Middle-class African Americans Research Articles

"It’s a Job Living Here": A Qualitative Exploration of Information Motivation and Behavioral Skills (IMB) Related to Primary Prevention of Type 2 Diabetes Among Middle-class African Americans

"It’s a Job Living Here": A Qualitative Exploration of Information Motivation and Behavioral Skills (IMB) Related to Primary Prevention of Type 2 Diabetes Among Middle-class African Americans

Gentrification and displacement of the African-American population: A case study of two neighborhoods in Cincinnati, U.S.A., 2000–2016

Cincinnati, like many mid-sized cities in the U.S., has undergone gentrification in the past few decades. One of the downsides of gentrification is that it supposedly displaces lower-income (often minority) population. This paper examines two census tracts in two neighborhoods in Cincinnati that underwent gentrification between 2000 and 2016 using a combination of census data, interviews with neighborhood Community Development Corporation members, building permits, and Google Street View Analysis. The African-American population in both of these neighborhoods declined by 20.0 percent between 2000 and 2016. It is suggested that the housing crisis of 2008 affected middle-class African-Americans to a greater extent than their white counterparts and led to the exodus of African-Americans from these tracts. Using a gentrification index adapted from Hwang (2015) to measure change in the built environment, it was shown that these two tracts progressed from disinvested in 2007/09 to early stage gentrification by 2016. These changes included the renovation of buildings, the construction of new mixed-use complexes, and changes in the types of businesses in the neighborhoods. • Displacement more likely in neighborhoods where whites and African-Americans have comparable median household incomes. • Displacement of low-income residents more likely in neighborhoods with substantial reinvestment in short period of time. • Changes in built environment indicative of gentrification associated with declines in African-American population.

Race, Crime, and Policing in the Jim Crow South: African Americans and Law Enforcement in Birmingham, Memphis, and New Orleans, 1920–1945 by Brandon T. Jett

Reviewed by: Race, Crime, and Policing in the Jim Crow South: African Americans and Law Enforcement in Birmingham, Memphis, and New Orleans, 1920–1945 by Brandon T. Jett Theresa Jach Race, Crime, and Policing in the Jim Crow South: African Americans and Law Enforcement in Birmingham, Memphis, and New Orleans, 1920–1945. By Brandon T. Jett. Making the Modern South. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2021. Pp. xiv, 235. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-7507-1.) In Race, Crime, and Policing in the Jim Crow South: African Americans and Law Enforcement in Birmingham, Memphis, and New Orleans, 1920–1945, Brandon T. Jett looks at how African Americans responded to crime and policing in three southern cities from 1920 to the end of World War II. While James Forman Jr.'s Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America (New York, 2017) explores this theme from the 1960s on, Jett provides an important look at a critical period in the development of policing in the Jim Crow South. As police forces expanded and professionalized, African Americans found ways to use the police to clean up their own neighborhoods. Focusing on agency, Jett shows that Black southerners were not just victims of police indifference or brutality. Using extensive police records, newspaper accounts of crime, court records, and witness statements, Jett gives voice to both victims and perpetrators of crime in Memphis, New Orleans, and Birmingham. Jett chooses these three southern cities for his study because they all were legally segregated, and they all greatly expanded their police forces, but had no Black police officers, during the period covered in the book. African American communities in these cities wanted police involvement in their neighborhoods to cut down on crime. Jett thoroughly delineates the ways African Americans manipulated the police to serve their own needs. While Black residents did not want the police to target them, they did want the police to treat them fairly and to prevent and punish crimes committed against them. The African American community was not only overpoliced but also underpoliced. The police saw African Americans as likely criminals and yet rarely went after those who committed crimes against them. Police often ignored or half-heartedly investigated crimes committed against African Americans. Jett argues that focusing on intraracial crime allows him to center the reactions of Black southerners rather than white fears of Black crime. He convincingly shows that both working-class and middle-class African Americans wanted the police to stop crime in their communities. They found ways to manipulate and use the police to their own ends. They sought fair administration and application of the law, due process, more police in their communities, and the hiring of Black officers. However, because Black communities had little formal political power, city governments were not responsive to their demands. Jett uses a multitude of sources to show that African Americans often used self-policing to combat crime. And significantly, he proves that the police needed the help of the Black community to arrest Black criminals. African Americans often went to the police station or called the police for help if they witnessed a crime. Witnesses turned over weapons and, in some cases, captured and held suspects. African Americans routinely did their own investigation before contacting the police and provided names, addresses, and other help in solving the crime. In fact, in many instances, they did the policemen's jobs for them. [End Page 799] Working within a Jim Crow system that demanded deference to white supremacy, African Americans found ways to combat crime in their neighborhoods. They would, at least on the surface, acquiesce to the system, in order to get the police to combat crime, trust Black witnesses, protect Black victims, and help return stolen property. Race, Crime, and Policing in the Jim Crow South provides a much-needed and nuanced look at African American interactions with the police in the urban South. It adds an important perspective on how the Black community used its power and agency to compel the police to combat crime and protect their neighborhoods. Theresa Jach Houston Community College–Northwest Copyright © 2022 The Southern Historical Association

Black Beauty Culture Matters: Race, Gender, and Consumer Capitalism

Black Beauty Culture Matters: Race, Gender, and Consumer Capitalism Ingrid Banks Laila Haidarali. Brown Beauty: Color, Sex, and Race from the Harlem Renaissance to World War II. New York: New York University Press, 2018. 368 pp. ISBN 9781479875108 (cl); 9781479802081 (pb); 9781479838370 (ebook). Lynn M. Thomas. Beneath the Surface: A Transnational History of Skin Lighteners. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020. 368 pp. ISBN 9781478005384 (cl); 9781478006428 (pb). Despite decades of scholarship on beauty culture, the terrain remains fertile for studies that add to our understanding of how women’s bodies bear messages of cultural and political import. Two recent publications stand as exemplary contributions that make compelling cases for scholars of race to look to beauty. Beauty offers an even greater understanding of how societies come to comprehend race and ethnicity, gender, class, sexuality, culture, and much more. Through their respective texts on beauty culture, Laila Haidarali and Lynn M. Thomas provide beautifully rigorous examples of how notions of race and cultural practices are inherently unstable. In Brown Beauty: Color, Sex, and Race from the Harlem Renaissance to World War II, Laila Haidarali explores beauty through the lens of “New Negro” womanhood during the interwar years and examines how middle-class African Americans embraced an intra-racial middle ground of “brown” skin tones as a signifier of racial pride.1 In Beneath the Surface: A Transnational History of Skin Lighteners, Lynn M. Thomas uses South Africa as the foundation of a transnational study of skin lighteners by historicizing how such practices emerged and endure, albeit in often contradictory ways. Both texts remarkably illustrate beauty’s reach and influence within African diasporic contexts. Both projects focus on consumerism, capitalism, and the shifting meaning of racialized categories, using beauty as a magnificent window. Highlighting the Harlem Renaissance, Haidarali argues that middle-class African Americans privileged brown complexions in constructing “New Negro” womanhood. Centering brown as a marker of racial identity and beauty, African Americans portrayed the modern woman as an urban educated worker, while also presenting brown skin tones as a source of racial pride. Though the Black Power era of the mid-to-late 1960s in the United States is often viewed as the moment African Americans embraced a “Black is Beautiful” politic and aesthetic, Haidarali argues that “New Negroes” were [End Page 115] championing race pride by embracing brownness as representative of a diverse Blackness that challenged the supremacy of lighter skin tones and denigration of darker hues. However, “modern” women, or those coming of age in the early twentieth century, rejected this framing of New Negro womanhood, suggesting it was too connected to earlier Victorian-era tenets of domesticity and respectability. For early twentieth-century modern women, there was nothing “new” about New Negro womanhood as it smacked of the “old” view of African American womanhood. Instead, modern African American women embraced brownness as a means to express gendered, sexualized, and political ideals that ran counter to what they viewed as outdated sexist constructions of New Negro womanhood that privileged middle class respectability. Thus, a modern or transgressive view of new womanhood emerged during the interwar years. Haidarali illustrates how brown skin inspired these conflicting beliefs about African American womanhood, with what was viewed as “archaic” and “modern” existing alongside each other. Haidarali adeptly shows how the language of brownness flooded print culture, visual and literary, during the Harlem Renaissance. Winold Reiss’s New Negro paintings documented brown skin, most famously in the Brown Madonna (circa 1925). Poetry centered the experiences of “brown girls.” Advertisements of dolls and beauty preparations such as hair and skin products appropriated “brown” in order to appeal to African American women. Periodicals such as The Crisis, the official publication of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), highlighted brown-skinned women on covers. About W. E. B. Du Bois’s novel Browning the Dark Princess, Haidarali notes: “As narrative device and racial metaphor, brownness exposes multiple points of entry to interpret its meaning in relation both to Du Bois’s creative expression and the broader intellectual, political, and social climates abounding in 1920s America” (223). The novel was Du Bois’s attempt to center brownness within a transnational context. Haidarali...

COVID-19, Black jurisdictions, and budget constraints: how fiscal footing shapes fighting the virus

ABSTRACT In the United States (U.S.), most reports regarding racial disparities in incidence and death from COVID-19 understate the importance of majority-Black local jurisdictions’ fiscal capacity in shaping African Americans’ resilience during the pandemic and majority-Black locales’ economic trajectories afterward. Black households and jurisdictions manage legacy and ongoing racialized capitalism. My data are fieldwork findings from a 2017 and 2018 study of the U.S. county with the highest concentration of middle-class African Americans, Prince George’s County (PGC), Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C., alongside government reports on how D.C.-area counties experience COVID-19 fallout. I find PGC’s fragile fiscal state prior to the coronavirus means it weathers harsher consequences from COVID-19 than two neighbouring counties with significantly smaller Black populations. My analysis explicates how layers of racial disadvantage compound across time, region, and level of social organization.

How One Magazine Negotiated the Abyss Between Capitalism and Revolution

How One Magazine Negotiated the Abyss Between Capitalism and Revolution Miglena Sternadori (bio) Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr.: Popular Black History in Postwar America. E. James West. University of Illinois Press, 2020. 208 pp. $24.95 paperback. The role of magazines in documenting and interpreting history has been aptly explored by Carolyn Kitch, in her 2005 book, Pages from the Past, and by other scholars who have attempted to map the complex intersection between journalism and memory. But magazines’ historical texts are not just about commemoration and nostalgia, as E. James West points out. If they reveal unknown or suppressed facts and stories, they can also serve as textbooks, propel advocacy, or spawn moneymaking ideas. Ebony, the general-interest magazine for middle-class African Americans, is a prime example and the object of West’s recent book, Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr. In it West traces the contributions of Lerone Bennett Jr., a popular historian who supported the Black Power movement, to a magazine remembered for encouraging conspicuous consumption as a path to racial equality. How did such an unlikely marriage of philosophies survive? The answer lies, implicitly, in the ambivalent nature of the magazine medium, where progressive story lines often serve to ensure the advertising success of large corporations. Bennett, a Morehouse College classmate of Martin Luther King Jr., arrived at Ebony in 1954 and relentlessly published Black history articles and series until his entry into senior management in the late 1980s. Despite his lack of academic credentials, he conducted research like a professional historian, spending time in archives and finding primary documents. His efforts were rewarded. Long before universities had Black [End Page 113] studies departments and February was celebrated as Black History Month, readers wrote ecstatic letters to praise Bennett. His work—including series such as Negro History (later released as a book titled Before the Mayflower), Pioneers in Protest, The Making of Black America, and Black Power—filled some of the gaps in the whitewashed school curricula and historicized the struggle for civil rights. He depicted the richness of African heritage, the horrors of slavery, the ingenuities of Black resistance, and the achievements of Black politicians during Reconstruction. Publisher John Johnson was proud of Bennett’s contributions. Conveniently, their consciousness-raising nature was also useful in deflecting criticisms about Ebony’s apolitical and staunchly capitalist philosophy. For readers who had grown accustomed to reading Bennett’s articles in Ebony, it probably seemed natural in the 1970s to start to see advertisements from companies encouraging them to take leisure trips to Black-history monuments—or even to the South, which was presented as supposedly friendly and open to Black-heritage tourism. These ads appeared especially in the context of the celebration of the US bicentennial, in 1976. But although Bennett himself had helped usher Black history into the mainstream, he was livid about its capitalist co-optations. A number of his articles suggested that history was a tool of advocacy and even revolution, but these viewpoints, which reached wide audiences through the pages of Ebony, in no way stopped or discouraged profiteering from the cause he cared so deeply about. Despite these tensions over the uses of Black history, little changed. Johnson held steady to his capitalist course, while Bennett remained a trusted editor at the magazine—save for a brief, disappointing foray into academia to serve as the first chair of Northwestern University’s Black studies department. Over the years, many other thorny questions about the interpretation of history emerged at Ebony. For example, how was a “moderate” magazine supposed to cover radical activists such as Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael? Had Martin Luther King been an individualistic hero rallying for the cause of color blindness—as Ronald Reagan had framed him upon declaring his birthday a holiday—or a champion of racial consciousness and equality? Was MLK, in fact, a peaceful martyr or a true revolutionary? While Bennett may have had short-term wins by publishing articles containing some relatively radical viewpoints, in the long run, Johnson invariably steered the magazine’s ship toward more commemorative and middle-of-the-road perspectives. [End Page 114] The book is a useful read not only...

Racial Disparities in Health Among College-Educated African Americans: Can Attendance at Historically Black Colleges or Universities Reduce the Risk of Metabolic Syndrome in Midlife?

We expand on existing understandings of health disparities among middle-class African Americans by examining how the postsecondary educational context gives rise to the unequal distribution of health. We used panel data (1994-2009) from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) to estimate whether the risk of developing metabolic syndrome by midlife significantly differs for African Americans who attended Historically Black College or Universities (HBCUs) versus predominantly White institutions. We found that HBCU enrollment was associated with a 35% reduction in the odds of metabolic syndrome. Furthermore, we demonstrate that HBCU attendees who grew up in more segregated environments experienced the greatest reductions in the likelihood of developing metabolic syndrome. Our results underscore the important role that HBCUs play in the lives of African Americans and suggest their impacts go far beyond traditional benchmarks of socioeconomic achievement to include key health outcomes.

Kin Support of the Black Middle Class: Negotiating Need, Norms, and Class Background

AbstractIn comparison to middle-class Whites, middle-class African Americans disproportionately provide financial support to their low-income family members. Evidence suggests that this practice is both essential for its low-income recipients and economically detrimental for Black middle-class givers. Scholars often oversimplify Black middle-class identity by describing kin support as motivated solely by racial identity. Gathering insight from 41 in-depth interviews, this article interrogates the conditions under which, despite their financial own vulnerability, middle-class Black families offer kin support. This study explores variations in Black middle-class racial ideology and observes how other dimensions of identity, such as class background, influence attitudes and decision-making towards family. This article demonstrates how socioeconomic background shapes the ways the Black middle class negotiates expectations of kin support and details three kin support approaches as either strategies for social mobility, tools reserved for short-term lending, or opportunities to repay unsettled childhood debts. This work contributes to our understanding of how the Black community deploys kin support, illuminates how the Black middle class makes sense of racial norms around giving, and centers class background in our intersectional understanding of identity.

Love, Marriage, and Civil Rights in African American History

Love, Marriage, and Civil Rights in African American History Rebecca L. Davis (bio) Tera W. Hunter, Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2017. 404 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $29.95. Tera W. Hunter’s long-awaited history of marriage among nineteenth-century African Americans illuminates cases of enslavement and emancipation, of citizenship and civil rights, and of national reckoning over persistent racial discrimination. The resulting narrative provides a revelatory work of historical revisionism. Hunter’s book is a signal intervention in the historiography of marriage in the US. Twenty years ago, Nancy F. Cott challenged historians to put marriage’s history at the center of United States history. Her landmark book, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (2000), asserted that marriage was never simply a private relationship but always reflected the interests of the state and structured the reach of state power into individuals’ personal lives. Since then, the field of marriage history has expanded to include histories of divorce attentive to gender dynamics, marital conflict and the making of gender roles and sexualities, interracial marriage and the creation of categories of racial difference, and the ongoing adaptation of ideas of gendered, racial, and sexual difference within debates over marital rights and pleasures. Within this outpouring of scholarship, only a few books have focused on the experiences of African Americans. In Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Reconstruction (2003), Michele Mitchell highlights how marriage and ideals of sexual respectability shaped aspirations for racial uplift. Emily West’s Chains of Love: Slave Couples in Antebellum South Carolina (2004) argues for the centrality of male-female couples’ bonds to enslaved people’s lives, even as slavery denied them the legal recognition of marriage. Anastasia C. Curwood’s Stormy Weather: Middle-Class African American Marriages Between the Two World Wars (2010) focuses on shifting ideals of marital intimacy for African Americans adapting to evolving expectations of marital partnership amid the precarious economic and educational opportunities available to them, particularly in the urban North. [End Page 277] Hunter makes clear that the denial of marriage rights was fundamental to the operation of enslavement, with a legacy of discrimination and family dislocation that endured generations after slavery’s formal end. She argues further that the very denial of marriage rights under enslavement augmented the importance that marriage held for enslaved and formerly enslaved African Americans as a symbol of the dignity of full citizenship, and as a benchmark for measuring African Americans’ “progress” toward respectability and socioeconomic stability. Yet marriage could hardly carry that load; it proved to be an inadequate vehicle for civil rights, and it failed to capture the diversity of romantic, parental, and kinship relationships that African Americans nurtured and defended. Bound in Wedlock is the best book on the history of marriage to be published in a generation. In arguing for marriage’s centrality to histories of enslavement, Hunter moves seamlessly among court cases, personal testimonies, social histories of family life under the institution of slavery, and regional histories of slave economies. Central to the book’s success is Hunter’s monumental research to recover the lived experiences of intimacy, family bonds, and kinship among enslaved and free Black people. The voices of enslaved and free people animate nearly every page. Rather than a bird’s-eye view of laws or policies, of court cases or official statements, the book tells stories of individuals struggling with bonds of love, necessity, enslavement, and kinship. While earlier scholars have deftly demonstrated how marriage served as a political metaphor in debates over slavery and women’s rights, and while others have documented patterns in family life and kinship among the enslaved, Hunter weds those two narratives and thus illuminates the connections between them: the political meanings of marriage excluded enslaved people from enjoying its legal protections, enabled slavery’s defenders to justify the separations of families, and made the possibility of legal marriage into a poignant symbol of freedom’s promise. Such an approach proves particularly illuminating when Hunter delves into the complexity of the legal fictions that shaped both slavery and marriage: slavery...

Racial Diversity or Cultural Safety?: Utilizing Social Identity to Understand the Choice of Racially Segregated Neighborhoods among Middle Class African-Americans

ABSTRACTAdding to a growing body of work on the psychology of neighborhood choice, the present research examined middle class black attitudes regarding owning homes in majority white and majority black communities. The principal source consisted of interviews with 35 black middle class homeowners which were subjected to narrative analysis to identify (i) whether and to what extent participants identified with the county in which they lived; (ii) features of their perceived experience responsible for any such identification; and (iii) any attitudes about living in predominately white and predominately black counties that acted as limits to identification. Although homeowners from each county (majority white and majority black) typically favored the county in which they lived, results point to complex motivations that were influenced by negative racial experiences, conceptually different understandings about the value of diversity, and other factors.

Do rising tides lift all boats? Racial disparities in health across the lifecourse among middle-class African-Americans and Whites

Although racial inequalities in health are well documented, much less is known about the underlying mechanisms that create and sustain these population patterns, especially among nonpoor subgroups. Using 20 waves of data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), we estimate the magnitude of the Black/White gap in self-rated health among middle-income, working-age (18–65) adults and explore potential sources of this disparity. Findings from multilevel regression models suggest that intragenerational gains in family income result in significantly smaller improvements in self-rated health for middle-class African-Americans than similarly situated Whites. We also note that childhood disadvantage predicts subsequent health trajectories in adulthood, but does little to explain the Black/White gap in the association between family income and self-rated health. We conclude that middle-class status provides restricted health returns to upward mobility for African-Americans and this differential relationship cannot be accounted for by greater exposure to early life disadvantage.

Urban Decolonization

National fair housing legislation opened up higher opportunity neighborhoods to multitudes of middle-class African Americans. In actuality, the FHA offered much less to the millions of poor, Black residents in inner cities than it did to the Black middle class. Partly in response to the FHA’s inability to provide quality housing for low-income blacks, Congress has pursued various mobility strategies designed to facilitate the integration of low-income Blacks into high-opportunity neighborhoods as a resolution to the persistent dilemma of the ghetto. These efforts, too, have had limited success. Now, just over fifty years after the passage of the Fair Housing Act and the Housing Choice Voucher Program (commonly known as Section 8), large numbers of African Americans throughout the country remain geographically isolated in urban ghettos. America’s neighborhoods are deeply segregated and Blacks have been relegated to the worst of them. This isolation has been likened to colonialism of an urban kind. To combat the housing conditions experienced by low-income Blacks, in recent years, housing advocates have reignited a campaign to add “source of income” protection to the federal Fair Housing Act as a means to open up high-opportunity neighborhoods to low-income people of color. This Article offers a critique of overreliance on integration and mobility programs to remedy urban colonialism. Integration’s ineffectiveness as a tool to achieve quality housing for masses of economically-subordinated Blacks has been revealed both in the historically White suburbs and the recently gentrified inner city. Low-income Blacks are welcome in neither place. Thus, this Article argues that focusing modern fair housing policy on the relatively small number of Black people for whom mobility is an option (either through high incomes or federal programs) is shortsighted, given the breadth of need for quality housing in economically-subordinated inner-city communities. As an alternative, this Article proposes, especially in the newly wealthy gentrified cities, that fair housing advocates, led by Black tenants, insist that state and local governments direct significant resources to economically depressed majority-minority neighborhoods and house residents equitably. This process of equitable distribution of local government resources across an entire jurisdiction, including in majority-minority neighborhoods, may be a critical step towards urban decolonization.

Measuring Type 2 diabetes mellitus knowledge and perceptions of risk in middle-class African Americans.

There is a paucity in the literature examining the African American middle-class. Most studies of African Americans and Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus (T2DM) have concentrated on lower-SES individuals, or make no distinction between African Americans of varying socio-economic positions. Middle-class African Americans are vulnerable in ways often overlooked by researchers. This study quantitatively examines specific T2DM knowledge and perceptions of risk in middle-class African Americans (N = 121). The majority of respondents, 70.2%, were unable to correctly identify all the warning signs of T2DM development. Only 3.3% of respondents correctly identified all risk factors provided as 'possible causes' of T2DM development. The difference between those participants who considered themselves to be at risk for T2DM development and their level of risk, according to the American Diabetes Associations' risk assessment, was not statistically significant (P = 0.397). However, there were statistically significant differences between participants' perceptions of their weight and clinical definitions of overweight, a major risk factor in T2DM development, based on BMI (P = 0.000). Middle-class African Americans are not inherently protected or exempt from developing T2DM. This study demonstrates gaps in knowledge and overall incongruent levels of perceived susceptibility, suggesting a need for additional research and health education in this segment of the population.

Diabetes Prevention for African-Americans: a Scoping Review.

Type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) is the most common form of diabetes and is preventable in many instances. African-Americans are disproportionately represented in T2DM statistics. The strategies in place to prevent disease development in this population warrant critical examination. A scoping review of literature was conducted to provide an overview of the largely inconsistent approach to African-American T2DM prevention research. Specific research questions included: (1) How are African-Americans treated in the existing T2DM literature? (1a) Are African-Americans primarily treated as a homogenous group in the literature? (1b) Has the literature addressed middle-class African-Americans? (2) Is the T2DM prevention literature focusedon primary or secondary prevention? The review included articles published from 1985 to 2016, examining the methodology and approach toward African-Americans in each article. The review yielded 653 unduplicated articles. Through title, abstract, and full-text screenings, 381 articles were excluded. Of the remaining articles only 37% were focused on the prevention of T2DM development, and only 22.7% described a participant education component. The majority of the studies were observational (n=19). Only 53.5% included majority African-American participants. Samples ranged from 2 to 27,899 individuals, which were often treated as homogeneous groups in terms of income and/or education (62.3%). The approach to T2DM prevention in African-Americans is largely inconsistent, which may be contributing to stagnation in this area of research.

Can the Achievement Gap Be Linked to Differences in the Development of Naming Strategies? A Comparison of African American and European American Children’s Responses on a Picture-Labeling Task

In this study, working- and middle-class African American and European American adults and children aged two through six were shown a series of pictures including “normal” referents and unfamiliar combinations which they were asked to identify. There were both age- and class-dependent differences in terms of naming behaviors but there were none according to ethnicity. When these results are interpreted in consideration of the still-widening achievement gap, it is clear that linguists and educators continue to face the same issue: there remains a societal insistence on furthering the primacy of middle class linguistic structures and language behaviors which serves to maintain a cycle of educational failure for African American working-class children.

Black Women Teacher Educators, Race Uplift, and the Academic Other-Mother Identity

This paper examines the intersections of teacher educators' identities and the notion of race uplift. It is basedon a larger study that explores the experiences and practices of Black women professors at three differenthigher education institutions. The author maintains that as a result of their outsider-within position and raceuplift stance, Black women teacher educators may produce an academic other-mother identity. Whileconsidering the concepts of womanist theory, this paper attempts to offer a thick description of the kind ofrace uplift practiced by teacher educators of color. The author defines the outsider-within position and thehistorical relationship between the race uplift theme and womanism, reviews current literature about teachereducators of color - highlighting their experiences and how they view their work in the academy, andexamines the outsider-within position in Black women teacher educators. The author concludes with adiscussion of the other-mother identity and Black women teacher educators.Research indicates that the experiences of Black women faculty involve racist and sexist practices bycolleagues and students. Additionally, these women experience feelings of isolation, discrimination, andtokenism. Collins (1998) cautions that being marginalized in intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality,and/or citizenship places a variety of well-meaning intellectuals engaged in higher education in commonborder zones, and these same systems of power reproduce hierarchies in "outsider-within locations." Middleclass African Americans in the United States, for example, are aggressively recruited to join eliteinstitutions of higher education and other sites of institutional power, only to find themselves, upon arrival,confined to a new designated "place", or "outsider-within location" (Collins, 1998). Professor AnnetteHenry, also a teacher educator, describes the outsider-within location clearly from personal experience:Standing like an oak by the photocopier, a White male graduate student utters the only words hehas ever said to me during his years in the college of education: "You're lucky you got this job;"he mutters, assuredly, un-stapling a document. "They don't usually hire, well;" he leans towardme and whispers,"outsiders," as if telling me a deep dark secret. (Henry, 1998, p. 5)That is, they appear to belong, because they possess both the credentials for admittance and the rights offormal citizenship, "but that does not automatically translate into substantive citizenship rights" (Collins,1998, p. 5). Several Black women scholars have termed the race-, sex-, and class-based oppression theyexperienced in institutions of higher learning as "double", "triple", or "multiple oppressions" (Anzaldúa,1998; Guy-Sheftall, 1995; James, 1999; James & Farmer, 1993; King, D., 1993). These terms are meant tosuggest the cumulative effect of experiencing, gender, race, and class exploitation (Knight, 1998).These new spaces that marginalized Black women occupy in the academy, coupled with the possible erosionof activism within teaching due to a growing Black middle class (Collins, 1990), led me to ask questionssuch as: what is the current relationship between agency and teacher preparation?; in what ways are teachingpractices influenced by these new "outsider-within" locations?; and, how do contemporary Black womenteacher educators utilize notions of "race uplift" to shape their work?This paper examines the intersections of teacher educators' outsider within identity and the notion of raceuplift. While considering the concepts of womanist theory, it attempts to offer a thick description of raceuplift as practiced by Black women teacher educators. It is based on a qualitative investigation of threeBlack women teacher educators that sought to answer two questions: In what ways do their experiencesinform their teaching practice, and how does the notion of race uplift inform their work? The sample wasclearly purposive because the goals were to deepen society's understandings of the significant experiencesand practices of Black women who prepare teachers for K-12 classrooms.

Paths to Respectability: Consumption and Stigma Management in the Contemporary Black Middle Class

Abstract When confronted with racial stigma, how do people manage it? What specific arrangements of objects and tactics do they mobilize to make everyday life more tolerable (if not more equal)? The politics of respectability (respectability) is one such arrangement. Respectability makes life more tolerable by offering a counternarrative that disavows stigma through status-oriented displays. This strategy of action emerged alongside mass consumer culture in the late 19th century, but what relevance does it have to those who are stigmatized in contemporary consumer culture? Based on ethnographic interviews and observations with middle-class African Americans, respectability remains an important strategy that has undergone profound changes since its origins while still operating in similar ways. In the late 20th century it fractured into two related but distinct counternarratives: (1) “discern and avoid,” which seeks distance from whatever is stigmatized, and (2) “destigmatize,” using black culture as a source of high status. Perceptions of how well either counternarrative manages stigma depend on how ideology, strategy, and consumption are connected via specific sociohistorical features of place and individual power resources. I illustrate those connections through four cases that show perceived success and perceived failure for each counternarrative.

Black Republicans and the Transformation of the GOP by Joshua D. Farrington

Reviewed by: Black Republicans and the Transformation of the GOP by Joshua D. Farrington Erica L. Metcalfe Black Republicans and the Transformation of the GOP. By Joshua D. Farrington. Politics and Culture in Modern America. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Pp. xii, 311. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8122-4852-4.) While most scholarship on African American political thought has focused on the black Left, studies examining the African American conservative perspective have more recently emerged. Joshua D. Farrington's latest study, Black Republicans and the Transformation of the GOP, offers an examination of black Republicans from the New Deal era to the Richard M. Nixon administration and explores how their goals within the party changed over time. Throughout the twentieth century, many middle-class African Americans remained in the Republican Party, where they sought to carve out a place for the black community and their socioeconomic needs. However, as the title suggests, this book is about more than black Republicans and their political agendas. It also explores the transformation of the Republican Party and how its interactions with African Americans changed throughout the twentieth century. While New Deal benefits were luring the black working class to the Democratic Party, notable black Republicans such as Archibald Carey Jr. and Robert Church Jr. occupied leadership positions in the South's Black-and-Tan organizations. They were elected to powerful positions at the local and state levels and lobbied for civil rights. Black Republican politicians were successful at getting meaningful civil rights legislation passed. Furthermore, on the national level, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, although a gradualist with civil rights, made judicial appointments that led to significant civil rights victories in the 1950s and 1960s. Despite the rising tide of conservatism within the GOP in the 1950s, black Republicans remained a visible presence in the party. Many received highranking federal appointments and maintained influential local and state positions. However, during the 1960s black Republicans and black issues were becoming less of a priority within the party. There were cuts to the Republican National Committee's Minorities Division, fewer black delegates attended Republican conventions, Black-and-Tan organizations were disregarded, and GOP resources were put into Operation Dixie—a plan to court southern white voters. The 1964 presidential nomination of notoriously conservative Arizona senator Barry Goldwater marked a low point for the GOP's relationship with black voters and black Republicans. Despite their marginalization within the [End Page 1011] party, black Republicans maintained their belief in using the two-party system to make both parties address black issues. Ideologically, many black Republicans had also shifted their focus from civil rights to economic self-help. Nixon's black capitalism initiatives had goals of promoting entrepreneurship within the African American community and elicited support from black Republicans. Nevertheless, as the GOP grew more conservative into the 1970s, black support for the Republican Party declined significantly on the national level and has not recovered. Farrington weaves his chronological narrative together with a wealth of archival sources. Using diverse manuscript collections from around the United States, he attempts to fill a vacuum in the current scholarship. However, the book is not without its shortcomings. There is only a brief mention of the work and experiences of African American women in the Republican Party, such as Nannie Burroughs, Daisy Lampkin, and Jewel Lafontant-Mankarious. Indeed, this study would have been further enriched by a discussion of black Republican women's perspectives. Nevertheless, unlike previous studies on black Republicans, the book takes a close look at the changes within the GOP and how the party managed to gradually alienate African American voters throughout the twentieth century. Ultimately, Black Republicans and the Transformation of the GOP is a welcome addition to African American political history and will appeal to those interested in politics, history, and civil rights. Erica L. Metcalfe Texas Southern University Copyright © 2017 The Southern Historical Association

Racial Discrimination and African Americans’ Travel Behavior

This study investigated African Americans’ travel behavior using Bourdieu’s concept of habitus. In-depth and face-to-face interviews were conducted with 13 middle-class African Americans. Vignette technique was used during the interviews. The study identified four salient themes: (1) racial discrimination during travel, (2) fear of racism, (3) storytelling and safety instructions: social reproduction of the fear of racism, and (4) race-related travel choices. The findings showed that informants’ travel behavior was linked to an acute fear of racism. They affirmed that African Americans’ travel patterns need to be conceived as a defensive mechanism against potential racial discrimination. Implications for research methods and tourism management are discussed.

What should young Black children know about race? Parents of preschoolers, preparation for bias, and promoting egalitarianism

This qualitative study of 26 African American parents and caregivers of preschool children sought to address gaps in the current literature by exploring how the intersection of parents’ racism experiences and social class may play a role in race-related socialization during the early years. Analysis of narrative interviews revealed that egalitarianism surfaced as the most common content of racial socialization (ethnic-racial socialization) messages. We also found that preparation for bias emerged as qualitatively different for the working- and middle-class African Americans, however, and thus, we argue that the ways in which working- and middle-class African American parents of preschoolers made sense of their experiences with racism and discrimination were different and that this shaped their preparation for bias messages differently. To provide a contrast for illustrating this argument, we detail working- and middle-class participants’ use of egalitarianism messages in relationship to their stories about racism, proposing here that parents may have been attuning to their young children’s developmental stage when deciding which messages to promote.