But the study found one notable exception - black boys from impoverished neighborhoods do as well as white boys from similar neighborhoods when there are a lot of black fathers and married couples present in the community. The study found that the presence of fathers matters at a community level, meaning that even black boys without resident fathers did as well as white boys, if they came from communities with high concentrations of black fathers and married couples.
"That is a pathbreaking finding," William Julius Wilson, a Harvard sociologist who studies economic struggles of black men, told the New York Times. "They're not talking about the direct effects of a boy's own parents' marital status. They're talking about the presence of fathers in a given census tract."
Some responses to the study have claimed that family structure matters minimally for the upward mobility of black boys. However, Dr. Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project and professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, told CNA that those takes ignore this important finding about marriage structure at the neighborhood level.
Those "are obviously two important family structure indicators that matter at the neighborhood level, so the point there is it's not just what happens in the individual households, but what's sort of happening to the family in your neighborhood or your community that would seem to matter for mobility," Wilcox told CNA.
Wilcox also noted in an article on the study that on the whole, young black men are much more likely to be raised in single-parent homes than young white men, so "if you control for household income growing up, you miss the ways in which racial differences in family structure affect outcomes for boys via their impact on family income."
Furthermore, the study compares the household income of black boys to their individual income as grown men. Wilcox said a more accurate comparison would be to compare the household income of black boys to the household income of those same boys when they reach adulthood, in order to measure the impact that marriage and family structure continues to have on income.