Doug, in response to your post--
>I've just been looking at the 1996 U.S. income figures. Median incomes of
>black households have risen from 58.2% of white ones in 1992 to 63.2% in
>1996, the highest on record. The black poverty rate is also the lowest on
>record. Obviously the gap is still very wide, but has anyone else noticed
>this trend? What's happening?
, my best guess (and since I'm thus admitting that I don't know for sure, I
suppose I open myself as well to a sneering suggestion to go back to grad
school or to teach English Lit--urg), is that these trends are reflections
of that fact that as a group blacks in the US economy are first hurt by
recession, last helped by booms. 1992 was a recession year, 1996 part of a
boom. I recall that blacks were hit harder than whites by the recession in
terms of percentage unemployed and poverty rate. As for the trends being
respectively being the "highest" and "lowest" on record, well, this has been
a strong boom, aside fromt the fact that it has affected people *very*
unequally (see for example the article by Holly Sklar in the latest Z
magazine).
What do you think?
Literarily,
Gil Skillman
