Blog Post #2: African Americans and Poverty

Today, I was working on a project about children in poverty, for one of my education courses, and I learned that 34% of Black Children in the United States are poor. According to The National Center for Children in Poverty (NCCP), a Public Health Research Center at Columbia University, children who are poor are "Children living in families with incomes below the federal poverty threshold." The Federal poverty threshold in the United States, for a family with four individuals, has a total yearly income that is less than $24,036.

Out of all the racial groups that were listed on the NCCP's website (White, Hispanic, Asian American, and Native American), the Black Americans had the second highest percentage of poverty. I was surprised to find that the racial group with the highest percentage of children in poverty was Native American Children, and 35% of them were in poverty. I was surprised to learn this, because when I learn about poor children, in the United States and Internationally, most of the pictures that go with the readings and videos are of children who have African descendent. This is very problematic, because every racial group in the United States has children who the NCCP who are identified as poor. Children and Adults of African Descendent are generalized as "poor," because they have always been treated as lower than individuals of European Descendent.

 In American History, individuals of African Descendent (children and adults) has been seen as either a slave, victims of the Jim Crow laws, or lower class individuals. However, not every individual of African descendent in the United States fits into any of these three categories. There were African Americans who were not slaves while slavery was legal in the United States, lived in the Northern United States where Jim Crow laws were not strongly enforced, and today there are thousands of African Americans who are not poor. Even though these African Americans were not necessarily part of the majority of the group in the United States, they need to be acknowledged and not forgotten. Each individual who identifies with at least one of the characteristics listed as the minority of the group are all incredibly different, and we are not to see them all as the same. Like white individuals in the United States, each African American individual has had different experiences and different views on the history of African Americans in the United States. 

Link to the NCCP's Website: http://www.nccp.org/profiles/US_profile_7.html