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Catalysts of change have been forgotten

By ANDREW SKERRITT
Published December 9, 2007

With all our middle class striving to make money to give our children all the things we didn't have, many African-Americans seemed to have missed the most important assignment.

Many of us forgot to pass down those important middle-class values: pursuit of education, hard work and sacrifice. And now we're seeing the troubling results.

While many African-Americans who grew up middle class are doing well or even better than their parents, a surprising number are not.

In every income group, blacks are less likely than whites to climb the ladder, and the majority of blacks born to middle-income parents are slipping out of the middle class, according to the "Economic Mobility of Black and White Families" study released by the Pew Charitable Trusts last month.

Thankfully, the news isn't all bad. Black children are experiencing some of the income gains that all Americans do - 63 percent make more today, after inflation, than their parents did - but there are dramatic differences between blacks and whites at each income level.

But here's the really discouraging part: The report found that only 31 percent of black children born to parents in the middle-income group have family incomes greater than their parents, compared with 68 percent of white children in the same circumstance. Nearly half, 45 percent, of black children born to middle-class families drop to the bottom of the income distribution in one generation - compared with only 16 percent of white children.

Some are going to be disappointed here, but this is a moment for introspection, not blame.

This isn't another chance to rage against racial discrimination, even though it persists. We assumed our children would see our hard work, the sacrifice and the fruits of our success and want it all, too.

Instead, we have reared a generation dazzled by the myth of easy money. They saw only the fruits but not the sacrifice.

"We were encouraged to do better and to go further than your parents," said Abel Bartley, director of Pan-African Studies at Clemson University in South Carolina.

His generation benefited from affirmative action and the civil rights movement only to see the gains being frittered away in one generation.

"We took advantage of the educational opportunities. But we didn't transfer that type of determination," Bartley said. "There is not that success ethos that was in the '60s and '70s."

Where did we go wrong?

We forgot what it took to pull our generation up from poverty. We forgot the hunger, the desire to succeed. That's one thing no parent can give a child.

Andrew Skerritt is a columnist for North Suncoast editions of the Times. He can be reached at askerritt@sptimes.com 813 909-4602 or toll-free at 1-800-333-7505, ext. 4602.

[Last modified December 8, 2007, 22:26:14]