Black middle class

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The black middle class, within the United States, refers to African Americans who occupy a middle class status within the American class structure. It is an occurrence that predominately began to develop in the 1970s, following the end of the African American Civil Rights Movement, which led to reform movements aimed at outlawing racial discrimination. Although the size of the black middle class can vary by definition, members of the middle class (for both blacks and whites) can be characterized by families who own their own home or small business, and by the strictest definition, those with a degree from college.^[1]

United States

African Americans had limited opportunities for advancement to middle class status prior to 1961 because of racial discrimination, segregation, and the fact that most lived in the rural South.^{[citation needed]} In 1960, forty-three percent of the white population completed high school, while only twenty percent of the black population did the same. African Americans had little to no access to higher education and only three percent graduated from college. Those blacks who were professionals were mainly confined to serving the African American population. Outside of the black community, they worked in unskilled industrial jobs. Black women who worked were almost all domestic servants.

Economic growth, public policy, black skill development, and the civil rights movement all contributed to the surfacing of a larger black middle class. The civil rights movement helped to remove barriers to higher education. As opportunity for African Americans expanded, blacks began to take advantage of the new possibilities. Homeownership has been crucial in the rise of the black middle class, including the movement of African Americans to the suburbs, which has also translated into better educational opportunities. By 1980, over 50% of the African American population had graduated from high school and eight percent graduated from college. In 2006, 86% of blacks between age 25 and 29 had graduated from high school and 19% had completed a bachelor's degrees.^[2] As of 2003, the percentage of black householders is 48%, compared to 43% in 1990.^[3]

Some argue 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%.^[4] The trend of downward mobility has caused the overall majority of middle-class-black children to end up with lower incomes than their parents.^{[citation needed]} While 68% of white children earn incomes above their parents, 31% of black children earn incomes more than their parents did.^[4] 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.^[5]

Sub-Saharan African immigrants to the United States tend to have higher income levels than African Americans due to their higher education levels. (Sub-Saharan Africans are distinguished from African Americans, who are the descendents of America's black slaves). In addition, African immigrants have the highest educational attainment rates of all American ethnic groups, with higher levels of completion than the stereotyped Asian American model minority.^[6][7] Like most Asian Americans, black Africans migrated to America in the last few decades after the Jim crow/African American Civil Rights Movement era ended. Prior to the mid-1970s, there were very few non-white immigrants because of immigration laws, banning non-whites; that is, up until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which was an extension of, and made possible by way of the African American Civil Rights Movement.^[8] Despite this, U.S. immigration policies are still discriminatory insofar as favoring immigrant candidates that have professional skills and higher educational levels over the many immigrant candidates who do not. In addition to this, it was found in a study that non-Mexican immigrants who can't simply cross the border, but must be able to pay for transatlantic journey, usually come to the U.S. already educated with middle-class backgrounds.^[9][10]

In 1997, 24.6 percent of all adult white Americans and 13.3 percent of all black Americans held a bachelors degree, while 48.9 percent of African immigrants held a bachelor's degree. Though the U.S. Census Bureau counts white populations who emigrated from Africa in the same category as black Africans, it shows African immigrants were more than three times as likely to hold a bachelor's degree than native-born African Americans.^[11] Despite the high educational achievement of African immigrants, African immigrants still tend to have lower median household incomes compared to other immigrant groups. Many African immigrants hold strong ties to their home countries and send remittances to their relatives.

A phrase used somewhat interchangeably with black middle class is black urban professional, whose acronym is buppie, a parallel structure to yuppie, or young urban professional. The acronym has a pejorative connotation when used in describing a person.^[12]

Social class of the African American community

Middle class African Americans

Going by household income, while the vast majority of whites are centrally middle-class, the majority of African Americans are considered lower middle-class, also defined as working-class and lower class. The narrowest view of a household with a middle-class income is considered $39,100 to $62,000, while a more generous view is $20,291 to $100,000. Anything around $40,000 is seen as the lower-end of the middle-class household income.^[13] In 2009, the majority of white household incomes was around $54,461, which is considered a centrally middle-class income. On the other hand, the majority of black household incomes was 32,584, which is viewed as a working class income.^[14]

Although most African Americans aren't living below the poverty line, what is middle-class for most white Americans is vastly different to what is middle-class for most African Americans. The few black professionals in all-white neighborhoods are not representative of the African American middle-class by any stretch; rather, most African Americans are lower middle-class: Living from paycheck to paycheck; employed in such jobs as retail; and may face many problems and circumstances worse off even than poor whites. What is vastly missing from the African American community is a central middle-class. ^[15][16] One of the problems facing lower middle-class African Americans is their close proximity and ties to poor African Americans: Most of the lower middle-class black neighborhoods in the U.S. are adjacent to poor, struggling, urban areas and neighborhoods. For the most part, lower middle-class African Americans and poor African Americans are sharing the same communities and environments. This is in part due to African Americans being much more likely to have poor family members; much of today's middle-aged and elderly African Americans are very likely to have grown up in poverty. In fact, the African American rise to the lower middle-class is a development that took off primarily by the 1970s; this recentness is due to previous generations of subjection to racial discrimination. ^[17]

Because of the close living quarters to poverty-stricken African Americans, there's a high potential for lower middle-class African Americans to develop friendships, relationships, and ties to poor African Americans and find themselves sharing the same urban environments. As a result, sociologists have found that the African American community's middle-class has a far greater potential than do middle-class whites of being involved with and falling victim to crime. The central middle-class portion of the African American middle-class is a relatively small group that's left with the choice of living in working-class black neighborhoods, adjacent to poor, struggling, urban areas, or in suburban areas where they're vastly outnumbered by whites. It should be noted that although illegal since the end of the Jim Crow/African American Civil Rights Movement era, racially restrictive covenants (which exclude racial minorities from moving into white neighborhoods) exist heavily in the present-day and continue to be used secretively by certain white realtors to keep racial minorities out of white neighborhoods. In a project conducted by The University of Washington's Civil Rights and Labor History Program in 2010, it was found that more than 400 properties in Seattle suburbs alone contained discriminatory language that excluded racial minorities. "These restrictions just sit there quietly, casting a shadow of segregation in neighborhoods to this day," said James Gregory, a history professor at The University of Washington.^[18]

Poor African Americans

As of 2010, while the poverty rate among non-Hispanic whites sits at 9.9%,^[19] the poverty rate among African Americans sits at 27.4%.^[20]

Controversy over how it grew

In 1999, NAACP Chairman Julian Bond credited affirmative action with bringing the black middle class into being.^[21]

But Larry Elder wrote:

• In their book, America in Black and White, Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom show that the black middle class existed and grew well before affirmative action. Moreover, they point out that affirmative action did not accelerate the growth of the black middle class.

And black economist Thomas Sowell wrote:

• "Yet the rapid growth of that [black] middle class began even before the civil-rights revolution of the 1960s, much less the racial quotas and preferences that began in the 1970s. ... The rise of blacks into professional and similar occupations was faster in the five years preceding passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than in the five years following its passage."

South Africa

The black middle class in South Africa is another important instance of a black middle class that developed in size and power in the wake of political change (in this case, the end of the apartheid).New research shows that there is a burgeoning black middle class in South Africa – with a significant boost to the number of black South Africans entering the middle-income brackets.

According to a study by the University of Cape Town's Unilever Institute of Strategic Marketing and TNS Research Surveys, South Africa's black middle class has grown by 30% in just over a year in 2007, with their numbers increasing from 2-million to 2.6-million and their collective spending power rising from R130-billion to R180-billion. ^[22]

See Also

American Black Upper Class

Footnotes

References

Sources

• Landry, Bart. "The New Black Middle Class". 1987.
• Harris Jr., Robert. "The Rise of the Black Middle Class". The World and I Magazine. Feb. 1999. Vol. 14, pg. 40.

Additional reading

• E. Franklin Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie Free Press, New York 1957
• Lawrence Otis Graham, Our Kind of People Harper Perennial, New York, 1999
• Mary Patillo-McCoy, Black Pickett Fences University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2000
• Bart Landry, The New Black Middle Class, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1987.
• Melvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro, Black Wealth/White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality, Routledge, New York, 1995.
• Susan Tolliver, Black Families in Corporate America, Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, California, 1998.
• Michael Dyson, Is Bill Cosby Right?: Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Minds?, New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2005. | ISBN 0-465-01719-3

External links

• From Recession to Depression: The Destruction of the Black Middle Class - video report by Democracy Now!