Is the Black Middle Class Still Growing?

Sept. 19, 2008--It's easy to ignore the ho-hum routines in a city like Washington, D.C.—a town that hosts conferences and conventions of some sort every single day, four or five times a day, it seems. But a town-hall meeting at this week's 30th Annual Conference and Exposition of the National Black MBA Association offered timely insight into the anxieties of black professionals. Hosted by CNN contributor Roland Martin, the meeting focused on the tenuous stability of the black middle class.I thought I was going to hear that the middle class in America is, in fact, disappearing. That's certainly the message that Lou Dobbs conveys to me—or, rather, yells at me—from my television screen five evenings a week. In fact, the questions and concerns voiced by most participants in the audience suggested that they believed Dobbs' take to be true, especially when it comes to blacks.In an attempt to define who is included in this supposedly fading group, panelists spent the opening minutes of the meeting trying to get people to define their perceptions of just who exactly makes up the black middle class. The already murky definition was made even fuzzier by John McCain's recent gaffe that a person earning just under $5 million a year could fall into this category.By the end of the conversation, panelists and audience members agreed that being middle class may be largely a position of perception. "Today everybody thinks they're in the middle class. Nobody wants to be rich, and nobody wants to be broke," said Michael Eric Dyson, one of five panelists, a noted author and a professor at Georgetown University.SOURCE:THEROOT.COM