Race vs. Socioeconomic Status

Factual Questions
1

I’ve been talking to my dad, who’s not a bad guy per se, but he’s got some notions that I’d really love to help him kick. This is the main one - he’s not really able to effectively separate race and socioeconomic status, such that any discussion of African Americans becomes one of lower-income americans almost by definition. I asked him what percentage of African Americans he thought were middle class, and what percent made over 100,000 USD a year. 2% and 0.1%, respectively. Aha.

Clearly that’s wrong.

From the US Census data I’ve found this PDF which tells me that in 1999, 24.9% of those reporting as African American were living below poverty (whatever that means) compared to a national average of 12.4%. But that’s poverty, and I’m interested in hearing how many are working, middle and upper classes, especially in comparison to the national averages for those figures. Census data also shows median incomes (for married couples, 50k compared to 57k national average) but more detail than this has to be available somewhere.

Who keeps track of such a thing? The federal government? My pizza delivery guy? How can I convince him that there are more good honest taxpaying citizens (the kind he would respect) that also happen to be of broadly differing ethnicity than he realizes?

2

Here’s a study:
http://www.welfareacademy.org/pubs/poverty/2005.0715.testimony/

Here are some observations I gain from the text and charts:

In 1980, 29% of black households made more than the average white household.

10% of black households make more than 75% of all American households.

50% of black males 25-29 attended college.

Blacks and hispanics are as a whole, broke in terms of savings.
White households have a median net worth of $22500.
Black households have a median net worth of $1200.
Hispanic households have a median net worth of $1900.

3

I think that the only way to reach your goal is by having him interact one-on-one with people.

4

That is a strange (biased?) statistic. Less than 50% of the white households made more than the average white household as well due to the highly skewed nature of income distribution. E.g. if you have 3 households with incomes of $50,000, $80,000 and $200,000, then the average income is $110,000 and two thirds of the housholds make less than average.