My Photo

July 2009

Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
      1 2 3 4
5 6 7 8 9 10 11
12 13 14 15 16 17 18
19 20 21 22 23 24 25
26 27 28 29 30 31  

« NPR Poll on Blacks: Race Hustlin | Main | NPR Poll on Blacks: Mental Health Assessment »

November 15, 2007

NPR Poll on Blacks: Single Race?

A new Pew Research Center survey found that nearly 40 percent of Blacks think "blacks can no longer be thought of as a single race."

The phrasing of that bothers me. It's as if a "poor" Black person is considered to be a different "race" than a "not poor" Black person. It should be stated that 40% of Blacks are acknowledging class differences. Or better yet, that people are now recognizing class differences and are finally being ASKED about it.

Or maybe not. I'm still thinking... Marinading....

[ Update ]

This is from a letter to The Washington Post Op-Ed section:

Black America is not a monolith, and neither is white America. Because a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant cab driver sees the world differently than a Hungarian immigrant computer company executive doesn't mean that they're not both white. White Americans are more diverse than African Americans are. Whites span the spectrum from dairy farmer to homeless Vietnam veteran and from minimum wage waitress to college professor. They descended from English Episcopalians; Russian Jews; Irish, Polish and Italian Catholics; German and Norwegian Lutherans and members of the Armenian Orthodox Church. They invented the Ku Klux Klan and taught kids how to be hippies. There are huge divides among whites in values, education and class.

Clearly, whites are at least as "divisible" as blacks. But nobody is looking to divide whites into different races.

TrackBack

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d8341ca09953ef00e54f84780e8833

Listed below are links to weblogs that reference NPR Poll on Blacks: Single Race?:

Comments

It strikes me that one family tree can have upper, middle and low income people. And, the "low income" members may have far better values than the ones who "made it big."

The comments to this entry are closed.