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:

    Planning ahead is a measure of class. The rich and even the middle class plan for future generations, but the poor can plan ahead only a few weeks or days.
    Gloria Steinem (b. 1934)

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

    why
    Do our black faces search the empty sky?
    Is there something we have forgotten? some precious thing
    We have lost, wandering in strange lands?
    Arna Bontemps (1902–1973)

    In the middle of the next century, when the literary establishment will reflect the multicultural makeup of this country and not be dominated by assimiliationists with similar tastes, from similar backgrounds, and of similar pretensions, Langston Hughes will be to the twentieth century what Walt Whitman was to the nineteenth.
    Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)

    The further jazz moves away from the stark blue continuum and the collective realities of Afro-American and American life, the more it moves into academic concert-hall lifelessness, which can be replicated by any middle class showing off its music lessons.
    Imamu Amiri Baraka (b. 1934)