Poverty in the family: race, siblings, and socioeconomic heterogeneity q Colleen M. Heflin a, * , Mary Pattillo b a Martin School of Public Policy, University of Kentucky, 429 Patterson Office Tower, Lexington, KY 40503, United States b Northwestern University, United States Abstract We use the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to characterize siblings of middle class and poor blacks and whites, testing for racial differences in the probability of having a sibling on the other side of the socioeconomic divide. In support of theories in the urban poverty lit- erature about the social isolation of poor blacks, we find that poor African-Americans are less likely to have a middle class sibling than poor whites, controlling for individual and family background factors. For the middle class, being black is positively correlated with the prob- ability of having a poor sibling, challenging the notion that the black middle class is separated from the black poor, but supporting recent research on black middle class fragility. Overall, we find that African-Americans are less likely than whites to have siblings that cross important social class lines in ways that are beneficial. Racial differences in the composition of kin net- works may indicate another dimension of racial stratification. Ó 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. 0049-089X/$ - see front matter Ó 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.ssresearch.2004.09.002 q This research was supported by a Ford Foundation grant in Poverty, the Underclass and Public Policy, the Joint Center for Poverty Research, and the Institute for Policy Research. We thank Sheldon Danziger, Mary Corcoran, Greg Duncan, Ray Reagans, Ngina Chiteji, David Harris, James Kunz, Aixa Cintron, and Arline Geronimus for their helpful comments. * Corresponding author. E-mail address: cmh@uky.edu (C.M. Heflin). Social Science Research xxx (2005) xxx–xxx www.elsevier.com/locate/ssresearch Social Science RESEARCH ARTICLE IN PRESS