A series of stories have spun out of the shocking package of Pew reports issued last week on African-Americans and class. One report demonstrates that black kids born to middle-class parents in the late 1960s have had a difficult time as adults maintaining their middle-class status. Forty five percent of them, according to the report, have fallen into relative poverty. It’s been the opposite for middle-class white kids, among whom only sixteen percent have dropped into lower income categories.

Another of the Pew reports suggests that a whopping thirty-seven percent of African Americans feel that “black [Americans] today can no longer be thought of as a single race” because of the widening class divide.

Writing on this second survey yesterday in the New York Times, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr, calls it a tragedy that has been unfolding for a long time and details some of his own recent related research:

(more…)