The black middle class received little scholarly attention from the 1960s through the 1980s, when the emphasis was on studying the black urban poor. Recently, however, there has been an increase in attention to this group and their residential environs. This review covers the topics of racial and class segregation, the comparative well-being of black middle-class neighborhoods, and residential preferences, with some attention to black suburbanization and black gentrification. Research findings clearly show that middle-class blacks in the United States have more favorable residential outcomes than poor blacks but still live in poorer neighborhoods than the majority of whites on all measures. Ethnographic studies explore this marginal position in more depth. I argue that if racial integration is the remedy to various racial disparities, then the more fruitful endeavor may be to study the ideologies, practices, and cultures of white neighborhoods, rather than black ones.

School choice is promoted as one strategy to improve educational outcomes for African Americans. Key themes in Black school choice politics are empowerment, control, and agency. Using qualitative interviews with seventy-seven poor and working-class Black parents in Chicago, this article asks: How well do the themes of empowerment, agency, and control characterize the experiences of low-income African American parents tasked with putting their children in schools? Also, what kind of political positions emerge from parents' everyday experiences given the ubiquitous language of school choice? I find that in their own recounting parents focused on finding a quality school while experiencing numerous barriers to accessing such schools; parents expressed experiential knowledge of being chosen, rather than choosing; and parents highlighted the opacity, uncertainty, and burden of choice, even when they participated in it quite heartily. I argue that their stories convey limited and weak empowerment, limited individual agency, and no control. Their perspectives conjure policy frameworks and political ideologies that require a discussion of entitlements and provision, rather than choice.

Using Chicago as our case, this article puts forth a notion of black placemaking that privileges the creative, celebratory, playful, pleasurable, and poetic experiences of being black and being around other black people in the city. Black placemaking refers to the ways that urban black Americans create sites of endurance, belonging, and resistance through social interaction. Our framework offers a corrective to existing accounts that depict urban blacks as bounded, plagued by violence, victims and perpetrators, unproductive, and isolated from one another and the city writ large. While ignoring neither the external assaults on black spaces nor the internal dangers that can make everyday life difficult, we highlight how black people make places in spite of those realities. Our four cases -the black digital commons, black public housing reunions, black lesbian and gay nightlife, and black Little League baseball -elucidate the matter of black lives across genders, sexualities, ages, classes, and politics.

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