Contrary to Donald Trump’s indiscriminate portrayal of African-Americans as “living in hell,” the black upper middle class is ascending the economic ladder at a faster rate than its white counterpart.

Scholars have begun to focus their attention on this phenomenon. William Julius Wilson, a sociologist at Harvard and the author of “The Truly Disadvantaged,” is working on a book about upward social mobility among African-Americans. In an email, he wrote me:

One of the most significant changes in recent decades is the remarkable gains in income among more affluent blacks. When we adjust for inflation to 2014 dollars, the percentage of black Americans earning at least $75,000 more than doubled from 1970 to 2014, to 21 percent. Those making $100,000 or more almost quadrupled to 13 percent (in contrast white Americans saw a less striking increase, from 11 to 26 percent).

In an NBER paper issued in November 2016, Patrick Bayer, an economist at Duke, and Kerwin Charles, a professor of public policy at the University of Chicago, published comparable findings, reporting that

higher quantile black men have experienced substantial gains in both relative […]