A study released last week by the Pew Charitable Trusts shows that over a generation African-Americans have a more difficult time maintaining middle class status than other groups.

The study, which began in 1968, tracked the economic status of more than 2,300 Americans, 730 of whom were African-American. Forty-five percent of blacks born to middle-class families in 1968 slid down the socioeconomic ladder. Their median family income was $23,100 compared to an inflation-adjusted $55,600 for their parents in 1968.

Only 16 percent of whites born to middle-class families had lower median incomes than their parents.

For lower-income blacks and whites, this disparity also existed.

The study found that 90 percent of whites born into low-income families now earned more than their parents did. In comparison, 75 percent of blacks surpassed the income levels of their parents.

Researchers don’t have an explanation for why the gap exists. But some economists have speculated the increase in single, mostly female headed households in the black community and the difference in education levels between blacks and whites are two factors.

Apparently not everyone is succumbing to the lure of social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace.

A study released earlier this week concluded African-Americans prefer to use the Internet for business and not pleasure. The study solely focused on what the authors termed “African-American influentials” (whatever that means) to draw conclusions about the online habits of blacks.

One interesting conclusion was that only 49 percent of these black influentials used Facebook, compared to 76 percent of the general population of people who actively use the Web, whom the study’s authors termed “online influencers.”

“African American-fluentials tend to embrace the Web for business and ‘serious’ pursuits while favoring a range of offline communications tools for social networking,” said Mireille Grangenois, managing director of U.S. Multicultural. “They are twice as likely to use handwritten notes than U.S. e-fluentials but half as likely to write blog entries.”

The tendency to network away from the confines of the Web could be because blacks have a  propensity toward being involved in a physical community, rather than a virtual one.

I recently interviewed one business owner on the West Side of Chicago who told me he was always skeptical when potential investors would try to make contact with him over the phone instead of coming to his restaurant to introduce themselves.

“With us black people, it’s the trust issue,” he said. “We prefer face-to-face contact.”

The election of America’s first black president has left many Americans–both black, white and in between–with the sense that America has made significant racial progress.

However, our country still has a long way to go in overcoming racial prejudice, according to people interviewed for a recent article in the New York Times.

In workplaces across the country, people are more open to talking about race, an often taboo and contentious subject. Some blacks interviewed for the story said they noticed more civility and friendless between them, their non-black colleagues, friends and even strangers passing by on the street:

Samuel Sallis, a 69-year old black man from Milwaukee, said: “Since President Obama started campaigning, if I go almost anywhere, it’s: ‘Hi! Hello, how are you, sir?’ I’m talking about strangers. Calling me ‘sir.’ ”

He added: “It makes you feel different, like, hey — maybe we are all equals. I’m no different than before. It’s just that other people seem to be realizing these things all around me.”

White Americans also said they felt a change.

“I feel a lot more comfortable starting up a conversation with people of other races on the streets now than I did before,” said Mitch Hansch, 29, who is white and works as a waiter in New York City. “Since Obama was elected, racial tensions seem a little lower. I think it’s fantastic.”

It would seem hard to imagine a place where children attend more funerals than weddings. A place where a mother—almost certain her children would not reach adulthood—pays $80 a month for burial insurance, even though they have barely reached adolescence.  But this is the case for Lafayette and Pharaoh Rivers, their mother LaJoe and almost everyone else in their family. Alex Kotlowitz’s “There Are No Children Here” details two years in the lives of the Rivers boys, humanizing the problem of urban poverty by portraying its most helpless victims—the children who are forced to live in it.

Long before Hurricane Katrina had U.S. politicians decrying the problem of urban poverty and lamenting about “Two Americas,” Alex Kotlowitz wrote about Lafayette and Pharaoh Rivers, two brothers living in the Henry Horner housing project on Chicago’s West Side. Kotlowitz first met the two boys in the summer of 1985, when he was writing the text for a friend’s photo essay on children living in poverty. Kotlowitz returned to Horner two years later to write on a similar topic for the Wall Street Journal. It was then he asked LaJoe, the boys’ mother, to chronicle the lives of her sons.

With his meticulous reporting and apparent empathy, Kotlowitz portrays the struggles of 12-year-old Lafayette and his 9-year-old brother, Pharaoh. The boys live in an apartment with cinder block walls, a tub with a perpetually leaky faucet, and a bathroom toilet whose putrid smells may be the result of at-home abortions performed by the previous tenants. Shootings, between rival gangs and by the police, are part of the reality for Lafayette and Pharaoh. Throughout the book, the boys lose friends and family to gun violence, drugs and prison.

Despite the depression that surrounds them, Lafayette and Pharaoh maintain some of their innocence. They play on railroad tracks and believe they’ll find leprechauns and a pot of gold after they see a rainbow. Though the boys know many people who go to prison, during a school spelling bee Pharaoh is unable to spell the word cellblock, an irony that shows he is still a child and can’t fully comprehend what could await him in the future.

Kotlowitz does a stellar job of linking the problems in Horner to bad public policy and neglect by Chicago city officials. The Chicago Housing Authority had lost control of its housing complexes to street gangs and seemed to have long forgotten about its residents or improving their living conditions.  Some of the police responded to violence in Horner and other projects by treating many of the residents like possible criminals.  As Kotlowitz puts it, “white opposition on the Chicago City Council gummed up most efforts by the administration to do much of anything” to change the city’s public housing.

Throughout the book, it becomes apparent Kotlowitz may have become too involved in the lives of his subjects. He doesn’t impose the same standard of accountability on the residents of public housing or examine why they made certain choices, sometimes even pardoning their mistakes as the inevitable consequences of being black and poor. While some kids did get lost to the neighborhood, as Kotlowitz says, one has to wonder where LaJoe Rivers was when Lafayette and Pharaoh were out late at night watching cars at the Chicago Bears Stadium. Why did LaJoe allow her grown daughter, her three children, her daughter’s boyfriend and his brother, none of whom paid bills, to move into her already cramped apartment? No one is blaming her and other Horner residents for living in poverty, but it seemed as though they were resigned to their fate.

“There Are No Children Here” is timeless in its portrayal of urban poverty. Chicago’s Plan for Transformation has changed Henry Horner into mixed-income, low-rise housing, but that change may be more structural than substantive. Many of the problems that plagued Lafayette and Pharaoh still exist today. No one has created a solution to dealing with persistent poverty in this country, but the answer may start with the children who live in it. Kotlowitz implies it is society’s communal responsibility to give these kids a fighting chance. Educating them and giving them the same opportunities as middle class kids in the suburbs is a starting point. Unlike Lafayette, those children don’t have to worry about what they’ll become if they grow up. For them, as it should be for all children, growing up is never a question of if, but of when.

There are many places online and offline that members of this socially and politically conscious group can meet. Online gathering places include discussion boards on AOL Black Voices, the BV Caucus blog, BlackPlanet (a social networking site),Club Black Web, ThinkTank, African America and the list goes on. The group 1,000,000 Black Students links to the Assata Shakur Forum, which discusses issues concerning people throughout the Diaspora, not just blacks in America. A blog, 1,000,000 Black Updates, is also affiliated with this Facebook group.

Offline activities include conferences and events held by organizations like the NAACP and National Urban League. Many universities also have black student unions and other organizations that hold multicultural events and conferences. Dr. Ausetkmt also said her group has organized events to raise awareness about the crisis in Darfur, showing a movie about the genocide at a local theater in Michigan.

Although these activities exist offline, some of the people I spoke to, like Horace Coleman, said there needs to be more conferences and meetings on black-oriented topics and issues. Jason Green echoed these sentiments, saying blacks need to be engaged in more discussion, especially on the Web.

“Marketing of the information they’re[ black websites] providing is not as efficient as the mainstream, like CNN, MSNBC,” Green said. “A lot of black people aren’t even aware of BlackNews.com.”

“When it comes to discussion and not just reading, that’s where the problem is,” Green said.

Ausetkmt said her group is able to spread information more efficiently than even some large media organizations. They frequently communicate with each other via text message.

“We use cell phones,” Ausetkmt said. “You get about 140 characters in cell phone message. Any major news story can be condensed to 140 characters and blasted out to the globe. I sent a news blast to someone in Canada, someone in Jamaica, someone in England and someone in France. Within two hours it came back to me from Switzerland, Belgium and Holland, all from black people. “

Ausetkmt referred to this network as the electronic village, a termed coined by Minister Louis Farrakhan in 1995. She said groups like Club Black Web wouldn’t exist without the Internet.

“Praise the Lord for bloggers and cell phones,” Ausetkmt said. “Yes I am a new disciple of the Church of the Internet.”

The people in this community rely on the mainstream media and a multitude of other news sources to get their information. Some examples include the New York Times, USA Today and the Washington Post. While targeted news sources like Essence magazine and its website, Black America Web, BlackNews.com and AOL Black voices all provide relevant news to African-Americans. The members of my online community are interested in topics such as politics, race relations, criminal and social justice.

Jason Green, creator of the Facebook group 1,000,000 black students, said he started the group after taking a class called “Racism in America” and reading about certain incidents he felt weren’t being publicized by the mainstream media.

“While I was taking that course, I was getting really emotional about things that I wasn’t aware of,” Green said. “At the time, I [also] read a story about a [black] man in Texas who was the victim of a racial beating. He had Down syndrome and he got beat up and it bothered me that nobody knew about that at the time.”

Though Green said he watches CNN, he believes the mainstream media doesn’t do a thorough job of covering issues concerning the black community. He relies on news sources like BET.com, BlackNews.com and Black Enterprise magazine and its website to get news. The creation of 1,000,000 black students was a way to remedy this lack of targeted information.

“Facebook is the perfect way to just network with people and to spread news amongst a large group of people,” Green said. “I thought if you can allow people to see what’s going on in society, they’ll be more aware and more equipped to prevent it from happening again.”

1,000,000 Black Students does not yet have that many members. Almost 118,000 students have joined since Green started the group in March of 2006. Recent postings have addressed the topic of supporting African-American-owned businesses, what they referred to as keeping wealth within the black community. Members have posted videos from YouTube that address this topic. Members have posted over 22,000 discussion topics, some of which include the prevalence of single-parent households in the black community and poverty in urban areas. As can be expected, some people have posted topics that don’t concern a wider audience. One person gave a birthday greeting to a friend and others have used the discussion board to post profanity. Many of the posts do a lot of linking to the original sources of information, so the discussion board serves as means to channel information.

Horace Coleman, moderator for ThinkTank and member of Club Black Web, said both groups are responsible for channeling information that may be ignored otherwise. ThinkTank, which has 129 members and has a mailing list, focuses on general news, politics and health information. Recent postings have focused the Jena 6 case, high mortality rates for cancer, and Barack Obama’s campaign.

Coleman said he tries to examine popular culture issues from a different perspective. One notable example is a posting he wrote about the film American Gangster, starring Denzel Washington. He said the mainstream media glorified the movie about a successful African-American drug dealer without examining how these illicit activities affected the black community.

“I like to find the back story to things, not just things that are in the mainstream media,” Coleman said.” That kind of thing is beyond what they do.”

Ray Ausetkmt, who reads 7,000 RSS Feeds a day, including feeds from papers like the New York Times and USA Today, said she has come to rely on non-traditional news sources–particularly information provided by fellow members of online communities like Club Black Web and ThinkTank. She said recent issues, like violence and Mogadishu, Somalia and almost 500 deaths in Darfur last week, have not been covered extensively by traditional news outlets.

“That’s why groups like Club Black Web and ThinkTank exist,” Ausetkmt said. “We pull in people who can pick up a pen and a piece of paper and say what needs to be said and syndicate it to sources that need to hear it. We don’t care about Reuters and AP.”

“Reuters and AP doesn’t have our type of syndication.”

According to a November report conducted by e-Marketer, a group that conducts market research and trend analysis on the Internet, African-Americans comprise almost 11 percent of Internet users. That figure is expected to increase to almost 12 percent by 2011, making the number of African-Americans online total almost 26 million users. Though the number of whites online more than quadruples the number of black Web users, the latter audience is growing and that means more news and information outlets on the Web need to cater to the black community.

My blog, “Other America,” focuses on issues concerning the black community. Topics include finance, education, politics, and race relations, among others. In recent weeks, I’ve written about the disparities in crack cocaine sentencing, Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, and high breast cancer mortality rates for black women. My goal was to write about issues that extend beyond popular culture. There are many entertainment sites, such as BET and MTV, which younger African-Americans visit on a regular basis, but sites are scarce that focus on the politically and socially conscious members of this demographic. Dr. Ray Ausetkmt, who is a member of the Yahoo Group Club Black Web and a number of other black online communities, referred to these people as the “black intelligentsia.” Ausetkmt said these people are academic scholars, professors, legislators, college students and others who have been able to share their ideas and mobilize online.

“The Internet changed the reality for black people, globally,” Ausetkmt said. “People are connected together that have never previously known much about each other. There’s an active live connection, a sharing of information, a development of resources, and in some cases, an enlightenment that takes place from one group to another one simply because there is that open sharing permitted by the Internet.”

The term “black intelligentsia” may have certain class implications, but I’m using it in this framework as an expedient way to describe people who use the Internet to gather and organize with others who share a similar consciousness.

Though the black community online and offline is not a monolithic one, it has certain uses for the Internet that are not typical of other online communities. The 2000 Pew Internet and American Life Project found the online behavior of blacks very different from that of whites. Sixty-five percent of blacks use the Internet for school research compared to 54 percent of whites. Thirty-eight percent of blacks use the Internet to chat online versus 23 percent of whites. Sixty percent of blacks have used the Net to play an audio or video clip.

The African-American online community is broad. The people I intended to target range in age from 21 to 40, but anyone above this age range who has similar interests could be a member of this community. I interviewed Dr. Ray Ausetkmt, a 52-year old researcher and Ph.d holder in African religion; Jason B. Green, a 21-year old college senior at Nova Southeastern University and creator of the Facebook group 1,000,000 Black students; and Horace Coleman, a 65-year old Vietnam veteran and moderator of Thinktank, an African-American discussion forum.

According to a recent article in E-Marketer, blacks are using the Web more than they have in previous years.

In 2006, African-Americans comprised about 11% of Internet users, compared to 74% for whites, 10 % for Hispanics and about 6% for Asians.

E-Marketer claims blacks will make up about 12% of Web users in 2011 or an estimated 25 million users.

One interesting observation is that the price of computers and Internet access have decreased, but this hasn’t increased Web usage by African-Americans.

The Pew Research Center’s 2007 Internet and American Life Project also shows who’s online and who’s not. Just 62% of African-Americans use the Internet, lower than any other ethnic group.

In a column in the New York Times Sunday, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. said the only way to deal with the increasing wealth gap in the black community, and between blacks and whites, is for African-Americans to obtain the modern-day equivalent of forty acres and a mule.

After the end of slavery, black slaves were promised forty acres of land and a mule, which they never received. Gates said the legacy of non-ownership in the black community needs to be reversed and that property ownership is the key to dealing with black poverty. He mentioned the recent Pew Research Study that showed blacks are more divided along class lines than ever before.

Gates examined the family trees of 20 successful African-Americans (Oprah Winfrey, Whoopi Goldberg and others) and discovered that many of their ancestors owned property before 1920, an accomplishment that allowed their descendents to achieve middle-class status.

He said this same strategy needs to be used to resolve the class divide in the black community:

“If the correlation between land ownership and success of African-Americans argues that the chasm between classes in the black community is partly the result of social forces set in motion by the dismal failure of 40 acres and a mule, then we must act decisively. If we do not, ours will be remembered as the generation that presided over a permanent class divide, a slow but inevitable process that began with the failure to give property to the people who had once been defined as property.”

A study by the Pew Research Center released Tuesday showed that blacks are more pessimistic about racial progress than they were 20 years ago.

Just 20 percent of blacks said things are better for blacks now than they were five years ago. That figure is the lowest it has been in the last 20 years. In 1983, 20 percent of blacks surveyed were also pessimistic about racial progress.

The survey also found blacks no longer view themselves as a single race. There is more cultural and economic diversity within the black community, but respondents said class issues between poor and middle income blacks is the source of the chasm within the community.

Key Findings

• 53% surveyed said blacks can still be thought of as a single race. 37% said otherwise.
• 30% of blacks said discrimination is the reason most African-Americans don’t get ahead.
• 53 % said each individual is responsible for the outcome of their own fate.
• 76% of blacks said Barack Obama is a good influence on the black community
• 87 % said Oprah was also a good influence
• Just 17% thought rapper 50 Cent was a good influence.

Read the full report here.