Black Middle Class - Challenges of The Black Middle Class

Challenges of The Black Middle Class

Empirical evidence demonstrates that blacks have less upward mobility than whites. A report done by the Pew Research Center in 2007 says that of the sons and daughters of the black middle class, 45% of black children end up "near poor", and the comparable rate for white families is 16%. The trend of downward mobility has caused the overall majority of middle-class-black children to end up with lower incomes than their parents. While 68% of white children earn incomes above their parents, 31% of black children earn incomes more than their parents did. The lower rate of upward mobility could be caused by the lack of married blacks, and the number of blacks born out of wedlock. In 2009, 72% of black babies are born out of wedlock, compared with 28% of white women.

Read more about this topic:  Black Middle Class

Famous quotes containing the words middle class, challenges, black, middle and/or class:

    “Had middle class black women begun a movement in which they had labeled themselves “oppressed,” no one would have taken them seriously.”
    —bell hooks (b. 1955)

    “A powerful idea communicates some of its strength to him who challenges it.”
    —Marcel Proust (1871–1922)

    “...I am who I am because I’m a black female.... When I was health director in Arkansas ... I could talk about teen-age pregnancy, about poverty, ignorance and enslavement and how the white power structure had imposed it—only because I was a black female. I mean, black people would have eaten up a white male who said what I did.”
    —Joycelyn Elders (b. 1933)

    “A tragedy is a representation of an action that is whole and complete and of a certain magnitude.... A whole is what has a beginning and middle and end.”
    —Aristotle (384–323 B.C.)

    “A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.”
    —Mao Zedong (1893–1976)