Kai Wright points us to a new chart from the Economic Policy Institute showing how much more likely black children born into the middle class are likely to fall into poverty even if they're born into a middle-class family:
As you can see from the chart, almost half of black children born into the middle fifth dropped to the lowest income group by adulthood. As Wright explains, "Economic mobility is not the same for everybody in America, and to the degree we can talk about a genuine black middle class, it’s not a terribly secure one." I'm sure someone will flippantly describe these results as indicative of pervasive black cultural pathology, but that kind of explanation strikes me more and more as a kind of social-science creationism, meant to blunt empirical inquiry into the problem rather than provide a real explanation.
