They were the very people communities would have turned to first to help recover from the pandemic: entrepreneurs who were also employers; confidants like coaches, pastors and barbers; family men forced into a sandwich generation younger than their white counterparts, because their parents got sick earlier and they had to care for them while raising kids of their own.

Because of persistent economic segregation in this country, low-income young people may only have access to those who are in similar economic circumstances as themselves (Albright & Hurd, 2017). Additionally, adolescents tend to only have access to social capital garnered through their relationships with their parents, parents' network, neighbors, and teachers (White & Glick, 2000). Low-income adolescents' access to social capital is thus restricted by their economic segregation, the homogeneity of their parents' network, and their limited access to other relationships(Putnam, 2015). Low-income youth have a clear disadvantage concerning the growth of social capital. An informal mentor, specifically one from outside the young person's community, thus, may play an important and unique role in expanding an adolescent's social capital by compensating for these limitations.

An individual's access to social capital, the total number of resources garnered through social relationships, is determined largely by their socioeconomic status and racial ethnic makeup

A young person's neighborhood context is associated with their chance of being mentored and their chance of being economically mobile. Young people living in under-resourced neighborhoods are also unlikely to be upwardly mobile (Chetty & Hendren, 2016a; Chetty, & Hendren, 2016b; Chetty, Hendren, Kline & Saez, 2014b; Goldsmith, Britton, Reese, & Velez, 2017). Low-income children are more likely to live in neighborhoods with higher crime and drug use (Abelev, 2009). Young people from these neighborhoods are more likelytohave lower tests scores (McCullock & Joshi, 2001), drop out of high school, and be unemployed (Ainsworth, 2002). This neighborhood effect is cumulative: the more time spent in under

Cumulatively, these studies suggest that the potential influence of informal mentors on mobility may be most pronounced for those youth who are facing a disadvantage of some kind (family structure, income, etc.) and/or are a racial ethnic minority. Concerning the focus of the present study, this literature would suggest that informal mentoring may be more strongly associated with upward mobility for low-income youth than for middle-or higher-income youth for whom informal mentoring is

Persistent immobility also disproves the idea of the U.S. being a land of equal opportunity. Since the term "the American Dream" was first coined in 1931, it has become a persistent cultural ethos, a wish list of sorts, with a consistent main tenet being the idea that each generation can achieve more than their parents (Samuel, 2012). Yet we know this tenet of the American Dream is no longer true: the chances that a child earnsmore than their parents has decreased in the past 40 years, especially for low-income families

Once products and, more important, people are coded as having certain preferences and tendencies, the feedback loops of algorithmic systems will work to reinforce these often flawed and discriminatory assumptions. The presupposed problem of difference will become even more entrenched, the chasms between people will widen.

Castro’s commitment to fighting racism in Cuba wasn’t as much an explicit mission as it was a convenient byproduct of adopting the Soviet model of governance — when you start to eliminate private property, mechanisms of systemic racism are rendered impotent.