The Evolution of the New Black Middle Class

Abstract

Although past research on the African American community has focused primarily on issues of discrimination, segregation, and other forms of deprivation, there has always been some recognition of class diversity within the black community. This research, on the fringe of most scholarship in the first half of the twentieth century, grew significantly with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In this review we highlight the growth of the black middle class itself and explore the debate on the relative influence of class and race in the lives of middle-class blacks in the post–Civil Rights Era. The consensus that has emerged thus far acknowledges the increasing influence of class in the mobility chances of college-educated blacks while documenting the continued role of race in limiting black middle-class achievement. This research also finds that middle-class blacks experience discrimination both in institutional settings and in the accommodations of everyday life.

Citizen Outsider: Children of North African Immigrants in France

“…For example, Pattillo-McCoy (1999, 13) uses "a combination of socioeconomic factors (mostly income, occupation, and education) and normative judgments (ranging from where people live, to what churches or clubs they belong to, to whether they plant flowers in their gardens" in her exegesis of Chicago's black middle-class. Furthermore, Landry and Marsh (2011) emphasize a Weberian approach to measuring and understanding middle-class populations, which are therefore constituted by individuals with white-collar employment, a term coined by C. Wright Mills ([1951] 2002) (see also Feagin 1991).…”

“…I therefore use a combination of occupation and educational attainment as indicators of the socioeconomic locations of my respondents (Weber [1922] 2013; see also Landry and Marsh 2011).…”

Interview with Annette Lareau

“…So I am curious about how, in your work, you go about extricating race from class and dealing with that tension. 9 The literature on the black middle class had been thin for a long time. Jessica Vasquez, in your own department, is doing a book on middle-class Hispanics.…”

Counting on Coworkers

“…Research utilizing public sector workers is particularly advantageous for examining the experiences of white and black workers because the public sector includes a wide variety of jobs with different racial compositions. Due to its formalized hiring and promotion procedures, work in the public sector has provided African Americans with greater opportunities for upward mobility compared to work in the private sector (Llorens, Wenger, and Kellough 2008;PattilloMcCoy 2000;Wilson 2006) and accounts for much of the growth of the black middle class in the United States (Collins 1983;Landry and Marsh 2011). Currently, black workers are more likely than whites or Latinos to be employed in public sector jobs (U.S. Department of Labor 2012).…”