Contrary to Donald Trump’s indiscriminate portrayal of African-Americans as “living in hell,” the black upper middle class is ascending the economic ladder at a faster rate than its white counterpart.

Scholars have begun to focus their attention on this phenomenon. William Julius Wilson, a sociologist at Harvard and the author of “The Truly Disadvantaged,” is working on a book about upward social mobility among African-Americans. In an email, he wrote me:

One of the most significant changes in recent decades is the remarkable gains in income among more affluent blacks. When we adjust for inflation to 2014 dollars, the percentage of black Americans earning at least $75,000 more than doubled from 1970 to 2014, to 21 percent. Those making $100,000 or more almost quadrupled to 13 percent (in contrast white Americans saw a less striking increase, from 11 to 26 percent).

In an NBER paper issued in November 2016, Patrick Bayer, an economist at Duke, and Kerwin Charles, a professor of public policy at the University of Chicago, published comparable findings, reporting that

higher quantile black men have experienced substantial gains in both relative earnings levels and their positional rank in the white earnings distribution.

In a summary of their work, Bayer and Charles made the same point more succinctly: “Over the past 75 years, the gap in economic rank” — that is, the gap between blacks and whites — “has narrowed sharply among men at the top of the earnings ladder.”

Bayer and Charles conclude that the improvement in earnings for upper-income black men have had an uneven impact on African- American communities generally:

While the entire economy has experienced a marked increase in earnings inequality, this increase has been even more dramatic for black men, with those at the top continuing to make clear gains within the earnings distribution, and those at the bottom being especially harmed by the era of mass incarceration and the failing job market for men with low skills.

Census income data supports the conclusion reached by Wilson, Bayer and Charles that there was significant income growth among well-off African-Americans during the first 15 years of this century, in contrast to much smaller percentage gains among affluent whites.

African-American households on the highest rungs of the economic ladder — the top 5 percent of all black households — experienced a substantial 19.8 percent income increase from 2000 to 2015. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in inflation-adjusted 2015 dollars, these households saw a $41,871 gain, from $211,425 in 2000 to $253,296 in 2015.