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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.
Which, notably, is around $1,000 higher than the 2021 median household income in the UK, as well as higher than 2/3 of European countries.
I guess it really demonstrates how much these are really zero-sum status concerns. Black Americans are, globally speaking, rich.
I find that looking at these aggregate numbers to be fascinating, and also difficult to really understand, especially because I really get the feeling that it's tough to understand without really digging in to the data sources, seeing if there are discrepancies between sources and how they choose to do their groupings. For example see the wiki article, which has different tables that are listed from the 2014, 2019, 2021, and 2022 ACS.
Especially the "detailed ancestry" section. Median Indian household income is $152k?! That's wild and dwarfs the top line white/black gap. Makes me wonder if composition effects are significant. That is, are Indian "households" just bigger? Like, more people, plausibly more working people, living in the same house? Conversely, many articles have been written claiming that poor family relations and divorce have plagued black communities more. If Indian households have 2-3 individuals earning incomes on average, while white households have 1.5-2, while black households have 1-1.5, could that be a huge effect? I do recall EconTalk mentioning household composition effects being rather important when talking just about the country-wide median household income statistics, and I wonder how much of a story they tell here.
Additionally, in the detailed ancestry section, they don't have a category for "African Americans (Black Americans)" at all, like they do in the top line chart. So, how are they actually describing these group boundaries? The number from the top chart for this category would be at the absolute bottom of the bottom chart (coming in just below Appalachian), and that's kind of wild to me, too. Even the "Subsaharan African" number is substantially higher. Is the general African American number being pulled down specifically by people who don't identify with any other ancestry, even if they have some sense of where their family came from? It would have to be a pretty strong pull, and I don't have a sense for how relatively big these groups are.
What about self-identification issues? If Cletus decides that Appalachia sucks and that you can't make a living there, so he moves out, finds a job in the fancy city, meets someone there, marries her, makes a family there, etc., how many years will it be until he stops identifying as Appalachian? He thought Appalachia sucked! "Nah; I'm just American." Possible analog to an evaporative cooling mechanism.
I don't think today will be the day that I have time to pour through all the details, but thanks for another reminder that I really need to sometime.
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