The poverty rate for families headed by single-black men has declined since 2010, while poverty rates for households headed by single white and Asian men have increased.
The poverty rate for black single-father families dropped 11.3 percentage points between 2010 and 2011, said Dr. Algernon Austin, director of the Program on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy at the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based nonpartisan think tank.
This compares with 0.1 percentage point increase for families headed by single white men and a 9.1 percentage point increase in the poverty rate for families head by single Asian men, Austin said. The poverty rate for households headed by single Hispanic men declined 1.7 percentage points.
Overall, families headed by black men are doing better economically after seeing a large spike in their poverty rate from 2009 to 2010, Austin said.
Dr. Algernon Austin The threshold poverty rate varies by family size and composition, but in 2011, it was about $17,900 annually for a family of three, he added. The number of households in poverty headed by single black men dropped to 140,000 in 2011 from 179,000 in 2010, Austin said.
In 2011, there were 5.7 million black families with children under 18 years old and 486,000 of them were headed by single black man, Austin said. Last year, families headed by single black men were 8.5 percent of all black families, up from 6.3 percent in 2000.
"It is a growing demographic, and we should be paying closer attention to it," Austin said.
Although single-black father families saw decreases in their poverty rates from 2010 to 2011, they still have very high rates of poverty, Austin said.
