Algernon Austin presents an excellent, concise, and wonderfully read scholarly examination of the complicated landscape of race, class and popular perception. Besides the prison industrial complex, black strides in education, poverty rates, crime and other indices contradict claims that blacks are “moving backward.”--Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Director, Institute for African American Studies, University of Connecticut and author of Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (The Johns Hopkins University Press), 2004 and Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap (University Press of Kansas), 2007.
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“High numbers of black children have fallen from the middle to the bottom of the income distribution,” concludes a study by Julia B. Isaacs done for the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Economic Mobility Project. This is quite a startling finding.
In absolute terms, the black real median family income has increased since the 1970s. This increase has been driven largely by increases in the percent of black women working and by increases in women’s earnings. This picture is basically the same for blacks and whites.
When one examines where children from different class backgrounds end up then the story for blacks and whites is remarkably different. If one looks at the children of white families that were in the middle fifth of the U.S. income distribution 40 years ago, 68 percent of those white children now have a real family income higher than their parents. For blacks, only 31 percent have a higher family income. In other words, a majority of the children of the black middle class are doing worse economically than their parents, but a majority of the children of the white middle class are doing better.
“A startling 45 percent of black children whose parents were solidly middle income end up falling to the bottom income quintile, while only 16 percent of white children born to parents in the middle make this descent,” Isaacs reports.
Although blacks who grew up in the poorest fifth were most likely to end up in the poorest fifth as adults, among blacks it was the poorest group that showed the greatest improvement relative to their parents. Seventy-three percent of them earned more than their parents.
Are These Findings Correct?
There aren’t many longitudinal studies with which to examine these issues. But Isaacs reports that another dataset has similar findings. Thus, this downward mobility finding appears to be true, but it would be nice to have other datasets to examine.
No one has a very good explanation of what could be going on here. Black families who were in the middle fifth of the U.S. income distribution in the late 1960s were likely quite well-off for blacks in the pre-Civil Rights era. Note these families are not in the middle fifth of the black income distribution, but the middle fifth for all U.S. families. If these families became so wealthy during Jim Crow then maybe the end of Jim Crow led then to experience rapid downward mobility. This is admittedly a wild guess.
Anyone with knowledge of a family with parents who were fairly wealthy in the late 1960s whose children ended up relatively poor, please e-mail me that story at contact@thorainstitute.com. What happened? What were the occupations of the parents and children? This is a real mystery.
If the finding of the downward mobility of the black middle class is correct then it seems that the American economy exerts a strong downward pressure on black family income. The downward pressure seems to increase as black incomes increase so that the children of the black middle class have less upward mobility that the children of the black poor.
This research is yet another piece of evidence that the pundits who have been beating up on the black poor are getting it very wrong. The poor from the 1960s were upwardly mobile to a fair degree. It is the black middle class of the 1960s who did not perform up to expectations.
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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.
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