Black Family Income Lags

WASHINGTON — Working wives bring financial success to America’s black families, the government said Thursday. Even so, they and their husbands together earn only 85 cents for each dollar earned by a similar white couple.

Working black couples were the only black families to see their income rise sharply compared to whites over the last two decades, said Claudette Bennett in a Census Bureau study. Black single-earner couples and families headed by men or women alone failed to better their incomes compared to whites.

“Black married couples today are far more likely to have wives in the paid labor force,” Bennett said.

Two out of three black wives work. In couples where the wife works, the median family income climbs to $40,000, double the level of families where only the husband works.

Black family incomes lag behind that of white families even when husband and wife work because of “the kind of job that the person has,” Bennett said. For example, in 1990, black men and women were nearly twice as likely as whites to work in low-paying service jobs.

Black families in general had median incomes of $21,548 in 1991, $125 more than the year before. But that amounted to only 57 cents for every dollar earned by white families.

Young black families earn far less than whites their age--about 49 cents to the dollar for people in their late 20s and early 30s.

Although things seem to improve with age, blacks’ incomes never come close to whites’. By age 35, their income has leveled off at about 60 cents for every dollar earned by white families, and it stays there through retirement and old age.

Why have black families overall fared so poorly if working couples are doing so well? It’s because blacks are less likely to live as married couples today, said Isabel Sawhil, senior fellow at the Urban Institute.

Fewer than half of black families have a husband and wife living together today, down from two-thirds 20 years ago. So the families with high income have less impact on the average.

Moreover, nearly half of black families are headed by women without husbands. They typically earn less than $12,000 a year, which is below the poverty line for a family of four.