For certain we are seeing this impact in Detroit...
The disappearing black middle class

BY JESSE WASHINGTON
July 10, 2011 12:24AM

Some see a bitter irony in soaring black unemployment and the decline of the black middle class on the watch of the first black president.

....“I thought Barack Obama could have provided some way out. But he lacks backbone,” Princeton Professor Cornel West told truthdig.com recently."

http://www.suntimes.com/news/nation/...dle-class.html