It's not just black people you know, although African Americans and other minorities are more likely to be stricken by poverty.
I won't deny that there are some problems in the African American community though.
Fighting the dropout rate for African-American youth | KALW
In 2011, about 82 percent of San Francisco’s students graduated from high school. Ten percent dropped out. Break it down by ethnic group and the numbers change in uncomfortable ways. For example, just 62.3 percent of the city’s African-American students graduated, and nearly 20 percent dropped out. The numbers for Latino students are similar. Kids need education and support, but resources are increasingly scarce. Often in these cases, in cities like San Francisco, nonprofits step in. Resources for those organizations are limited, too, but it helps to be able to show pretty much constant success.
This year, San Francisco’s Omega Boys Club celebrates its 25th anniversary. It has spent that quarter century helping local boys and girls get out of bad neighborhoods and into different mindsets.
The idea came to mind back in 1982, when Joe Marshall was teaching at Woodrow Wilson High School on the Southeast side of San Francisco. He thought he was pretty good at it, and by academic measures, he was. Then he realized that in a school serving low-income families, that wasn’t enough.
“They were getting A’s in math and F’s in life – and it’s tough to get a kid an A in math at 13 and go to his funeral at 19,” says Marshall.
Marshall said that he heard horror stories about his students.
“Many were ending up on drugs, in jail or pregnant,” says Marshall. “The worst thing to do was have to go to a funeral of a former student who was killed in a drug or gang-related incident.”
Marshall started to reflect on his own path. He’d grown up in St. Louis and then South Central L.A. As a young black man, he saw less than half of his African-American peers graduating from high school within four years.