Tavis Smiley, pictured.
In this installment of the Bullsh-t Study of the Month campaign against Black Americans, the ’scholars’ found that there is a ‘vibrant’ black middle class of single people.
Marsh and her colleagues studied United States census data from 1980, 1990 and 2000. The data show that among the black middle class, ages 25 to 44, the Love Jones cohort more than doubled its share between 1980 and 2000, from 5.8 percent to more than 14 percent. Meanwhile, the percentage of married couples, living together, with children declined from 64.6 percent to 48 percent in that same time period.
By following the data through three decades, the study also confirmed that SALAs, and especially the Love Jones cohort, do not simply delay marriage but remain single and continue to accumulate wealth.
This contradicts previous research that said a reduction in marriage and childbearing has created a black middle class in stagnation or in decline. Instead, Marsh said, her work reveals a vibrant population, but the composition is changing.
“Marsh’s innovative study makes clear that scholars reached this conclusion because they’ve been focusing on the wrong people. By looking exclusively at married couples, scholars miss the group, which is slowly becoming a fixture in the black middle class – single black professionals who do not marry or become parents. Their status as single and middle class challenges just about everything that we think we know about life in the middle and will demand new research on the consumption patterns, housing preferences and lifestyles of this influential group,” Lacy said.
TheStateOf . . . The Black Middle Class. What good is being educated and middle class if you don’t reproduce? What are you going to do with all that money?
