For every census tract in Cook County, the mean adult household-income percentile reached by children raised in low-income families (parents at the 25th percentile). Each shape is one of 1,318 census tracts; bluer tracts lift poor children higher, redder tracts hold them lower. Thin lines trace Chicago's 77 community areas; hover any tract for its neighborhood or suburb.
Because the Atlas reports outcomes separately by race, we can ask a sharper question of Cook County: within the same census tract, do Black and White children from equally poor families (parents at the 25th percentile) reach the same place in adulthood? Each dot below is one of 729 Cook County tracts where the Atlas measured both. If the neighborhood offered the same opportunity, the dots would crowd the diagonal.
They do not. In 90.8% of these tracts, the White child grew up to out-earn the Black child from a family of comparable income — by about 11 percentiles on average. The same map of opportunity is not the same opportunity for everyone living on it.
And the divide is driven more by sons than daughters. Splitting the same comparison by sex: among daughters the White child ends higher in 88.7% of tracts; among sons, 92.5%, with a wider average gap. Use the dropdown to spotlight one neighborhood across all three charts.
The scatter shows the gap exists; the map shows where it bites hardest. Each tract is shaded by the difference between White and Black children's mean adult rank — deep red where White children pull furthest ahead, blue in the minority of tracts where Black children end higher.
Pooling every Cook County tract and comparing across racial groups yields distinct distributions of the mean adult rank. Black children cluster lowest, White and Asian children highest, Hispanic children in between — the curves barely overlap.
Splitting White and Black by sex shows the gap is wider among sons than daughters — the Black–White distance between the mean ticks grows from roughly 14 percentiles for daughters to about 15 for sons.
Across Cook County, the same neighborhoods that lift poor White children toward the middle class leave their Black neighbors about eleven percentiles behind — a gap that widens for sons and runs from the South and West Sides through much of the suburbs. A ZIP code summarizes opportunity well; it is not the same opportunity for everyone who lives in it.