The Gentlemen's
Agenda
A Black boy born today will live —. A white boy born the same day will live —. That is a difference of —.
The Gentlemen's Agenda is a platform for the years he's owed.
There are roughly 22.5 million Black boys and men in America. They are students and CEOs, bus drivers and surgeons, warehouse workers, retired veterans and recent college graduates. The Gentlemen's Agenda is a living dashboard built from federal data the government already collects but rarely publishes side-by-side, including over 72,000 searchable corporate EEO-1 records via the FOIA.
This project documents where he stands — across four dimensions that shape a life. It begins with his health — mental and physical.
How long does he get to live?
Start with the body. Black men live nearly 6 fewer years than the structural benchmark — White men — and the gap has held for the half-century the federal government has measured it. The reasons are not biological. They are structural: environment, access, stress, exposure to violence, untreated mental health. Where life is shortened, look upstream. What follows is upstream.
The gap between Black men's and White men's life expectancy has held at approximately five years for every decade the federal government has measured it. The pandemic widened it briefly. It has not narrowed since.
For young Black men, homicide is the number-one cause of death — more than ten times the rate for young White men, where suicide tops the list. The youngest Black men are losing their lives to a public health crisis the country still calls a crime problem.
National suicide rates have been roughly flat. Among Black men, they have climbed sharply — fastest among ages 15–24, where rates have nearly doubled. The mental health story is not that Black men aren't struggling. It's that they aren't being reached.
In 2022, only 39% of Black adults experiencing mental illness received any treatment — compared to 52% of White adults. The gap is sharpest for Black men. Cost, distrust of the medical system, and a shortage of culturally competent providers each carry weight.
Roughly one in seven working-age Black men carry no health insurance, against 8% for White men. Coverage widened after the ACA — but that gain is now reversing: enhanced marketplace subsidies expired in January 2026 and the 2025 Medicaid cuts are projected to push the national uninsured rate from about 8% toward 11%. The gap is closable; right now it is widening.
The gap is structural, not biological. Closing it doesn't extend life with new technology — it lets Black men reach years that other groups already reach. The math runs into the millions.
How this is measured
Five fewer years. That is the country's running tab, paid in lives. The body is the receipt — but it is not the cause. The cause is upstream, in the conditions a man is placed inside.
The body absorbs what the structure delivers. So look at what the structure delivers. The job is the first place to look — it sets the wage, the hours, the stress, the insurance, the room to climb. Wage to savings to home to retirement — the chain runs from there.
The labor market is where the country decides who climbs and who waits.
Where does the economy place him?
Black men are in the workforce. The question is where the workforce puts them — what jobs, at what level, for what wage, with what room to move up. Three different lenses below: the corporate hierarchy, monthly unemployment, and what every group earns per dollar a White man does.
Climbing the corporate pyramid.
Each row is a job category in the federal EEO-1 standard, from executive at the apex to service worker at the base. The green fills how much of that row is held by Black men. The cream marker on each row shows how much is held by White men, for comparison.
A 2:1 gap that has held for fifty years.
Black men's unemployment rate runs about twice the rate for White men. That ratio has held through booms, recessions, and tight labor markets — every period the federal government has measured it.
This ratio has held between 1.8× and 2.5× for more than fifty years of federal measurement — through booms, recessions, tight labor markets, and policy regimes. The story isn't a bend. It's the flatline.
For every $1.00 a White man earns, who else gets how many cents?
Each square below is one cent of the dollar. The colors stack from the bottom up: every demographic group's color fills the squares up to their own median paycheck. White men sit at $1.00 — the structural baseline. Read the picture from the bottom: at 73¢, Black men's color cuts off. Asian men are an exception: they out-earn White men, mostly because they're concentrated in tech and medicine.
How to read this. Each tiny square is one cent of the dollar. The squares stack from the bottom up. Each demographic group's color owns the band of cents from the next-lower group up to its own pay rate. Read it like a thermometer.
White men sit at $1.00 by definition. Asian men exceed it because they're concentrated in tech, medicine, and law. Everyone else sits below. Black men's color cuts off lower in the grid — that's how much less, dollar-for-dollar, the same workforce earns for the same work.
When Black men can't work, the country loses.
Multiply the number of Black men currently unemployed by what the average employed Black man earns in a year. That's the consumer demand pulled out of the U.S. economy every year because the labor market won't place them.
When Black men can't work, the people they would have paid don't get paid either. The grocery store, the landlord, the mechanic, the daycare — all of it shrinks. This is the consumer side of unemployment that doesn't show up in the headline rate.
Same data, different lens. The diagnostic above names the gap; the figures below name what closing it returns — to households, to leadership pipelines, and to U.S. economic demand.
How this is measured
The hierarchy is the gate. It doesn't bar him from the building — it decides which floor he's allowed to reach, whether he gets invited to the country club, who sponsors his growth. The pyramid is the aggregate. Behind it sit over 72,000 individual filings — every employer required to report, by name, year by year. Those filings are public. They are below.
Every employer with 100 or more workers files one document with the federal government.
It's called an EEO-1 filing — a legally mandated breakdown of every position the company employs, broken down by race, sex, and ten standard job categories. These are documents companies pay attorneys to keep quiet. They are also public.
BDI has consolidated 72,989 federal EEO-1 filings across 28,369 employers — the largest disaggregated EEO-1 record ever assembled outside the government itself — and continues to verify new filings one document at a time. Below: the high-level view, three eras of the same record, and the search to drill in.
The same federal record, three different stories.
Federal EEO-1 filings tell different stories depending on when you look. The 2016–2020 cut is the bulk FOIA release — the last years before the rules around DEI started shifting. From 2021–2024, BDI individually verified filings from a smaller set of large committed employers. From 2025 onward, the country pulled back.
One important note: Era 2 numbers look higher than Era 1 because the curated set is large, committed employers — not a representative slice of the country. Treat Era 2 as a floor — what the most accountable companies look like when most of corporate America walks away.
The employers BDI tracks most closely.
These are companies still publishing recent EEO-1 filings, with each one verified by BDI from source documents. Each card carries a small chart of how that company's Black workforce has moved over time. Below: the aggregate trajectory across all BDI-tracked companies, then the per-card directory.
Placement is the paycheck. The paycheck is the savings account. The savings account is the inheritance.
What he earns is what his children start with.
What can he build and pass on?
Wealth is what is left after paying the bills — the buffer that turns a layoff into a sabbatical, a child's tuition into a manageable expense, a parent's medical bill into a difficult month rather than a household crisis.
The wealth gap is not primarily a housing gap. It is a financial assets gap — stocks, retirement accounts, business equity. These compound across generations. The gap they produce is the largest in any pillar this project measures.
What does $44,900 buy? Not retirement. Not a year of college tuition for a child without loans. Not a down payment on a house in most cities. It is roughly seven months of the median Black household's expenses — meaning one medical emergency, one job loss, one totaled car can erase a Black family's entire net worth. $285,000 buys a runway. A lost job becomes a sabbatical. A child's tuition becomes a manageable line item. A medical bill becomes a difficult month, not a household crisis. The wealth gap is what changes outcomes when life happens.
The median is the household in the middle — not the rich one, not the struggling one, the typical one. Even averaging in the wealthiest Black households, the gap closes only modestly: per-household mean Black net worth is roughly $370,000, against $1.68 million for White households. The mean is pulled up by a small slice of high-wealth Black families. The median is what life looks like for most.
The lines stay where they are.
Each line below is a slice of total U.S. household wealth. The green line is what Black households hold. The cream line is what White households hold. The dashed gold line at 14% marks Black Americans' share of the population — what their wealth share would be if the playing field were level.
Thirty-six years of Federal Reserve measurement. Today, Black households hold about 3.3% of total U.S. household wealth — down from a post-1989 ceiling of 4.7% briefly held in 2016, before the slide back. The gold dashed line at 14% marks where the share would land at proportional household parity; the green line has never come within 9 points of it. White households still hold roughly 86% — exactly where they were in 1989.
Forecast lines (dashed) computed from Federal Reserve DFA data, 2017–present (the recent decline period). Different windows would yield different slopes. Linear extrapolation. Not a prediction.
Wealth is measured at the household level — Black men and Black women aggregated through the homes they share. Federal data does not break Black household wealth out by sex of head, so the figures below stay at the household level Black men contribute to (~6 million Black-male-headed households, plus the Black-women-headed households Black men live in and support). The diagnostic above names how far behind Black households sit; the figures below name what closing it returns — to households, to capital markets, to the next generation's starting line.
How this is measured
$44,900 doesn't survive a health crisis. It doesn't pay for his child's education, a starter home, or groceries for a family of four. But his voice carries no price tag — and no ceiling.
When the body has been measured, the wage counted, and the inheritance weighed — one instrument of power is left.
The ballot is the one place a Black man's count equals everyone else's. If he can reach it.
Does the system count him?
He is part of an electorate that has decided national elections. The voice exists. The bloc has weight. The data shows it being exercised at scale — and shows what gets in the way.
Black turnout dipped from the 2020 highs but the bloc still cast 19.9 million ballots in 2024 — voices decisive in multiple swing-state margins. Black women carried the heaviest weight inside the bloc at 62.7% turnout; Black men's participation, at 55.5%, remains the swing factor in close races.
The voice taken — by law.
One in 19 Black voting-age adults is barred from the ballot due to a current or completed felony conviction. In five states the rate exceeds 1 in 10. Reform is real but uneven — Virginia restored rights by executive action in 2021; Florida amended its constitution in 2018 even with subsequent rollbacks. The wall stands in most of the country; in some places, it has begun to come down.
From 1980 to 2020, White men's rate roughly doubled. The Black-men line peaked around 2000 and has since fallen by nearly half — a real, measured decline — but the 2020 floor still sits more than 60% above the 1980 baseline, and the absolute gap with White men remains far wider than where the era began. The peak of the era passed; the era did not.
22 million Black boys and men. 8.6 million votes. Every gate is a place where the count gets decided — and where it can be changed.
Of the 6.9 million Black men who didn't vote in 2024, 5.8 million are reachable through outreach — registration, mobilization, candidate engagement. The remaining ~1.1 million need statutory reform of felony-disenfranchisement law before they can vote at all. The figures below show what closing the addressable gap returns.
Black men and Black women combined — the full Black electoral bloc, with the gender breakouts pulling in the same direction. Numbers below sum the citizen voting-age population for both groups together.
Method. Census CPS Voting Supplement · November 2024 · Table 2 (citizen voting-age population, registration, reported voting) — using the Black Alone or in Combination series, current research best practice for inclusive Black-community counts. The Sentencing Project · Locked Out 2024: 1.34M Black Americans disenfranchised ("1 in 22 of voting age"). The Black-men figure (~1.1M, roughly 1 in 14 of citizen voting age) is a BDI estimate — the report does not break out race by gender, so we apply its national gender split (men are roughly 80% of all disenfranchised people) to the Black total, on AOIC denominators. Counterfactual scenarios apply turnout rates to the population with full ballot access. CPS turnout is self-reported and runs roughly 4–8 percentage points higher than administrative records, meaning the addressable gap is likely larger than shown. Linear projection. Not a prediction.
The bloc has weight. The system removes pieces of it before participation. But a gentleman holds it down — for himself — and for the 1.2 million voices stolen.
22 million boys and men. 8.6 million votes. 1.7% of executive seats. 16 cents of wealth. Nearly 6 fewer years.
Every number is the consequence of the one before it.
Right now, in America: of 22.5 million Black boys and men, fewer than 8.6 million cast a ballot in 2024 — leaving 6.9 million voices unregistered, unengaged, or unrepresented. Roughly one in 22 Black citizens of voting age is barred from the ballot by a felony conviction — and men carry most of that weight. Of those who reach the workforce, — are unemployed — a Black-to-White rate ratio of — — and — of the country's executive seats sit with a Black man. The wealth that follows tracks the placement: — of America's household wealth, against a 14% population share. The years that follow track the wealth: nearly six fewer, on average, than a White man.
If every gate moved: +5.8 million Black men's votes recoverable through outreach — Black men's electoral weight grows from 5.6% to 8.9% of all U.S. voters. At employment parity, tens of billions in annual wages flow back into Black households and the demand they create. At the 4.7% post-1989 wealth ceiling — ground Black households briefly held in 2016 — roughly $2.5 trillion returns to Black balance sheets. And nearly six years of life — career, family, civic — return to every Black man, more than 125 million person-years per generation. None of these are projections. They are arithmetic.
The body. The wage. The balance sheet. The ballot. Four gates, one record. The numbers above are not arguments — they are receipts.
FOR EVERY YEAR HE IS OWED.
That's the Gentlemen's Agenda.
What this asks of you.
The data above is not the conclusion. It is the starting line. The Gentlemen's Agenda — the priorities, the policy positions, the corporate commitments — will be shaped by Black men nationally, in partnership with The Gentlemen's Factory in Brooklyn and the communities it serves.
5.8 million Black men's votes are reachable through outreach alone — 4.0M who could register but didn't, plus 1.8M who registered and didn't turn out. Underwrite the registration drives, the GOTV operations, the candidate-engagement work, and the data pipelines that keep this dashboard live. Two activities, one funding ask.
Black men hold 1.7% of executive seats. Their own working-age population parity sits at ~7% — roughly 4× current. Partner with BDI on the targets and the accountability — and on the recoverable demand that lands when the pay gap closes.
The only gate outreach can't reach is felony disenfranchisement — 1.3M Black voters held out by state law. Only state-level reform moves that number. Every figure on this page is sourced, citable, and ready for state-by-state briefings on request.
There's strength in the ~14.3 million gentlemen's voices — the priorities, the platforms, the demands come from Black men themselves. Check back for data directly from The Gentlemen's Agenda Community Ledger.