Download or read book Living with Racism written by Joe R. Feagin and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 1995-07-31 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “One step from suicide” was the first response to Joe Feagin and Mel Sikes’ question about how it feels to be middle-class and African-American. Despite the prevalent white view that racism is diminishing, this groundbreaking study exposes the depth and relentlessness of the racism that middle-class Black Americans face every day. From the supermarket to the office, the authors show, African Americans are routinely subjected to subtle humiliations and overt hostility across white America. Based on the sometimes harrowing testimony of more than 200 Black respondents, Living with Racism shows how discrimination targets middle-class African Americans, impeding their economic and social progress, and wearying their spirit. A man is refused service in a restaurant. A woman is harassed while shopping. A little girl is taunted in a public pool by white children. These are everyday incidents encountered by millions of African Americans. But beyond presenting a litany of abuse, the authors argue that racism is deeply imbedded in American institutions and that the cumulative effect of these episodes is profoundly damaging. They argue that discrimination is experienced by their interviewees not as separate incidents, but as a process demanding their constant vigilance and shaping their personal, professional, and psychological lives. With powerful insight into the daily workings of discrimination, this important study can help all Americans confront the racism of our institutions and our culture.
Download or read book Black Picket Fences written by Mary Pattillo and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-07-02 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1999, Mary Pattillo’s Black Picket Fences explores an American demographic group too often ignored by both scholars and the media: the black middle class. Nearly fifteen years later, this book remains a groundbreaking study of a group still underrepresented in the academic and public spheres. The result of living for three years in “Groveland,” a black middle-class neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side, Black Picket Fences explored both the advantages the black middle class has and the boundaries they still face. Despite arguments that race no longer matters, Pattillo showed a different reality, one where black and white middle classes remain separate and unequal. Stark, moving, and still timely, the book is updated for this edition with a new epilogue by the author that details how the neighborhood and its residents fared in the recession of 2008, as well as new interviews with many of the same neighborhood residents featured in the original. Also included is a new foreword by acclaimed University of Pennsylvania sociologist Annette Lareau.
Download or read book The Black Experience in Middle class America written by Melvin D. Williams and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of the experience of race and class in middle-class America, featuring ethnographic details and empirical data. The book should be of interest to those studying black studies, women's studies and religious studies.
Download or read book Black Privilege written by Cassi Pittman Claytor and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-22 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[A] compelling ethnographic account of middle class Blacks in New York City. . . . A major contribution to race, consumption, class, and urban studies.” —Juliet Schor, author of After the Gig In their own words, the subjects of this book present a rich portrait of the modern black middle-class, examining how cultural consumption is a critical tool for enjoying material comforts as well as challenging racism. New York City has the largest population of black Americans out of any metropolitan area in the United States. It is home to a steadily rising number of socio-economically privileged blacks. In Black Privilege, Cassi Pittman Claytor examines how this economically advantaged group experiences privilege, having credentials that grant them access to elite spaces and resources with which they can purchase luxuries, while still confronting persistent anti-black bias and racial stigma. Drawing on the everyday experiences of black middle-class individuals, Pittman Claytor offers vivid accounts of their consumer experiences and cultural flexibility in the places where they live, work, and play. Whether it is the majority-white Wall Street firm where they’re employed, or the majority-black Baptist church where they worship, questions of class and racial identity are equally on their minds. They navigate divergent social worlds that demand, at times, middle-class sensibilities, pedigree, and cultural acumen, and at other times pride in and connection with other blacks. Rich qualitative data and original analysis help account for this special kind of privilege and the entitlements it affords—materially in terms of the things they consume, as well as symbolically, as they strive to be unapologetically black in a society where a racial consumer hierarchy prevails.
Download or read book Mothering While Black written by Dawn Marie Dow and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2019-03-12 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mothering While Black examines the complex lives of the African American middle class—in particular, black mothers and the strategies they use to raise their children to maintain class status while simultaneously defining and protecting their children’s “authentically black” identities. Sociologist Dawn Marie Dow shows how the frameworks typically used to research middle-class families focus on white mothers’ experiences, inadequately capturing the experiences of African American middle- and upper-middle-class mothers. These limitations become apparent when Dow considers how these mothers apply different parenting strategies for black boys and for black girls, and how they navigate different expectations about breadwinning and childrearing from the African American community. At the intersection of race, ethnicity, gender, work, family, and culture, Mothering While Black sheds light on the exclusion of African American middle-class mothers from the dominant cultural experience of middle-class motherhood. In doing so, it reveals the painful truth of the decisions that black mothers must make to ensure the safety, well-being, and future prospects of their children.
Download or read book The New Black Middle Class in the Twenty First Century written by Bart Landry and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2018-11-30 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 population. The New Black Middle Class in the Twenty-First Century is a significant contribution to the continuing study of black middle class life. Sociologist Bart Landry examines the changes that have occurred since the publication of his now-classic The New Black Middle Class in the late 1980s, and conducts a comprehensive examination of black middle class American life in the early decades of the twenty-first century. Landry investigates the educational and occupational attainment, income and wealth, methods of child-rearing, community-building priorities, and residential settlement patterns of this growing yet still-understudied segment of the U.S. population.
Download or read book Stories of Identity among Black Middle Class Second Generation Caribbeans written by Yndia S. Lorick-Wilmot and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-08-29 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume addresses how black, middle class, second generation Caribbean immigrants are often overlooked in contemporary discussions of race, black economic mobility, and immigrant communities in the US. Based on rich ethnography, Yndia S. Lorick-Wilmot draws attention to this persisting invisibility by exploring this generation’s experiences in challenging structures of oppression as adult children of post-1965 Caribbean immigrants and as an important part of the African-American middle class. She recounts compelling stories from participants regarding their identity performances in public and private spaces—including what it means to be “black and making it in America”—as well as the race, gender, and class constraints they face as part of a larger transnational community.
Download or read book Middle Class African American English written by Tracey Weldon and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-02-04 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From its historical development to its current context, this is the first full-length overview of middle-class African American English.
Download or read book The Vanishing Middle Class new epilogue written by Peter Temin and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2018-03-09 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why the United States has developed an economy divided between rich and poor and how racism helped bring this about. The United States is becoming a nation of rich and poor, with few families in the middle. In this book, MIT economist Peter Temin offers an illuminating way to look at the vanishing middle class. Temin argues that American history and politics, particularly slavery and its aftermath, play an important part in the widening gap between rich and poor. Temin employs a well-known, simple model of a dual economy to examine the dynamics of the rich/poor divide in America, and outlines ways to work toward greater equality so that America will no longer have one economy for the rich and one for the poor. Many poorer Americans live in conditions resembling those of a developing country—substandard education, dilapidated housing, and few stable employment opportunities. And although almost half of black Americans are poor, most poor people are not black. Conservative white politicians still appeal to the racism of poor white voters to get support for policies that harm low-income people as a whole, casting recipients of social programs as the Other—black, Latino, not like "us." Politicians also use mass incarceration as a tool to keep black and Latino Americans from participating fully in society. Money goes to a vast entrenched prison system rather than to education. In the dual justice system, the rich pay fines and the poor go to jail.
Download or read book The Colour of Class written by Nicola Rollock and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-11-13 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do race and class intersect to shape the identities and experiences of Black middle-class parents and their children? What are Black middle-class parents’ strategies for supporting their children through school? What role do the educational histories of Black middle-class parents play in their decision-making about their children’s education? There is now an extensive body of research on the educational strategies of the white middle classes but a silence exists around the emergence of the Black middle classes and their experiences, priorities, and actions in relation to education. This book focuses on middle-class families of Black Caribbean heritage. Drawing on rich qualitative data from nearly 80 in-depth interviews with Black Caribbean middle-class parents, the internationally renowned contributors reveal how these parents attempt to navigate their children successfully through the school system, and defend them against low expectations and other manifestations of discrimination. Chapters identify when, how and to what extent parents deploy the financial, cultural and social resources available to them as professional, middle class individuals in support of their children’s academic success and emotional well-being. The book sheds light on the complex, and relatively neglected relations, between race, social class and education, and in addition, poses wider questions about the experiences of social mobility, and the intersection of race and class in forming the identity of the parents and their children. The Colour of Class: The educational strategies of the Black middle classes will appeal to undergraduates and postgraduates on education, sociology and social policy courses, as well as academics with an interest in Critical Race Theory and Bourdieu. The Colour of Class was awarded 2nd prize by the Society for Educational Studies: Book Prize 2016.
Download or read book The Original Black Elite written by Elizabeth Dowling Taylor and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2017-01-31 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this outstanding cultural biography, the author of the New York Times bestseller A Slave in the White House chronicles a critical yet overlooked chapter in American history: the inspiring rise and calculated fall of the black elite, from Emancipation through Reconstruction to the Jim Crow Era—embodied in the experiences of an influential figure of the time, academic, entrepreneur, and political activist and black history pioneer Daniel Murray. In the wake of the Civil War, Daniel Murray, born free and educated in Baltimore, was in the vanguard of Washington, D.C.’s black upper class. Appointed Assistant Librarian at the Library of Congress—at a time when government appointments were the most prestigious positions available for blacks—Murray became wealthy through his business as a construction contractor and married a college-educated socialite. The Murrays’ social circles included some of the first African-American U.S. Senators and Congressmen, and their children went to the best colleges—Harvard and Cornell. Though Murray and other black elite of his time were primed to assimilate into the cultural fabric as Americans first and people of color second, their prospects were crushed by Jim Crow segregation and the capitulation to white supremacist groups by the government, which turned a blind eye to their unlawful—often murderous—acts. Elizabeth Dowling Taylor traces the rise, fall, and disillusionment of upper-class African Americans, revealing that they were a representation not of hypothetical achievement but what could be realized by African Americans through education and equal opportunities. As she makes clear, these well-educated and wealthy elite were living proof that African Americans did not lack ability to fully participate in the social contract as white supremacists claimed, making their subsequent fall when Reconstruction was prematurely abandoned all the more tragic. Illuminating and powerful, her magnificent work brings to life a dark chapter of American history that too many Americans have yet to recognize.
Download or read book The Rage of a Privileged Class written by Ellis Cose and published by Harper Perennial. This book was released on 1994-12-02 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A controversial and widely heralded look at the race-related pain and anger felt by the most respected, best educated, and wealthiest members of the black community.
Download or read book Black Bourgeois written by Candice M. Jenkins and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2019-10-15 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring the forces that keep black people vulnerable even amid economically privileged lives At a moment in U.S. history with repeated reminders of the vulnerability of African Americans to state and extralegal violence, Black Bourgeois is the first book to consider the contradiction of privileged, presumably protected black bodies that nonetheless remain racially vulnerable. Examining disruptions around race and class status in literary texts, Candice M. Jenkins reminds us that the conflicted relation of the black subject to privilege is not, solely, a recent phenomenon. Focusing on works by Toni Morrison, Spike Lee, Danzy Senna, Rebecca Walker, Reginald McKnight, Percival Everett, Colson Whitehead, and Michael Thomas, Jenkins shows that the seemingly abrupt discursive shift from post–Civil Rights to Black Lives Matter, from an emphasis on privilege and progress to an emphasis on vulnerability and precariousness, suggests a pendulum swing between two interrelated positions still in tension. By analyzing how these narratives stage the fraught interaction between the black and the bourgeois, Jenkins offers renewed attention to class as a framework for the study of black life—a necessary shift in an age of rapidly increasing income inequality and societal stratification. Black Bourgeois thus challenges the assumed link between blackness and poverty that has become so ingrained in the United States, reminding us that privileged subjects, too, are “classed.” This book offers, finally, a rigorous and nuanced grasp of how African Americans live within complex, intersecting identities.
Download or read book The New Black Middle Class written by Bart Landry and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1987-04-21 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this important new book, Bart Landry contributes significantly to the study of black American life and its social stratification and to the study of American middle class life in general.
Download or read book The Sinking Middle Class written by David Roediger and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2022-06-21 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Sinking Middle Class challenges the “save the middle class” rhetoric that dominates our political imagination. The slogan misleads us regarding class, nation, and race. Talk of middle class salvation reinforces myths holding that the US is a providentially middle class nation. Implicitly white, the middle class becomes viewed as unheard amidst supposed concerns for racial justice and for the poor. Roediger shows how little the US has been a middle class nation. The term seldom appeared in US writing before 1900. Many white Americans were self-employed, but this social experience separated them from the contemporary middle class of today, overwhelmingly employed and surveilled. Today’s highly unequal US hardly qualifies as sustaining the middle class. The idea of the US as a middle class place required nurturing. Those doing that ideological work—from the business press, to pollsters, to intellectuals celebrating the results of free enterprise—gained little traction until the Depression and Cold War expanded the middle class brand. Much later, the book’s sections on liberal strategist Stanley Greenberg detail, “saving the middle class” entered presidential politics. Both parties soon defined the middle class to include over 90% of the population, precluding intelligent attention to the poor and the very rich. Resurrecting radical historical critiques of the middle class, Roediger argues that middle class identities have so long been shaped by debt, anxiety about falling, and having to sell one’s personality at work that misery defines a middle class existence as much as fulfillment.
Download or read book Blue Chip Black written by Karyn R. Lacy and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2007-07-03 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher description
Download or read book The American Middle Class written by Lawrence R Samuel and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-07-18 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The middle class is often viewed as the heart of American society, the key to the country’s democracy and prosperity. Most Americans believe they belong to this group, and few politicians can hope to be elected without promising to serve the middle class. Yet today the American middle class is increasingly seen as under threat. In The American Middle Class: A Cultural History, Lawrence R. Samuel charts the rise and fall of this most definitive American population, from its triumphant emergence in the post-World War II years to the struggles of the present day. Between the 1920s and the 1950s, powerful economic, social, and political factors worked together in the U.S. to forge what many historians consider to be the first genuine mass middle class in history. But from the cultural convulsions of the 1960s, to the 'stagflation' of the 1970s, to Reaganomics in the 1980s, this segment of the population has been under severe stress. Drawing on a rich array of voices from the past half-century, The American Middle Class explores how the middle class, and ideas about it, have changed over time, including the distinct story of the black middle class. Placing the current crisis of the middle class in historical perspective, Samuel shows how the roots of middle-class troubles reach back to the cultural upheaval of the 1960s. The American Middle Class takes a long look at how the middle class has been winnowed away and reveals how, even in the face of this erosion, the image of the enduring middle class remains the heart and soul of the United States.
