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Notes -
What people rarely try to figure out is, how well is the black community actually doing today compared to in the past? For all I know, African Americans might be doing better now than at any previous point in the history of the US. And not just absolutely, but also in relative terms.
Before we talk about how to approach African American issues, we should probably try to figure out how well African Americans actually are doing right now - for real, not just through the prism of political agendas and media.
There is such a thing as the black middle class after all, and it's not small. The white unemployment rate in 2023 was 3.3%, the black was 5.5%. That does not seem to indicate a huge difference, even when one takes into account that the unemployment rate does not entirely represent what people usually think of as unemployment. Median white household income in 2021 was $74,932, median black was $48,297. Huge difference, but it's not like an order of magnitude. It's much smaller than the difference between the median income of the average American and the median income of a truly upper class American.
Both sides of the political divide, for their own reasons, focus heavily on a subset of the overall African-American population: inner-city black people living in poor, dysfunctional, crime-ridden communities.
For the left, focusing on that subset lets them hammer on the idea that black people are horribly oppressed and a lot more must be done to help them, and in general, a lot more must be done to make society more equal and to make up for past injustices. For the right, focusing on that subset lets them hammer on ideas like Democratic mismanagement of cities, the need for law and order, the importance of culture and stable nuclear families, and (for some) genetic discrepancies. Meanwhile the entertainment media has an incentive to focus on that subset because it is easier to write interesting inner city black characters than characters who are black accountants or middle managers.
But how representative is that subset really?
I don't know, I haven't looked into the data in enough detail to be confident. But it is quite possible that the majority of commentators of all kinds, whether they are progressive, liberal, conservative, or "grey tribe" - are arguing about the wrong things.
It seems to me there isn't much incentive to figure this out. For the people who do care about analyzing this kind of thing in terms of race, finding out the truth about the current state of things is scary, since it could reduce enthusiasm for whatever policies they want to push. For the people who don't care about seeing this in terms of race, they just wouldn't really have that much investment in this question intrinsically.
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