African American Sociology

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From time to time I volunteer to assist with distribution of food at a local food pantry at a local church. It never dawned on me that there all kinds of clients that needed the assistance until I required to write this paper for my Sociology class. I never noticed race or gender because I only saw that there were people in need based on individual circumstances. Hard times fell upon many of people and they sought assistance the best way they could. I noticed as I passed out bags of perishable foods, there were a number of people requiring assistance. There were Caucasian men and women but most were predominately African-American. Based on the initial observation, many of them were from different social backgrounds. Some of the clients were …show more content…

Characteristics of the household's composition included are; the number of adults in the household, the number of adults having attended college, the number of adults employed, and marital status in the household. The job market fails to provide a proper amount of jobs which pay enough to keep families out of poverty. Studies show that 9.4% of persons working full-time and 14.9% of persons working at least part-time did not earn enough annually to keep them above the poverty line. The distribution of families in poverty compared to the general population revealed that single parent household’s were more susceptible to poverty than that of a household including married couples. Based on a study in 2013, 6% of married couples were poor, 16% of families with male householders with no wife were poor, and 31% of families with the female as the head of the household with no husband were …show more content…

One of the main causes of poverty is a lack of money. There are some families that do have at least one person employed in the household but the money earned is not enough to provide for the family. Tough decisions such as paying rent buying groceries become a daily challenge for struggling households. Those living in households headed by people with no high school degree are the most likely to enter poverty. Limited options in the job market make it hard for those without degrees the ability to find jobs that will pay above minimum wage. Many Americans earn less than the nation’s median income which hinders most Americans from living a life free of hunger. Children who grow up in poverty suffer more persistent, frequent, and severe health problems than do children who grow up under better financial circumstances. Children of poverty are at an extreme disadvantage and cycle ends up repeating itself until the pattern is somehow

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