as likely to be from working-class families or in working-class jobs as are white Americans, and half as likely to be from professional/managerial fami-lies or in those positions.But it is the difference in the rates of class reproduction (the paths from left to right) that Figure 1 really makes clear. For white people, the most common outcome is reproduction of class position: the thickest path for white people from professional/managerial families is into pro-fessional/managerial positions themselves. But for Black people from professional/managerial families, the most common outcome is downward mobility into routine/man-ual jobs. White upward mobility is twice as common as Black upward mobility: Less than 1 out of every 10 Black 960959 SRDXXX10.1177/2378023120960959Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic WorldLaurison et al.research-article20201Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA, USA2University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA3Moore College of Art and Design, Philadelphia, PA, USACorresponding Author:Daniel Laurison, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA, USA. Email: dlauris1@swarthmore.eduClass Mobility and Reproduction for  Black and White Adults in the  United States: A VisualizationDaniel Laurison1 , Dawn Dow2, and Carolyn Chernoff3AbstractThe relationship between where people start out in life (class origin) and where they are likely to end up (class destination) is central to any question about the fairness of contemporary society. Yet we often don’t have a good picture—literally or metaphorically—of the contours of that relationship. Further, work on class mobility in the United States often glosses over the large differences between white and Black Americans’ class positions and mobility trajectories. This visualization, based on data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, shows the association between occupational class origin and destination for Black and white employed Americans ages 25 to 69. Stark racial inequality, produced by the legacy and ongoing operation of white supremacy, is evident in each aspect of these figures.Keywordsclass, mobility, stratification, race2 Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World Figure 1. Origin and destination, (a) Black adults ages 25 to 69 and (b) white adults ages 25 to 69.Source: Data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, 2015 wave.Note: (a) n = 2,745. (b) n = 4,913. All original individual respondents and their family members and descendants are included if they were between the ages of 25 and 69 in 2015, reported a current or recent occupation for themselves, and reported at least one parent’s occupation. All figures are based on tables created using cross-sectional weights. Numbers to the left of each origin and destination group indicate the (weighted) proportion of respondents from each origin in each racial group; for example, the .53 on the bottom left corner of Figure 1a indicates that 53 percent of Black Laurison et al. 3working-class-origin people end up in professional/mana-gerial jobs, compared to 1 out of every 5 white working-class-origin people.A full explanation of these differences is beyond the scope of this piece, but numerous studies indicate the influ-ence of systemic and interpersonal racism on Black Americans’ trajectories, with older cohorts’ having navi-gated state-enforced racially discriminatory laws and poli-cies. Black Americans are more likely than whites to face police violence, incarceration, and myriad other stressors and traumas (Branch and Jackson 2020). Subtle and overt discrimination suppresses Black achievement throughout the life course, from elementary school through careers and beyond. Black families in each big class-group have on average far less wealth, have lower incomes, and live in poorer neighborhoods than whites in the same group (Oliver and Shapiro 2006; Pattillo 2013).The research above describes a range of unjust, unfair challenges Black Americans confront and lends empirical support to the belief that as a group they must work twice as hard to get half as far.ORCID iDDaniel Laurison  https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8221-0535Supplemental MaterialSupplemental material for this article is available online.ReferencesBrady, David, and Ulrich Kohler. 2019. “WZB-PSID.” https://bra-dydave.files.wordpress.com/2020/05/wzbpsid_2015v2_code-book.pdf.Branch, Enobong Hannah, and Christina Jackson. 2020. Black in America: The Paradox of the Color Line. 1st ed. Cambridge, England: Polity.Oliver, Melvin, and Thomas M. Shapiro. 2006. Black Wealth/White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge.Pattillo, Mary. 2013. Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril among the Black Middle Class. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Survey Research Center. 2020. “Panel Study of Income Dynamics, Public Use Dataset.” Ann Arbor: Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan. https://psidonline.isr.umich.edu/Guide/FAQ.aspx?Type=8.Author BiographiesDaniel Laurison is an assistant professor of sociology at Swarthmore College and the associate editor of the British Journal of Sociology. His research is on class and inequality, politics, and political participation. He is the coauthor, with Sam Friedman, of The Class Ceiling: Why It Pays to Be Privileged, published in 2019 by Policy Press, and has a book due out in 2021 with Beacon Press about the role of campaign professionals in American democracy.Dawn Dow is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park; a faculty associate at the Maryland Population Research Center; the faculty director of the Critical Race Initiative; and a deputy editor for the Journal of Marriage and Family. Her research examines intersections of race, class, and gen-der within the context of the family, educational settings, the work-place, the law, and political mobilization. She is the author of Mothering While Black: Boundaries and Burdens of Middle-Class Parenthood, published by the University of California Press in 2019.Carolyn Chernoff is a sociologist of everyday culture and inequal-ity. She has published broadly on intersectional identity, social justice, and art in outlets ranging from Huffington Post and Inside Higher Ed to scholarly journals and edited collections. Most recently, she and Janise Hurtig coedited Contested Spaces of Teaching and Learning: Practitioner Ethnographies of Adult Education in the United States (2019, Lexington Press).  employed Americans are from families in routine/manual work; the .25 in the same location in Figure 1b means only a quarter of white employed Americans are from working-class origins. Looking at destinations, 32 percent of white workers have professional or managerial jobs, compared to only 16 percent of Black workers. The numbers to the right of each class origin and destination give the proportion in each flow or trajectory; for example, the .31 at the bottom right corner of Figure 1a indicates that 31 percent of Black Americans have parents in routine/manual occupations and continue to work in similar jobs as adults; the .07 near the turquoise section of routine/manual destinations indicates that 7 percent of Black people experience steep downward mobility; tracing this flow back to the left, we can see that this is the most common destination for Black people whose parents were in professional/managerial occupations.Figure 1. (continued)

Class Mobility And Reproduction For Black And White Adults In The United States: A Visualization

https://doi.org/10.1177/2378023120960959
Socius: Sociological Research for  
a Dynamic World
Volume 6: 1 –3
© The Author(s) 2020
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI  10.1177/2378023120960 59
srd.sagepub.com
Creative Commons Non Commercial CC BY-NC: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-
NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and 
distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages  
(https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
Data Visualization
Questions of inequality and fairness in society hinge on the 
relationship between where people start out in life (class ori-
gin) and where they are likely to end up (class destination). 
Yet we often don’t have a good picture—literally or meta-
phorically—of the contours of that relationship. Further, 
work on class mobility in the United States often glosses 
over the large differences between white and Black 
Americans’ class positions and trajectories produced by the 
legacy and ongoing operation of white supremacy.
Scholars examining social mobility frequently use sophis-
ticated models that are difficult for most people to interpret. 
This can leave researchers (and everyone else) without an 
intuitive grasp of how much parental occupation and race 
predict the jobs people get.
This visualization, based on data from the Panel Study of 
Income Dynamics (Brady and Kohler 2019; Survey Research 
Center 2020), shows the association between occupational 
class origin and destination for Black and white employed 
adults ages 25 to 69. Details about the construction of the 
three class-groups, the role of education, cohort differences, 
and the representativeness of the data are in the supplemental 
material.
Stark racial inequality is evident in each aspect of these 
figures.
First, there is a profound difference in the class distribu-
tions of Black and white Americans. Overall, Black 
Americans are twice as likely to be from working-class 
families or in working-class jobs as are white Americans, 
and half as likely to be from professional/managerial fami-
lies or in those positions.
But it is the difference in the rates of class reproduction 
(the paths from left to right) that Figure 1 really makes 
clear. For white people, the most common outcome is 
reproduction of class position: the thickest path for white 
people from professional/managerial families is into pro-
fessional/managerial positions themselves. But for Black 
people from professional/managerial families, the most 
common outcome is downward mobility into routine/man-
ual jobs. White upward mobility is twice as common as 
Black upward mobility: Less than 1 out of every 10 Black 
960959 SRDXXX10.1177/2378023120960959Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic WorldLaurison et al.
research-article2020
1Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA, USA
2University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA
3Moore College of Art and Design, Philadelphia, PA, USA
Corresponding Author:
Daniel Laurison, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Swarthmore 
College, Swarthmore, PA, USA. 
Email: dlauris1@swarthmore.edu
Class Mobility and Reproduction for  
Black and White Adults in the  
United States: A Visualization
Daniel Laurison1 , Dawn Dow2, and Carolyn Chernoff3
Abstract
The relationship between where people start out in life (class origin) and where they are likely to end up (class 
destination) is central to any question about the fairness of contemporary society. Yet we often don’t have a good 
picture—literally or metaphorically—of the contours of that relationship. Further, work on class mobility in the 
United States often glosses over the large differences between white and Black Americans’ class positions and mobility 
trajectories. This visualization, based on data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, shows the association between 
occupational class origin and destination for Black and white employed Americans ages 25 to 69. Stark racial inequality, 
produced by the legacy and ongoing operation of white supremacy, is evident in each aspect of these figures.
Keywords
class, mobility, stratification, race
2 Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World 
Figure 1. Origin and destination, (a) Black adults ages 25 to 69 and (b) white adults ages 25 to 69.
Source: Data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, 2015 wave.
Note: (a) n = 2,745. (b) n = 4,913. All original individual respondents and their family members and descendants are included if they were between 
the ages of 25 and 69 in 2015, reported a current or recent occupation for themselves, and reported at least one parent’s occupation. All figures are 
based on tables created using cross-sectional weights. Numbers to the left of each origin and destination group indicate the (weighted) proportion 
of respondents from each origin in each racial group; for example, the .53 on the bottom left corner of Figure 1a indicates that 53 percent of Black 
Laurison et al. 3
working-class-origin people end up in professional/mana-
gerial jobs, compared to 1 out of every 5 white working-
class-origin people.
A full explanation of these differences is beyond the 
scope of this piece, but numerous studies indicate the influ-
ence of systemic and interpersonal racism on Black 
Americans’ trajectories, with older cohorts’ having navi-
gated state-enforced racially discriminatory laws and poli-
cies. Black Americans are more likely than whites to face 
police violence, incarceration, and myriad other stressors 
and traumas (Branch and Jackson 2020). Subtle and overt 
discrimination suppresses Black achievement throughout 
the life course, from elementary school through careers and 
beyond. Black families in each big class-group have on 
average far less wealth, have lower incomes, and live in 
poorer neighborhoods than whites in the same group (Oliver 
and Shapiro 2006; Pattillo 2013).
The research above describes a range of unjust, unfair 
challenges Black Americans confront and lends empirical 
support to the belief that as a group they must work twice as 
hard to get half as far.
ORCID iD
Daniel Laurison  https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8221-0535
Supplemental Material
Supplemental material for this article is available online.
References
Brady, David, and Ulrich Kohler. 2019. “WZB-PSID.” https://bra-
dydave.files.wordpress.com/2020/05/wzbpsid_2015v2_code-
book.pdf.
Branch, Enobong Hannah, and Christina Jackson. 2020. Black in 
America: The Paradox of the Color Line. 1st ed. Cambridge, 
England: Polity.
Oliver, Melvin, and Thomas M. Shapiro. 2006. Black Wealth/White 
Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality. 2nd ed. New 
York: Routledge.
Pattillo, Mary. 2013. Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril 
among the Black Middle Class. 2nd ed. Chicago: University 
of Chicago Press.
Survey Research Center. 2020. “Panel Study of Income Dynamics, 
Public Use Dataset.” Ann Arbor: Institute for Social Research, 
University of Michigan. https://psidonline.isr.umich.edu/
Guide/FAQ.aspx?Type=8.
Author Biographies
Daniel Laurison is an assistant professor of sociology at 
Swarthmore College and the associate editor of the British Journal 
of Sociology. His research is on class and inequality, politics, and 
political participation. He is the coauthor, with Sam Friedman, of 
The Class Ceiling: Why It Pays to Be Privileged, published in 2019 
by Policy Press, and has a book due out in 2021 with Beacon Press 
about the role of campaign professionals in American democracy.
Dawn Dow is an associate professor of sociology at the University 
of Maryland, College Park; a faculty associate at the Maryland 
Population Research Center; the faculty director of the Critical Race 
Initiative; and a deputy editor for the Journal of Marriage and 
Family. Her research examines intersections of race, class, and gen-
der within the context of the family, educational settings, the work-
place, the law, and political mobilization. She is the author of 
Mothering While Black: Boundaries and Burdens of Middle-Class 
Parenthood, published by the University of California Press in 2019.
Carolyn Chernoff is a sociologist of everyday culture and inequal-
ity. She has published broadly on intersectional identity, social 
justice, and art in outlets ranging from Huffington Post and Inside 
Higher Ed to scholarly journals and edited collections. Most 
recently, she and Janise Hurtig coedited Contested Spaces of 
Teaching and Learning: Practitioner Ethnographies of Adult 
Education in the United States (2019, Lexington Press).  
employed Americans are from families in routine/manual work; the .25 in the same location in Figure 1b means only a quarter of white employed 
Americans are from working-class origins. Looking at destinations, 32 percent of white workers have professional or managerial jobs, compared to only 
16 percent of Black workers. The numbers to the right of each class origin and destination give the proportion in each flow or trajectory; for example, 
the .31 at the bottom right corner of Figure 1a indicates that 31 percent of Black Americans have parents in routine/manual occupations and continue 
to work in similar jobs as adults; the .07 near the turquoise section of routine/manual destinations indicates that 7 percent of Black people experience 
steep downward mobility; tracing this flow back to the left, we can see that this is the most common destination for Black people whose parents were in 
professional/managerial occupations.
Figure 1. (continued)


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