Rich White Men Are Doing Just Fine -- It's Men and Women of Color Who Continue to Fall Behind

The end of men won't be the end of racism.

Jacqueline E. King of the American Council on Education sat down in 2000 to look at the problem. She found that the gender gap on college campuses was actually among Blacks, Latinos and poor whites. "There is little evidence to suggest that white, middle-class males are falling behind their female peers," she wrote at the time.

The future of the country might be poor, Black and unmarried? You can almost feel the collective shudder among Atlantic readers.

Rosin, unfortunately, does what her supposedly now almost extinct male predecessors have done, laying out information about poor Black families as if they existed in a political vacuum. Perhaps that wasn't her intention. Presumably she knows about the racial disparities in sentencing laws that put more Black men behind prison, the welfare mandates that make it impossible to receive assistance if a partner is around, the double-digit unemployment rates for Black men. But Rosin skips mentioning any of this.

You wouldn't know from Rosin's story that all of this is happening in a public education system that's racially segregated and underfunded. Neither would you find out that King's most recent research shows that the big gender gap on college campuses right now is in the Latino community.