(ThyBlackMan.com) For many Black people in this country part of the Black experience is catching up to your White peers. If you’re a child of the inner city or of a working to once upon a time “Middle Class” family you were raised in a way where your parents made sure that not only were you as good as, but you most definitely could without a doubt be better than. That constant state of playing catch up has been researched, studied and stratified to give us the numbers behind the education gap, the wealth gap and the income gap. Well ladies and gentleman, boys and girls of the race we once upon a time called colored, here’s some new data to shake your socks out of your well worn Nikes:
WE ARE NO LONGER PLAYING CATCH UP WITH OUR WHITE PEERS.
I REPEAT WE ARE NO LONGER PLAYING CATCHUP WITH OUR WHITE PEERS. 
So who are we playing catch up with?
I’m glad you asked.
Introducing something I’d like to call “The Huxtable Factor.”
At work this morning I saw a story come down on the Associated Press wires titled Census Income Gap. I thought it would be more data about the income gap between the races that’s been talked about ad nauseum this year in relation to the wealth gap, the economy and all the other f***ed up financial news we’ve received for the last four years. But boy was I wrong.
“New census data show affluent black Americans who are leaving industrial cities for the suburbs and the South are shifting traditional lines between rich and poor. Their migration is widening the income gap between whites and the inner-city blacks who remain behind, while making blacks less monolithic as a group and subject to greater income disparities.”
While the income gap between Whites and Blacks is still large and growing wider, we see that not all Black people are created equal in this numbers game of life. There are the poor, dis-enfrancished, inner city urban dwellers whom the Census showed tend to live in more inner city, urban (read: poor and crime ridden) neighborhoods. Then there are the Black folks who are W.E.B. DuBois’ talented tenth, real life Huxtables, Barack, Michelle, Sasha and Malia clones if you will. They’ve left the hood for the suburbs or some gentrified neighborhood where the movers and shakers are re-staking their claim.
The Huxtables lived in a gorgeous brownstone in Brooklyn. With five children, two nicely paid incomes and a whole lot of love money was never an issue unless it was Theo trying to prove he could just be “regular people.” The First Family lives in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood. Their neighborhood is also home to Louis Farrakhan. It is also minutes from a gentrified Bronzeville and the South Side’s roughest hoods; one of them being my old stomping grounds. I myself do live in the South on the nice side of my Florida city. If I didn’t want to I never have to leave my side of the city for anything but to go to the work. The mall and movie theater is down the street in one direction, in the other direction is the grocery store, my yoga studio, my cleaners, my tailor, my shoe and bag repair place a Smoothie King, Panera Bread, another movie theater and a host of restaurants to keep my palette whet with new food cravings.
I guess you could say I have arrived. That I am the one of those that has traded the inner city life for Southern Hospitality and mixed living in a mid-income range that allows me to pretend I too am “Huxtable.” In a way I have but in so many other ways I have not.
What’s funny about Census statistics is that they don’t discuss the quality of life of the people in these income gap, wealth gap compilations. Since I’ve graduated college and began my career I have lived in the South. In the South the cost of living is cheaper therefore I was able — as in could afford — to live on the “nice” side of town no matter where I’ve lived. However, just because one lives on the “nice” side of town does not mean everything is all good. Up until March my living on the “nice” side of town meant I lived check to check to afford my “nice” side of town rent along with groceries, gas and whatever other personal amenities I may have needed; you know like hair maintenance.
These Census numbers don’t detail that for even those truly living the “Huxtable” life times have changed from the crazy 80s or undefined 90s to the not so timelessness of the aughts or the uncertainty of these 20-teens. Being a doctor or lawyer is great but in an economy over saturated with young professionals the chances of becoming that regular Black dentist that lives next door to Kid Rock is slim to none.
Even those perpetrating to have it all don’t. We see NeNe-I’m-very-rich-bitch-Leakes along with Sheree the brain behind Chateau Sheree on Real Housewives of Atlanta living fabulously and extravagantly. Yet whispers and rumors about foreclosures and repossessions have swirled about the self-proclaimed Joneses since their show launched a few years ago. The same goes for the so-called rich and famous. Toni Braxton declared bankruptcy twice. Yet she’s moved to a new house in Los Angeles no less and her sister Traci is envious. T-Boz recently filed for bankruptcy and she was part of one of the biggest girl groups of recent memory and they too filed bankruptcy when they were on top of the charts.
The income gap between low wage earning Blacks, affluent Blacks and Whites is yet another division in an already fractured community that I feel will do more to harvest the crabs in the barrel mentality than it will foster a sense of oneness. If the Census Bureau can compile a report from which an AP journalist can extrapolate that Black people are not a monolith — as I’ve discussed and linked to so many times before — than how long before that fact is exploited against our better benefit.
Herman Cain already tried it and had it not been for his lack of self control he may have been able to make an argument for the Joneses we so envy while putting down the Smiths (not those Smiths) that we left behind.
For many these new numbers will blow over their heads as the target goal remains keeping up with the O’Malleys more than the Washingtons. But I do believe it is important to note that as the Black in America experience changes — including Soledad O’Brien’s reports on said experience — so to will the goals of this not at all monolithic race which could erode the common dreams so many of us have believed in for so long.
It begs the question: “Is being Black in America no longer distinctive because we have finally arrived at the point of being plain old Americans?”
Assimilation Complete?
What do you think about the new bump in the income gap road?
Staff Writer; Nikesha Leeper
To connect with this sister feel free to visit; Change Comes Slow.
