Economic Mobility For African Americans May Be A Myth, Pew Report Shows: The fine line between the American Dream and the African-American Dream is becoming more distinct, according to a recent report by the Pew Charitable Trusts, a nonprofit research organization.
The survey of economic mobility across generations compared the income and wealth of Americans with that of their parents at the same age, and it offered a promising outlook for most Americans -- 84 percent to be exact -- who were shown to have higher incomes than their parents, when adjusted for inflation.
African Americans, however, haven't had the same success, with just 23 percent of blacks raised in the middle class surpassing their parents’ family wealth, compared to 56 percent of whites.
The study's project manager, Erin Currier, said the results aren't far off from what a simliar 2008 survey found. "With this newest update to the data, we can see that not much has changed with a few more years of data added in," Currier told The Huffington Post. "Specifically, African Americans are much more likely than whites to be stuck at the bottom of the income ladder over a generation, and also at the bottom of the wealth ladder," she said. They're also more likely to fall from the middle.
