Have you heard? The Black Middle Class is dead. At least that’s what a lot of primetime talking heads are saying these days. I don’t know about you, but this sounds more like Bill Cosby-style anthropology which has long ago been debunked. Too many of us seemingly don’t believe in fact-checking our census reports, and are all too willing to take voodoo statistics and massage the numbers into messages of doom and gloom for Black people, all the while patting the self-appointed Talented Tenth on the head. The National Black MBA Association held a confab where they lamented the death of the Black middle class. That’s bull. I think the pundits and pseudo-intellectuals stay in business by insisting that Black people aren’t succeeding, and they know the reason why. Most often, they don’t know anything you don’t.

It’s true—statistics have suggested for years that Black family incomes weren’t keeping up with our White counterparts. Many would quote stale numbers and map that back to crime and laziness in the Black community. However, there are statistics that have a different perspective: namely census reports that say that young Black pregnancies are down, the high school dropout rate among Blacks has been reduced and there are more Black people going to college today than ever. Certainly, there are places in the country where this is not the case. But using any kind of numbers to infer anything about an entire community is dangerous. For sure, we aren’t winning as well as we should be, but we aren’t doing as bad as we could be.

I question the motivation of grievance merchants who would have you believe that the American Dream still eludes Us: what is the motivation of these people? Maybe they want you to hire them so they can stand on stage and offer you some easy answers. What do you think?

Your Spin: Is the black middle class fading? Tell us here.

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