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Comment by weberc2 | Hacker News Reader

“Outlier” is extreme. A significant portion of black Americans are in the middle class. The legacy of historical racism is significant, but exaggerations don’t help anyone.

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The median wealth of a black person is $17,000, while the median wealth of a white person is $170,000 [0]. Defining what middle class is extremely difficult, but one of the numbers I’ve seen is the minimum cut off at $50,000. If this is true, it means more than half of African Americans are less than middle class.

0; http://apps.urban.org/features/wealth-inequality-charts/

“Median” doesn’t tell you anything about outliers, so I don’t see how that relates to my post...

The average numbers are $900,000 for whites and $140,000 for blacks. Averages are more effected by outliers, so read in to this what you will. Never the less I’m not sure what outliers has to do with people being in the middle class.

Also if you want to look at the wealthiest 1% as outliers, only 3% of these outliers are black [0]

0: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/business/the-1-percent-pa...

I was responding to the claim that black people who escape poverty are outliers. I used "middle class" as an approximation for "escaping poverty".

> more than half of African Americans are less than middle class

What is the reason of that?

There’s a lot of complicated reasons. The easiest ones to look at via economic data is the homeownership rate which is significantly lower, higher levels of student debt (a fairly recent phenomenon) and that young black adults start out with less wealth in early adulthood, which means they miss out on the power of compounding interest.

All this data can be found from the source I linked to above.

It's one thing to state that "the homeownership rate which is significantly lower" and another to point out the systematic housing discrimination that has taken place across America for more than a century and which is certainly not over.

https://www.npr.org/2017/05/03/526655831/a-forgotten-history...

Think about it - in most cities the entire shape of our urban landscape is defined by the movement of white people to avoid living near black people. Similarly, the reason public transit in most of the US is near non-existent is b/c people do not want buses and trains bringing 'other' people to where they live.

I'm pretty sure that they were disproportionately affected by the drug war, also. Large numbers of black men are convicted felons, which has to have an effect on future earnings.

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