If racial gaps in measures of human capital like educational attainment and standardized test scores were eliminated, what would happen to racial disparities in wages, employment, and other labor market outcomes?A credible answer to this question is foundational for understanding the nature and scope of racial inequality and discrimination in the United States.This article reviews and synthesizes a literature that studies this question by estimating the extent to which controlling for measures of human capital changes Black-white gaps in labor market outcomes, and discusses various conceptual and methodological issues related to interpreting this type of exercise.I show that while accurately interpreting this exercise and its many variants requires careful thinking, the results elucidate many important and subtle aspects of racial inequality in the United States.

Before the racial integration of schools in the southern United States, predominantly African American schools were staffed almost exclusively by African American teachers as well, and teaching constituted an extraordinarily large share of professional employment among southern Blacks. The large-scale desegregation of southern schools that occurred after passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act represented a potential threat to this employment base, and this paper estimates how student integration affected Black teacher employment. Using newly assembled archival data from 759 southern school districts observed between 1960 and 1972, I estimate that a school district transitioning from fully segregated to fully integrated education, which approximates the experience of the modal southern district in this period, led to a 41.7% reduction in Black teacher employment. Additional results, including event-study specifications and models with extensive controls for concurrent policy changes, strongly suggest that these employment reductions were a causal effect of integration and not due to school district self-selection into desegregation. To study the broader impacts of reduced teaching employment, I estimate race-specific changes in occupations and earnings in the decennial Censuses and find that displaced southern Black teachers either entered lower skill occupations within the South or migrated out of the region to continue teaching and that integration-induced displacement led to substantial earnings reductions.

Blacks and whites in the United States adopt widely different parental behaviors, but the underlying causes of these differences are not well understood. This paper documents large-scale increases in cognitively stimulating parenting among southern black mothers who came of age in the period immediately following the civil rights movement. The total magnitude of these improvements was approximately 0.5 standard deviations between the 1957 and 1964 birth cohorts, while no significant trends occurred among blacks outside of the South or among whites from any region.