In spite of a century the Black population is still concentrated in the South. I am not saying the disparity does not exist.

Blacks are less than 10% of population in California and about 33% of population in Alabama. That it self will skew numbers in certain way.

The median white person's salary in Alabama is ~29k. The median black person's salary in Alabama is ~20k.

http://www.usacityfacts.com/al/economy/

Your assertion that difference in American black/white incomes is largely due to differences in geographic distribution is wrong.

Which in some ways proves the point. Poverty begets poverty. Black Americans are under-represented in the well-educated cohorts of young professionals who get high salary jobs and easily move to high cost-of-living areas.

> Put another way, if whites took a pay cut so they made the same as blacks, $1.6 trillion of national income would disappear, a number comparable to the total income of the entire top 1% ($2 trillion).

Isn't this how that is expected to look if the difference is due to elites? The total difference is equal to the amount made by the elites, almost all of whom are white. And that's assuming the "elites" are only the top 1% and not e.g. the top 20%.

Or look at it from the bottom side. The population of white people who make less than the median black person in the US is larger than the black population of the US.