The Pew Research Center recently released controversial poll results about the African American community. In it, they report that “we see a widening gulf between the values of the middle class and poor blacks.” They go on to state that 37% of blacks believe “blacks can no longer be thought of as a single race.”
This was enough to get Henry Louis Gates, who heads Harvard’s African American Studies program, to put out a widely published opinion letter entitled “Forty acres and a gap in wealth.” He decries the survey findings as a loss for the black community and a threat to their shared history as embodied by civil rights giants such as Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr. He quotes the following statistic from the report: “by a ratio of 2 to 1, blacks say that the values of poor and middle-class blacks have grown more dissimilar over the past decade.” He suggests that this trend is potentially dangerous to the cohesion of the African American community.
My own research into the nature of wealth and money suggests a more nuanced view of Pew’s results. People can share pride in their aspirations while increasing success can lead to an estrangement between themselves and those they’ve left behind.
Hot off the research for my upcoming book, The Middle-Class Millionaire: The Rise of the New Rich and How They Are Transforming America, I recognized this duality in the Pew results but I found myself surprised by Gates perception that a robust and growing middle-class in the black community poses any kind of a threat.
When I point out to people that The Middle-Class Millionaire compares middle-class households to households of self-made middle-class people who’ve gone on to accumulate substantial wealth (net worths between $1 million to $10 million), one of the first questions I’m asked is “how do you define ‘middle-class’?”
While writing the book, I spent a great deal of time looking for a commonly accepted definition of “middle-class”—a formula, a litmus test, a clear expression of boundaries—but was unable to find one that captured the essence of middle-class values. (For the study, we used an income-based definition: middle-class households had an income that fell between $50,000 and $80,000). During my research, however, I continually came across data and opinions about the emerging black middle-class dating from the 1970s. It seemed to me that the black community has been exploring this question of “what is the middle-class?” for a very long time. But more than that, the texts consistently place this aspiration in high regard and describe it as proof of success and assimilation in America.
For the purposes of The Middle-Class Millionaire, I finally settled on a quote from George Bernard Shaw to define middle-class values. He said, “I have to live for others and not for myself; that’s middle-class morality.” This statement naturally calls for some further explanation. Shaw’s expression of the sacrificing instinct of middle-class morality certainly has its own iterations among both the working classes and the very high net worth. However, it has a distinctly important meaning to the middle-class, the most openly aspirational of all the classes.
When we asked our two middle-class samples, the middle-class and the Middle-Class Millionaire, what are some “very or extremely important values,” they both agree that “being a good parent,” (about 90%) and “providing your children with the best possible education (about 86%) rank at the top. This suggests that, even though Middle-Class Millionaires have assets several times greater than the rest of the middle-class, they still share common middle-class beliefs about home and family life. By contrast, our research shows that with extreme wealth come new priorities. Survey respondents with a net worth greater than $25 million gave these same values a ranking of 67% and 60.5% respectively. We did not survey any lower-income groups.
Gates himself is a big fan of many of the hallmarks of prosperity, particularly home and land ownership. In fact, he’s currently working on a study of the family trees of 20 successful and prominent African-Americans, from astronauts to Oprah, and he points out that 75% of them came from families who owned land before 1920, before land- or home-ownership was common among blacks. This research suggests that the seeds of accomplishment within these families were planted long ago.
One of the common misperceptions among the middle-class people we interviewed for the book was that somehow hardship and setbacks didn’t affect our Middle-Class Millionaire population as intensely as it affected the middle-class—that somehow self-made people were innately more able to shake off adversity than others. In our survey and our individual interviews, this didn’t bear out. Stories of crushing failures were common among both groups. The difference was the response.
When we asked our middle-class sample and our Middle-Class Millionaire sample if they had made “major career or business decisions that had a very bad outcome” they both reported “yes” at relatively equal rates, both around 90%. But when we asked them what they did after bad career or business decisions, the Middle-Class Millionaire’s most common response was, “I tried again in the same field,” (72.9% versus 14.3% for the middle-class sample) while the middle-class sample’s most common response was I “gave up and focused on other projects” (51.5% of the time as compared to 2.2% for the Middle-Class Millionaire survey sample).
While our Middle-Class Millionaire sample told us tales of the despair and rejection they experienced, they also said that, when faced with failure, they simply didn’t allow themselves to consider the idea of giving up. These and other attributes set them apart from the middle-class cohort even if their shared aspirations to lead a middle-class life and sacrifice for their families suggest common ground. The Middle-Class Millionaire possesses the values of the middle-class community while at the same time are set apart from that community by their behavior and attitudes.
In the black community, both the desire and the opportunity to enter into the middle-class appear strong—recent census data on the New York City borough of Queens revealed that its black population had surpassed whites in median income. Never has wealth been in the hands of so many Americans, nor has the belief that wealth is attainable ever been as widely held, as it is today.
As evidenced by the Pew poll results, the experience of those who are pulling themselves into higher economic status tends to bring people together, not separate them. When asked “in the last 10 years have the values held by black people and the values held by white people become more similar or more different?” A majority of blacks (54%) and whites (72%) said “more similar.”
Gates, who is focused on how to bolster the civil rights movement that dates back to the Reverend King and others, writes, “The sad truth is that the civil rights movement cannot be reborn until we identify the causes of black suffering, some of them self-inflicted.” There’s no reason why a civil rights movement can’t emerge from within the stratified environment the Pew poll describes. While aspiration, unfortunately, is not equally distributed among any population, the pull towards a middle-class lifestyle remains a quintessential American goal. Public intellectuals like Gates have many great examples to choose from when looking for ways to turn the success of the few into policy for the many.
