Pew Survey Shatters Stereotypes About Black People
By: Manny Otiko
Tags: Politics, Race, Equality, Employment, BlackLivesMatter

I’m generally skeptical of surveys because you can make them say anything. I also don’t think a survey of 1,000 people is an accurate representation of a country. Still, sometimes surveys do provide interesting information. Pew’s recent analysis of Black Americans (based on 2019 census data) provides some stereotype-shattering information. As Sirius talk show host Karen Hunter often says, it’s inaccurate to view Black people through the lens of poverty.

This is something I’ve known for a while. Most of the African-Americans I know aren’t living in the projects and surviving on welfare. The Black people I interact with are solidly middle class, whatever that means these days. The American middle class has been shrinking and struggling to stay afloat because of stagnant wages and skyrocketing healthcare and education costs for decades.

Like the average middle-class American, most Black Americans are barely staying afloat and are one paycheck away from living in their cars. According to the survey, almost half of Black households made $50,000 in 2019. However, when it comes to assets, the numbers get much uglier. Black people have lower homeownership rates than white Americans.



But here are some other findings from the Pew Survey:

Black people are fertile

That’s a good thing for America and a bad thing for neo-Nazis such as Tucker Carlson. According to Pew, Black people have a 5.9 percent fertility rate. That’s good for the United States because they are reproducing at a rate needed to sustain the economy. You have to produce babies so they grow up, become working adults, and pay into the economy to sustain programs such as social security and do the jobs left vacant as seniors retire. The fact that Black people and Latinos are reproducing means America doesn’t have to import more people, through immigration, to keep things running. Although that’s going to be inevitable at some point.

White people, who overwhelmingly vote Republican, have low fertility rates. Ironically, white nationalists don’t like any of the solutions to this problem and have come up with crackpot conspiracy theories to deal with their anxiety. The “the Great Replacement” conspiracy, which claims Jews are replacing white people with immigrants from developing countries, comes straight from the pages of Stormfront, a hate website. This lie is frequently repeated by Carlson and fellow FOX News neo-Nazi Laura Ingraham.

The Pew survey shows that many Americans’ stereotypical view of Black people is not accurate. We’re not all thugs, rappers and athletes who grew up dodging bullets in the ‘hood.

Black people don’t favor the coasts

According to the Pew survey, more than half of Black people (56 percent) live in the South. This is also not surprising because there has been a trend of African Americans moving back to the South from the North in reverse migration. They’re attracted by the slower pace of life and cheaper cost of living, especially property prices. The South is also attractive to retirees. percent.)

African Americans are educated

According to the survey, almost a quarter of Black Americans are educated with 23 percent of them possessing a college degree. Forty-four percent of African Americans had at least a high school education. Also, 33 percent of Black people had some college education, so more than half received some form of higher education. This is a good sign since you need higher education to get a good-paying job these days.



However, the ugly side is that Blacks with college degrees still have higher unemployment rates than whites with lower education. This shows employment discrimination is still an issue. Another interesting fact from the survey was that 21 percent of African Americans fell into the unaffiliated category in terms of faith. While Black Americans are overall the most religious group, that trend is slowly declining.



Overall, the Pew survey shows that many Americans’ stereotypical view of Black people is not accurate. We’re not all thugs, rappers, and athletes who grew up dodging bullets in the ‘hood. Most of us are educated, middle-class people. And that pretty much describes me too.