My latest reading of Andrew Hacker’s 1992 (updated for 1995) book, Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal focused on inequality in income and employment. In Losing the Race,
John McWhorter argued that most African-Americans are not poor, and
that a reason that statistics indicate a vastly lower median income for
African-Americans than for white Americans is that poor African-American
single-parent families are pulling the median down. I have not yet
read anything in Hacker’s book that indicates that most
African-Americans are poor (although, as I’ve said before, one-in-four
African-Americans in poverty is still high), but he does appear to be
arguing that African-Americans struggle financially more than whites do on average.
Hacker compares the median income of African-American males with that of white males
and finds that the former is lower. African-American unemployment,
while not encompassing the majority of African-Americans, is still
higher than white unemployment and is in the double-digits.
African-Americans are represented in the double-digits in more menial
professions, while in the single-digits in upper-class professions.
Hacker acknowledges the existence of an African-American middle-class
but says that, often, both parents are working in these families,
whereas there are more white families in which one parent can stay at
home.
What is interesting in some of the statistics that Hacker presents is
that African-American working women make more on average than
African-American working men. Hacker states on page 107 that “If black
women have fared better, it is because more of them have been seen as
suitable for office positions”, and that “Professional and clerical
occupations generally call for attitudes and aptitudes associated with
the white world.”
Because Hacker wrote this book in the 1990′s, I searched online for later statistics. See here
for this article, which has 2012 statistics. The African-American
unemployment rate is 10%, which is still the double-digits and is higher
than the overall unemployment rate. It does appear that
African-Americans have made significant gains in terms of entering into
white-collar professions. And working African-American women are still
doing better overall than employed African-American men.
Something else that stood out to me in Hacker’s book is his
discussion of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), a welfare
program. Contrary to the myth that the program promotes long-term
dependency, Hacker argues that more than half of recipients voluntarily
leave the program before the third year. Nowadays, there is Temporary
Aid to Needy Families (TANF), and here
is a discussion of how many who leave the program are faring. The
article appears to be arguing that they’re not faring very well.