Black Middle Class Research Articles

The Love Jones Cohort and singlehood are family law issues

AbstractThis article reviews the changing Black family and households. The core theme is to understand the uniqueness of those single and living alone in the Black middle class—the “Love Jones Cohort”—and how their intersecting identities of race, class, gender, and singleness inform their lifestyle, shape how they manage life decisions, and their relationship to policy as well as family law and family court. This essay moves beyond the popularized and omnipresent inquiry: “Why are Black women not getting married?” or “Why are there so many single professional Black women?” This line of questioning throws the spotlight squarely on Black women's individual dating practices, while often ignoring structural factors that undergird those decision‐making processes. It implies that because of the individual actions of the Love Jones Cohort, specifically Black women, they are somehow at a deficiency if they are not married and child‐free, rendering them invisible as a family. This article discusses the legal implications of the presence of the Love Jones Cohort.

Opportunity Hoarding and Elite Reproduction: School Segregation in Post-Apartheid South Africa

Abstract School integration is an important indicator of equality of opportunity and racial reconciliation in contemporary South Africa. Despite its prominence in public and political discourse, however, there is no systemic evidence on the levels and patterns of school segregation. Drawing on the literature on the post-apartheid political settlement and sociological theories of opportunity hoarding, we explain how the small White minority and, to a lesser extent, the new Black middle class monopolized access to South Africa’s most prestigious schools following the abolition of de jure segregation in 1994. Using the 2021 Annual School Survey—an administrative dataset covering all South African schools—and the 2019 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study school survey, we find very high levels of school segregation along racial as well as socioeconomic lines. White students almost exclusively attend former White schools, have little exposure to the low-income Black majority, and are vastly overrepresented in elite public and private schools. We argue that in South Africa and other contexts with under-resourced education systems, elite capture of the few high-performing schools serves to reproduce race and class privilege.

The Love Jones Cohort: Single and Living Alone in the Black Middle Class

The Love Jones Cohort: Single and Living Alone in the Black Middle Class

Creating Racial Structural Solidarity

This article draws on recent transnational protests against police brutality to advance an understanding of anti-racist solidarity that aims to improve over Mara Marin’s ‘structural solidarity’ view. On Marin’s view, anti-racist solidarity is grounded in the racial structure. But Marin forgets that racial domination exerts a segregative influence on different groups, so that whites and middle-class blacks tend not to frequent the social milieux that would help them develop a sense of solidarity with working-class blacks. To address this problem, the article hypothesises that the conditions for anti-racist solidarity are not inherent in the racial structure but created by social movements, as exemplified by Black Lives Matter: to the extent that white and middle-class black participants in the George Floyd protests experienced the racist police brutality they were denouncing on behalf of the black working class, these protests functioned as non-segregated milieux that could ground the solidarity of the former with the latter at the national and transnational levels.

Exploring Racial Disparities in the 1918 Influenza Pandemic: A Case Study of Durham, North Carolina.

The paradox of excess mortality among White Americans during the 1918 influenza pandemic has long puzzled historians and scientists. Recent scholarship has suggested that this disparity was not true for the country as a whole, but rather regional variation was observed. The factors influencing these disparities remain speculative. A case study was conducted of Durham, North Carolina, a city known nationally for the achievements of its Black middle class, to further explore these themes relying on numerous sources including newspapers and death certificates. Though Durham's overall mortality was lower than many places in North Carolina, the White mortality rate greatly exceeded that of the Black population. Previously described theories, including Alfred Crosby's exposure hypothesis and segregation, were explored. The most notable difference between Durham's pandemic narrative and other comparable towns was the robust healthcare response, which was made possible by the excellence of the Black nursing force from Lincoln Hospital. Nursing care was the best treatment available for the 1918 influenza, but most of the nation experienced severe nursing shortages due to the war effort. This study thus provides an example of how the Black health community has proven an active agent in countering the structural forces driving racial disparities.

Black South African Middle-Class Engagements with Social Media and Digitised Food Cultures

Abstract The tastes and consumption patterns of the black middle class of South Africa have long been of interest to both media and researchers. The majority of this interest has been disproportionately focused on the lower end of the black middle class, with few researchers exploring the black middle class as bona fide bearers of cultural capital or how they legitimise their cultural capital and social status. Prevailing perceptions portray a homogenous, irresponsible, vapid, shallow and materialistic group obsessed with status. Based on a study which took a phenomenological exploration of the black middle class’s negotiation of ‘self’ and identity, this paper presents an analysis of how members of the contemporary black middle class of South Africa use social media; food narratives; and messages about taste, culinary skill, and food knowledge to craft empowering self-images. Focusing on two compelling performances—‘eating without food’ and ‘the cultured palate’ (my terms)—I draw attention to the complex ways in which this group navigate classed and racialised worlds. The analysis reveals that by developing what may seem to be unremarkable performative acts related to eating, preparing, and displaying food, members of the black middle class craft group identity and create ‘selves’ that reveal ingenuity and thoughtful knowledge about food, taste, global culture and their classed and racialised social positions.

Book Review: The Love Jones Cohort: Single and Living Alone in the Black Middle Class, by Kris Marsh

Book Review: <i>The Love Jones Cohort: Single and Living Alone in the Black Middle Class</i>, by Kris Marsh

Contributors to concentrated poverty of Blacks and Hispanics in metropolitan America, 1980–2020

ABSTRACT A longstanding debate asks why African Americans have been disproportionately concentrated in poor neighborhoods. All sides agree that a key contributor is the high level of poverty among Blacks, but they differ on other sources. Has the exodus of a growing Black middle class from the inner city (raising income segregation among Blacks) left the Black poor more isolated? Does persistent high racial segregation hold both middle class and poor Blacks in neighborhoods that are depressed by the high rate of Black poverty? Is poverty in Black neighborhoods mainly due to the presence of poor Black households or poor non-Black neighbors? This study addresses these questions with data for 1980–2020, and extends the analysis also to the case of Hispanic poverty exposure. Longitudinal models and detailed analysis of neighborhood composition by race and income show that the group’s own income composition is the most important predictor of poverty exposure. This effect is compounded by high racial segregation. Within-group income segregation adds to poverty concentration for Blacks but not for Hispanics. Blacks and Hispanics of all income levels live in poorer neighborhoods mainly because of the large share of their Black and Hispanic low-income neighbors, while their white neighbors tend to have higher incomes than they do.

Book Review: The Love Jones cohort: Single and living alone in the Black middle class

Book Review: The Love Jones cohort: Single and living alone in the Black middle class

Black women and the cultural performance of music in mid-nineteenth century Natchez

ABSTRACT Anna and Kate Johnson’s experiences typify that of thousands of women who lived in the United States during the mid-nineteenth century. In this microhistory of Anna and Kate and performativity among Black women living in a slave state, I expose the evidence of their lived experiences outside the metanarrative of music history in the United States. With the acknowledgment that middle-class Blacks adopted social customs used by whites, and confirmation through the artifacts that might confirm this practice, this essay introduces Black women and others into a more inclusive and honest narrative of social music practices in the nineteenth century.

“We Can Only Go So Far”: Employing Intersectionality in Research with Middle-Class Black Women and Black Muslim Women

How to engage and apply intersectionality is still a point of contention among scholars. In this conceptual paper, we use examples from our preliminary research on the experiences of middle-class Black women with depression and Black Muslim women who have experienced intimate partner violence to illustrate how we applied intersectionality as a framework and a method. We highlight the foundational literature that informed our applications. We then describe how we employed intersectionality in our respective studies. Through our reflections, we conclude that intersectionality was, and continues to be, a necessary frame for guiding our work due to its rendering visible for critique and intervention categories of privilege and oppression and our centering the experiences of Black women. We, however, note having felt limited in our ability to fully apply intersectionality in our preliminary research. We conclude that what was missing for us reflects critiques of a gap in social work feminist scholarship that is a central tenet of intersectionality: liberation. We posit ways of doing intersectional research that liberates by offering recommendations for research, education, and policy.

Laundering racial capitalism in post-apartheid South Africa

ABSTRACT This article employs the theoretical concept of racial capitalism as an intellectual framework with which to theorise and explain racialised inequality in South Africa. Historical evidence shows that the accumulation of Whiteness in South Africa has historically been inseparable from the accumulation of capital. This work illustrates that the African National Congress (ANC) used the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) to launder and legitimise racial capitalism in post-apartheid South Africa. It identifies Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) as one of the ANC government’s economic laundering schemes that it employs to legitimise racial capitalism in post-apartheid South Africa. I use the insight of scholars such as Marzia Milazzo to conclude that, as a full-blown laundered discourse, racial capitalism allows a White middle class to continue to own and manage the means of production and intergenerational wealth, while a Black middle class continues to endure intergenerational poverty and dispossession.

Resistance and Gendered Racism: Middle-Class Black Women's Experiences Navigating Reproductive Health Care Systems

A core issue in reproductive justice concerns how racism impacts reproductive health outcomes for Black women. However, the intersectional experiences of middle-class Black women navigating racism in reproductive health systems have not been fully captured in psychological literature. By utilizing a Black feminist approach to qualitative inquiry, this study situates the psychological dynamics behind middle-class Black women's interpretations of and reactions to gendered racism in reproductive settings within the historical context of slavery and its aftermath. The data analysis of 12 interviews captures how middle-class Black women reflect on their interactions with gynecologists, narrate their anticipation of gendered racism, and interpret and respond to experiencing gendered racism. Findings from this study suggest that gendered racism is a haunting of embodied gynecological trauma that maps onto the historical legacy of slavery. This study offers psychology an empirical and analytical framework for moving forward with its conceptualizations of how race, gender, and class intersect in service of reproductive justice. Results from this study can be used by clinicians to guide their clients towards healing gendered-racist-related stress, as well as medical schools to educate obstetricians and gynecologists on how to provide anti-racist care to their Black patients. Online slides for instructors who want to use this article for teaching are available on PWQ's website at http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/suppl/10.1177/03616843231168113 .

White psychodrama

White psychodrama

It’s Life as I See It: Black Cartoonists in Chicago, 1940–1980

It’s Life as I See It: Black Cartoonists in Chicago, 1940–1980

Blacks in Niagara Falls: Leaders and Community Development, 1850–1985

Michael B. Boston's ambitious book, Blacks in Niagara Falls, complements a growing list of community studies of African American migration, leadership, protest, and community formation in a northern city. Although Boston fails to offer an engaging thesis, he demonstrates that, despite their small population, Black people, who resided in Niagara Falls since the antebellum era, fought vigorously for equal rights. The city's Black population, which numbered only 344 in 1900, established community institutions, a local newspaper, churches, and an energetic leadership class. Black Niagarans regarded themselves as part of the broader struggle for full equality in the United States. Niagara's Black community expanded significantly during World War II, mirroring the migration pattern of hundreds of urban communities, as Black wartime migrants sought greater freedom and employment in wartime defense industries. Boston reconstructs the journey of several migrants to Niagara Falls and details the expanded employment opportunities that awaited them. Boston argues that the growing population of Black migrants to Niagara Falls accelerated existing patterns of racial inequality and exacerbated the schisms within Black leadership. Most Black Niagarans were unskilled laborers, following the familiar pattern of Black wartime migration to other northern cities. Nevertheless, the expanding Black middle and professional class dominated the community's leadership by the 1950s and early 1960s, and these leaders served as liaisons between the Black and white community. Residential concentration and housing discrimination also grew more intense as the Black population expanded. Although Niagara Falls never developed a ghetto, Black people were concentrated in several residential areas with limited access to better housing. Niagara Falls's schools also achieved little racial balance, and two public schools had Black enrollments of 80 percent and 99 percent as late as 1968. Attempts to achieve a semblance of racial balance in public schools through bussing were vehemently opposed by most white parents. Niagara Falls resembled a moderate southern city such as Greensboro, North Carolina, which expressed support for integrating its public schools following the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 but failed to fully integrate them for three decades.

"For Women Only!": A Radical Message of the Black Middle Class in Kansas City

"For Women Only!"A Radical Message of the Black Middle Class in Kansas City Elyssa Ford (bio) The Kansas City [Missouri] Call, published from 1919 to the present, has been one of the largest and most successful Black newspapers in the country. This article examines the depiction of Black women in the Call in the 1950s, a decade of significant change in Kansas City. As a midwestern crossroads, Kansas City had seen its Black population grow substantially in the previous decade as rural African Americans arrived seeking new urban opportunities. Some of these new Kansas City residents came from the Missouri countryside or from surrounding midwestern states. Others were part of the Great Migration out of the South and either planned to make Kansas City their permanent home or saw it as simply a temporary stop before moving northward to Chicago or Detroit. Regardless of their origins, the increased Black population of 1950s Kansas City read the Call at a key time in the publication's history. The civil rights movement was ramping up, and the newspaper was changing editors for the first time. Under these circumstances, the paper's depiction of Black women relied significantly on the politics of respectability.1 While the Call sometimes presented women as activists, it more frequently paralleled White newspapers in its presentation of women in more traditional roles. Stories discussed women as college students, often as beauty contest winners; featured female musicians and actresses in the entertainment section; and included women in the society and wedding pages. While these articles did not differ significantly from those in White newspapers, to present Black women as models of success and beauty was inherently radical. The Call also included the weekly feature "For Women Only!," which focused on women as wives and mothers and included recipes and cleaning tips. This corresponded with the prescribed 1950s model of womanhood and mirrored the presentation [End Page 77] of ideal womanhood that also appeared in White newspapers. Yet to present Black women and Black families as middle class challenged popular conceptions of Blackness in the era. By depicting the typical Black woman as the counterpart to a White middle-class woman, the Kansas City Call aligned with an activist agenda of civil rights and social change based on racial uplift and made a gender- and socioeconomic-based argument that was revolutionary. In the 1950s, reformers' depictions of Black women as middle class, respectable wives, mothers, and daughters was nothing new. Booker T. Washington had promoted the idea of racial uplift in the late nineteenth century. For him, a focus by African Americans on thrift, industry, hard work, and education would raise up the race and eventually lead to an expansion of their civil rights.2 Though men were often the focus of these efforts, Black women soon became leaders of the racial uplift movement, and they formed their own organizations to support this race work. Black women founded the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) in 1896, and the organization focused primarily on the uplift of the Black race. After seeing Black men fail to achieve racial equality and because the voices of Black men were more limited by Jim Crow-era violence, Black women believed that it was up to them to improve the stature of all African Americans. As historian Deborah Gray White has explained, "To build the black home was to build the black nation. At the center of it all was the woman." The association believed that Black women were responsible for uplifting the race through "intellectual development and cultural refinement." By the 1940s, club women began to adjust their focus from using the moral purity of Black women to uplift the race to helping uplift the race to improve their rights as women.3 Despite this evolution, the Missouri branch of the NACW still followed the earlier tenets of the national motto, "Lifting as We Climb," by continuing to emphasize intellectual development. In 1954 the Missouri group promoted three main goals: the integration of Missouri public schools, strengthening and improving family life, and building a student aid and scholarship fund.4 Founded in 1919 by Chester A. Franklin, the Kansas City Call had likewise...

:Studying While Black: Race, Education and Emancipation in South African Universities

:<i>Studying While Black: Race, Education and Emancipation in South African Universities</i>

African American Workers and the Appalachian Coal Industry

African American Workers and the Appalachian Coal Industry

The Intimate Politics of Soul Food: On the Tastes and Distastes of a New Orleans Black Middle-Class Family

Ces dernières années, la cuisine traditionnelle du Sud des États-Unis a été à la fois stigmatisée pour sa contribution à l’épidémie d’obésité et de plus en plus adoptée par la culture populaire américaine. En tant que fusion d’influences africaines, européennes et amérindiennes, la cuisine du Sud est véritablement américaine, mais sa propriété est contestée entre les communautés blanches et noires. À partir d’une ethnographie des pratiques de consommation d’une famille noire de classe moyenne de La Nouvelle-Orléans, cet article vise à dépasser les présupposés culturalistes réduisant la soul food à une tradition du passé et les Africains-Américains à un groupe monolithique. En revisitant la théorie de la « distinction » de Bourdieu pour prendre en compte l’intersection des catégories de race et de classe, nous verrons comment les pratiques de consommation de cette famille permettent à ses membres de revendiquer les valeurs de respectabilité des classes moyennes sans trahir leur identité noire, en se distinguant à la fois des Noirs pauvres et des blancs de classe moyenne qui menacent leur position sociale.