Interesting article
I was reading the Washington Post a couple days ago and came across this article :
I figured you all might find it interesting.
If the link doesn't work the gist of the article is that, while in White families growing up middle class generally means the children will be middle class, in a study done on African - American children born to middle class parents in the 1960's many of them wound up living in poverty.
One of the suggestions as to possible reasons is that White middle class families have significantly more wealth then African - American families (class status is largely defined by income, wealth includes everything).
I figured you all might find it interesting.
If the link doesn't work the gist of the article is that, while in White families growing up middle class generally means the children will be middle class, in a study done on African - American children born to middle class parents in the 1960's many of them wound up living in poverty.
One of the suggestions as to possible reasons is that White middle class families have significantly more wealth then African - American families (class status is largely defined by income, wealth includes everything).
posted by Shoshana at
3:00 PM
1 Comments:
Shoshana has posted an interesting article (if the link is broken, you can try using the title of the article in the Washington Post search screen -- "Middle-Class Dream Eludes African American Families" -- that got me to the article).
Wealth inequality could certainly be a contributor to the "slide down the economic ladder" for the next generation of African Americans, and I would guess that it is a symptom of structural and institutional racism. Just because an African American family achieves a middle class income does not mean its members are immune from the effects of structural and institutional racism, and the article even mentioned factors like racial isolation and education inequality as being contributors to the "slide."
I am currently taking a class in the school of public health where we looked at health effects of being a person of color. Research has indicated that holding all other socio-economic variables constant, people of color tend to do worse on most health outcomes than their white counterparts. Similarly, (again, holding all other SES variables constant) white Jewish people perceive their health to be worse than non-Jewish white people. Thus, there may even be variation within the white race, providing additional evidence that the concept of race is socially constructed, and that the categories of race in this country really serve as an indicator of racism.
Even though explicit racism is no longer tolerated in the way it was before civil rights, it is imperative to remember that more subtle racism is alive and well, and its effects cannot be ignored.
A good summary of the varying types of racism and their effects can be found in "Levels of Racism: A Theoretic Framework and a Gardener's Tale" by Camara Jones. It may give a deeper understanding of the "downward slide" described in the article posted by Shoshana.
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