Source: Andrew Billingsley, “Understanding African American Family Diversity,” in Lee A. Daniels, ed., State of Black America 1990  (National Urban League,1990)

Billingsley’s top-three class categories: upper class (9%), middle class (27%), and working-class non-poor (34%) – approximate what I call today’s “mobile-stratum” among African-American households. His bottom-two categories – a combination of working-class poor and underclass (28%) – approximate what I call today’s “static-stratum” among African-American households.  Accordingly, in overall terms I would classify 40% of  today’s African-American households belonging to the “static-stratum,”  and 60% of African-American households belonging to the “mobile-stratum.”

We should mention, however, that the important advances during the post-Civil Rights Movement era in new middle-class and professional jobs for African-Americans have resulted in checkered advances in the Black/White income and wealth gap. As a major analyst of African-Americans’ income and wealth patterns, Professor Thomas Shapiro of Brandeis University, informs us in his important study The Hidden Cost of Being African American (2004):

Furthermore,  Thomas Shapiro’s research found that job-market advancement for middle-class and professional African-Americans has produced only marginal changes in the overall Black/White wealth gap. This is the gap in overall assets held by Black families and White families.  At the dawn of the 21st century, Shapiro’s research found that:

Thus, it is clear that it has been the new “mobile-stratum” African-American households that have benefited most from the overall advances for Blacks in the post-Civil Rights Movement era.  This means, in turn, that numerous problems continue to shackle the life conditions of “static-stratum” African-American families.

Problem-Spheres Facing Poor African-Americans  

We can identify three main problem-spheres that make up the substance of the crisis-development fault line among  40% of African-American households today:

l) Family Structure/Poverty Problem-Sphere

Fundamental to the family structure/poverty problem-sphere faced by African-Americans in the “static-stratum” is the weak and sometimes non-existent job-market available to them. That’s been proved again and again – most recently in 1999-2000 when, as White unemployment fell to 4.2%, its lowest level in three decades, the Black unemployment rate sank to an historic low of 7%.  It reached that level because poor Blacks, and especially poor Black males, had rushed to take the low-wage service sector jobs which, thanks to the powerful dynamic of job-creation during the Clinton Administrations of the 1990s, had opened up to them.

That was confirmed by a national study of more than 300 metropolitan areas by the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Massachusetts-based  think tank. It found that because the nation’s long period of prosperity had opened up jobs at the bottom of the occupational ladder, Black males age 16 to 24 with a high school education or less, were working in greater numbers and earning bigger paychecks than ever before.

We must note, however, that the tragedy for Black America’s “static-stratum” is that such “good times” – let’s call them – are an anomaly. But for the 1999-2000 period, the overall unemployment rate for African-Americans since the 1960s has continually fluctuated between 8% and 12% - twice the national rate. Moreover,  Black youth faced unemployment  levels at least twice as high.  Today, the overall Black unemployment  rate is back in double digits – hovering between 10% and 11%. These high levels of unemployment have inevitably led to sizable rates of poverty, and a grinding pressure on African-Americans at the bottom of the social ladder.

The Black poverty rate was nothing short of massive as the Civil Rights Movement reached its height in the late 1960s – nearly 42% in 1966, compared to a national rate of 14.7%. Such “Great Society” policies of the Johnson Administration as job-training and affirmative action slowly helped mitigate Black poverty in the succeeding decade until the rate leveled off at 32% for much of the 1980s. The long period of a booming economy during the 1990s brought it down even further, and today the poverty rate stands at 24.4% of African-American households, compared to 29% Latino-American households and a national rate of 12.5%.

A U.S. Census Bureau occupation survey in 2002 reported that low-paying jobs at the bottom of the American occupational ladder (with the exception of “farming, forestry, fishing”) accounted for 4,163,000 Black workers or 28.2% of all employed African-Americans. The overarching disability faced by such “static-stratum” African-Americans is that of  weak family patterns.  Professor Andrew Billingsley’s study for the National Urban League’s State of Black America 1990 provided data showing that working-class poor Black households had a 67% single-parent rate and underclass Black households had 75% single-parent rate.  This fragile family pattern means, moreover, that over 60% of African-American children are being raised in economically distressed single-parent households.

These weak family patterns among the 40% “static-stratum” African-American households  appear even worse when they are contrasted with family patterns among “mobile-stratum” African-Americans. For instance, in the upper-class category in Billingsley’s study for the National Urban League, the 624,000 African-American families he placed in this category (9% of all Black families) had 96% husband/wife pattern. And the 2,000,000 African-American families Billingsley placed in the middle-class category (27% of all black families) had 83% husband/wife pattern.

Thus, there is no doubt about the burden of the family structure/poverty problem-sphere for the 40% “static-stratum” among African-Americans. Should anyone have any doubt, just note that according to a study released in June 2004 by Family USA, some 40% of African-Americans are without health insurance (60% for Latino-Americans) and most of these African-Americans inhabit the “static-stratum.” This predicament, by the way, exacerbates the dreadful health and medical circumstances the poorest African-Americans endure, such as the fact that African-American babies are likely to die at three-times the rate of White babies, and African-American and Latino children under five are hospitalized for asthma at more than three times the rate for White children under five.

A graphic view of the social deficiencies faced by poverty-level African American families was presented by the African-American columnist Eugene Robinson in the Washington Post (March 4, 2005), where he critiques the cynical use by President George W. Bush of death rates among Black males to defend the Republican party’s reactionary attack on Social Security. As Eugene Robinson observed:

2) Racist Criminal Justice Problem-Sphere

If we can say that the weak job-market and unemployment dynamics over the past 30-odd years have stymied stable social patterns among African-Americans in the “static-stratum,” we must also say that the American racist criminal justice system has ravaged the lives of “static-stratum” African-Americans. Without a doubt,  the past four decades of a corrosive high unemployment rate among African-Americans – especially young males – created an extremely destructive dynamic whereby African-American society was beset by an abnormal number of crime-committers, many pushed into crime by their condition of social-economic-personal desperation.

This criminal dynamic in Black communities, in turn, provided a pretext for racist-inspired criminal justice elements to fashion a unique post-Civil Rights era American “crime-control system”.  Namely, one whose overwhelming concern has been to use America’s massive prison system – the largest in any democratic country – to harness working-class and poor African-American males (working-class and poor Latino-Americans as well), to render them quiescent or docile.  After three decades existence, this racist-inspired “crime-control system” has been reinforced by a massive prison-construction industry.

Inevitably,  the everyday operation of the post-Civil Rights era America “crime-control system” has ravaged the lives of working-class and poor African-Americans through widespread police  brutality and the execution of draconian drug laws, the latter involving fraudulent arrests and convictions. A survey of the attributes comprising the racist application of criminal justice to African-Americans by Professor Manning Marable of Columbia University reported that at the end of the 1990s there was an astronomical prison-incarceration for African-Americans. This meant that nearly 50% of prisoners in federal prisons were African-Americans. Marable observed that this incarceration rate “even surpassed that experienced by blacks who still lived under the apartheid regime in South Africa [by 1990].”

Moreover, the federal-level prison incarceration rate for African-Americans was replicated at the state level, especially in states with large Black populations. Marable used data on New York state, showing that “In New York, a state in which African Americans and Latinos comprise 25 percent of the total population, they represented 83  percent of all state prisoners by 1999….”  Marable especially identified the role of draconian drug laws as part of the explanation of the high incarceration rate for Blacks and Latinos in New York, noting that “94 percent of all individuals [were] convicted on drug offences.”

Marable concluded his discussion by relating the stark racist dynamics surrounding New York’s incarceration rate for African-Americans in particular. As Professor Marable put it: “The pattern of racial bias in these statistics is confirmed by the research of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, which found that while African Americans today [2000] constitute only 14 percent of all drug users nationally, they are 35 percent of all drug arrests, 55 percent of all convictions, and 75% of all prison admissions for drug offences.”  Thus, it is patently clear, I think, that the U.S. criminal justice system’s so-called “drug war” facets alone render it a racist system. How else can the massively race-skewed arrest, conviction, and incarceration rates be explained? African-American opposition to the racist features of the criminal justice system must be raised to the level of a moral imperative. This means that a major African-American social movement challenge of today’s racist criminal justice system must be a political imperative of the 21st century Black elite.

3) Education Opportunity/Performance Problem-Sphere

There are two different sets of data that provide a stark outline of the education crisis confronting African-American children and youth in general, and those of weak-working class and poor African-American children in particular.  One set of data I have in mind – developed by the NAACP’s education researchers – shows that in typical public schools attended heavily by Black children around the country, disproportionate numbers of African-American children are herded into special education classes and denied access to gifted or talented classes.  Adding insult-to-injury, as it were, in typical public schools attended heavily by Black children, disproportionate numbers of these children are also slapped with suspensions.

Data in TABLE VI – developed by the NAACP State Data Sheets—Public Schools  (2004) – show a typical instance of these barriers to adequate education opportunity faced massively by African-American children around the country, highlighting the situation in  Alabama.  

Table VI

BLACK CHILDREN’S

EDUCATION OPPORTUNITY GAP

IN ALABAMA 2004

Click to view larger and printer friendly table

"As the chart [Table] shows, 1 in 3 public school students in the state is African American. Yet according to the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, almost 1 in 2 students in special education and almost 2 in 3 students suspended is African American. When it comes to high-level courses, white students are far more likely than African-American students to be placed in gifted and talented programs. These disparities block too many African American youth from the rigorous curriculum and high quality instruction that will close the achievement gap."            

”…American student performance is appalling. Only a minority of students – whether in 4th, 8th or 12th grade – reach proficiency as measured by the Education Department’s National Assessment of Educational Progress. On a scale that has three levels – basic, proficient and advanced – most students score at the basic level or even below basic in every subject. American students also perform poorly when compared with their peers in other developed countries on tests of mathematics and science, and many other nations now have a higher proportion of their students completing high school.”