Racial Disparities in Median Household Incomes
Why some ethnic households are excelling while others are struggling is the subject of much speculation.
In our preparation for one of our Facebook Live chats, my co-blogger, Marie, sent me this tweet, which was, by then, beginning to go viral:
The numbers themselves are disputable. The median household income of African American families in the U.S. for example is typically reported to be as high as $48,000.
Still, despite the discrepancies between certain studies, the general pattern remains consistent: Asian and South Asian Americans have the nation’s highest median household income, Hispanic and African Americans have the lowest, and white Americans are in the middle.
Interestingly, while Twitter user @EndWokeness claims “This chart totally obliterates the woke narrative about race in America,” presumably arguing that if the U.S. was a white supremacist nation then whites would have the highest median household income, many readers disagree:
The economic superiority of so many non-white households to that of white households is irrelevant to these posters, as the economic inferiority of other households, particularly African American households, is to them evidence that the U.S. is a racist country.
Why some ethnic households are excelling while others are struggling is the subject of much speculation.
Anti-Black racism may indeed be a factor, but clearly it is not the deciding factor itself. Nigerian and Ghanaian Americans, whose skin is as black as my own, have a median household income of about $69,000, significantly higher than the average white American household.
One factor may be in how “household income” is defined. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, this is “the income of the householder and all other individuals 15-years-old and over in the household, whether they are related to the householder or not.” Obviously, as Marie recently pointed out in a Facebook Live chat, households with more members who are income earners will tend to have a higher household income.
According to these 2015 numbers from Statista, the following is how ethnic groups rank in terms of household size:
HOUSEHOLDS WITH THREE OR FOUR MEMBERS
White 37.2%
Blacks 43.8%
Hispanic 46.4%
Asian 50.5%
HOUSEHOLDS WITH FIVE OR MORE MEMBERS
White 10.0%
Blacks 14.0%
Asian 17.2%
Hispanic 25.3%
One does not have to be Thomas Sowell to see from these numbers that the typical Asian household size puts them at an advantage in terms of median household income over others.
Statistics also indicate that if the number of household members includes two parents, poverty is much less likely. According to the Annie E. Casey Foundation, “Nearly 30% of single parents live in poverty while just 6% of married couples fit this same statistic.”
The same site breaks down the numbers by race. According to their 2021 numbers, 64% of African American children, 42% of Hispanic children, and 24% of white children are being raised by a single parent. For Asians this number falls to 16%.
It should also be noted that Asian foreign-born immigrants are much more likely to be college educated than foreign-born immigrants from other regions or native-born Americans.
According to Pew Research, “More than half of Asians ages 25 and older (54%) have a bachelor’s degree or more education, compared with 33% of the U.S. population in the same age range.”
By contrast, “31% of Black immigrants ages 25 and older have a bachelor’s degree or higher – slightly lower (33%) than the share of the immigrant population in the U.S. with a college degree” and “about a quarter (26%) of recently arrived Latino immigrants ages 25 and older had a bachelor’s degree or more education in 2018.”
If one examines these 2018 numbers from Migration Policy, one will see that nine of the top twenty origin countries of college-educated immigrants (excluding Russia) and 43.7% of these immigrants are Asian.
The country from which the highest percentage of college-aged immigrants migrate is overwhelmingly the South Asian nation of India. According to the Economic Times, “In 2021, 80% of Indian immigrants aged 25 or older reported having at least a bachelor’s degree, compared to about one-third of all foreign-born and US-born adults.”
Much of this, I argue, is due to Indian exploitation of our controversial H-1B visa program that allows U.S. employers to “pay migrant workers well below market wages.”
H-1B jobs are generally tech jobs that attract foreigners with Science, Technology, Engineering, Math (STEM) degrees, and India (and to a lesser degree, China) has STEM grads willing to work for lower wages than what U.S. companies would typically pay an American STEM graduate in abundance: “Statistically speaking, Indians account for 73.9[%] out of the total number of H1B visa holders in the USA.”
Another thing that affects median household income, although it is not an issue mentioned very often in this regard, is crime. High-crime neighborhoods find it more difficult to attract businesses, which makes the local price of goods and services higher, and local jobs harder to find. Crime also causes property values to decline.
This lowers the amount local homeowners and business owners pay in taxes, which in turn decreases the amount local schools can collect for funding.
FBI statistics confirm the wide disparity among ethnic groups on crime. African Americans are roughly 13% of the U.S. population yet are an incredible 27% of those arrested for murder.
Whites and Hispanics have murder rates more or less consistent with the percentage of the population they comprise, which are 62% and 19% respectively.
Asians are 7% of the population; however, only 2% of those arrested for murder in the U.S. are Asian.
Since most crime is intraracial, the more crime a racial group commits, the more that group suffers from the harsh repression of crime. African Americans therefore suffer the most.
For example, 44% of all murder victims in 2019 were Black, and 89% of those murder victims were murdered by other Blacks. Conversely, 56% of Asian (“other”) murder victims were killed by other Asians, but only 0.04% of murder victims were Asian.
There's a public library near a high school in my neighborhood. I often kid that anyone who is in it after school would think that Asians were dumb because every table would is filled with Asian students in study groups or with a tutor. Why do they need so much extra help? In truth, some are studying for an SAT exam still years away. Others are mastering advanced math or other classes, preparing for the day when they will be studying STEM at some esteemed university.
Sadly, I rarely see African American students there at that time, although there is a good number of African American students in the school.
My point is that besides simply living in households with more income-generating adults, there are achievable measures by which the African American community can represent better on charts such as the one @EndWokeness tweeted.
Granted, Asian Americans hold important advantages over African Americans, given how many of them are highly educated before they come to America, but there is still much about their values Blacks would do well to emulate; such as two-parent households, low crime, and, most importantly, a focus on education.
—DK