A relational study of the Black middle classes and globalised White hegemony: Identities, interactions, and ideologies in the United States, United Kingdom, and South Africa

Abstract

In this paper, I explore the experiences of the Black middle classes across the United States, United Kingdom (UK), and South Africa. I argue that the similar experiences the Black middle classes face across these nations are not coincidental but represent the process of globalised White hegemony. Globalised White hegemony refers to how the middle class, transnationally, is often understood as a symbolic category informed by specific White norms, identifications, and practices. I explore globalised White hegemony through three areas of Black middle‐class experience: identity, interactions, and ideologies. Thus, I examine how across the UK, United States, and South Africa, the Black middle classes construct public identities according to White norms, encounter interactions through which their blackness negatively trumps their middle‐class status, and confront classed‐racialised ideologies, which construe the Black middle class as inauthentic. I argue in this paper that central to fleshing out the similarities in Black middle‐class experiences across the globe is engaging in relational sociology, which stresses the globalised nature of contemporary raciality.

Activating Controlling Images in the Racialized Interaction Order: Black Middle‐Class Interactions and the Creativity of Racist Action

“…While the data presented in this paper includes a fraction of my interviewees' narratives, through a case study logic we can use these individualized narratives to generate hypotheses about the social world (see Small ) . As may be expected, given the global nature of anti‐blackness (Meghji ), my research shows that black British professionals face similar experiences to black professionals in the United States; namely, they are subject to being stereotyped as unintelligent, aggressive, and lower‐class. However, a large contribution of this paper is at the theoretical level.…”

“…While Anderson's () research is U.S.‐based, the scarce research on Britain's black middle‐class has highlighted how black professionals are also subject to such a deficit of credibility—what Wallace (:467) refers to as a process of “class‐imaging” (see Meghji ; Rollock et al ; Wallace ). In response to this class‐imaging, research in both the United States and Britain has shown that the black middle‐class engage in strategies of impression management to “prove” their class status, such as wearing smart clothes and speaking in refined manners (see Anderson ; Lacy ; Meghji ; Rawls and Duck ; Rollock et al ; Wallace ). Nevertheless, this impression management is often not enough to overcome the combined strength of white ignorance and controlling images, and black professionals continue to be subject to racial microaggressions regardless of their impression management strategies…”

“You don’t believe in God? You ain’t Black”: Identifying as atheist elicits identity denial from Black ingroup members.

“…Strongly identified Black, relative to weakly identified Black people may be more likely to perceive Black atheists' as being less Black given prototypical ingroup members construct the meaning of what it means to be Black. They may exert their ownership of this construction by rejecting ingroup members who display nonprototypical behaviors (Meghji, 2017). Lastly, although not our main research question, we examined perceptions of Black atheists' trustworthiness to see if we could replicate past research, which demonstrates that atheists are perceived as less trustworthy than their religious counterparts (for a review see Gervais, 2013).…”

‘calling‐out’ vs. ‘calling‐in’ prejudice: Confrontation style affects inferred motive and expected outcomes

“…In 'study three', participants read a vignette where one student (Adam) implies that several Black students who recently dropped the class must have been athletes who lacked the intellectual merit needed for regular admission. Stereotypes of Black individuals as superior athletes but intellectually inferior are prevalent in both the United States and United Kingdom (Gillborn, 1997;Rasmussen et al, 2005; see also Meghji, 2017). In the rest of the interaction, another student (Will) confronts Adam in one of three styles: 'Call-in' (Will accommodates and does not self-promote), 'Educational' (a 'bare bones' non-accommodating and not-self-promoting confrontation), and 'Call-out' (Will does not accommodate and self-promotes).…”