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Media influencer Kevin Samuels, known for doling out harsh dating advice to women and men, recently stated on his podcast that “61 percent of single Black men are middle class.”
According to some experts, you are in the U.S. middle class if you earned between $51,200 and $153,000 in 2020, depending on the state you live in, USA Today reported.
How correct is Samuels? He’s not that far off if he’s getting his data from a report by the Institute for Family Studies, a right-of-center think tank, and the American Enterprise Institute, another right-leaning think tank.
Black Men Making It in America, a 2018 report by researchers W. Bradford Wilcox, Wendy Wang, and Ronald B. Mincy, used data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 to track a cohort of men born between 1957 and 1964. The men were tracked from their early years to age 50 and older to determine how many of the Black men made it into the middle class or higher by midlife, and what institutional and cultural factors were behind their success. The study found that more than one in two Black men (57 percent) were middle class or higher as adults today, up from 38 percent in 1960. The report does not specify if the Black men are single or married.
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But if you are looking at the most recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Samuels is not correct. The median weekly earnings for Black men was $807, or 71.5 percent of the median for white men ($1,129) in 2021. That comes to $41,964 annually, according to the BLS.
A new report from Oxfam America found that Black workers are dominant among low-wage earners making less than $15 an hour. While 26 percent of white workers earn less than $15 an hour, 47 percent of Black workers and 46 percent of Hispanic workers earn less than $15 an hour, according to the Oxfam report.
READ MORE: Oxfam: Almost Half Of Black American Workers Make Less Than $15 Per Hour
Photo Deagreez, iStock, https://www.istockphoto.com/portfolio/Deagreez?mediatype=photography
