Blue-Chip Black: Race, Class, and Status in the New Black Middle Class / Edition 1

by Karyn Lacy

Overview

As Karyn R. Lacy's innovative work in the suburbs of Washington, DC, reveals, there is a continuum of middle-classness among blacks, ranging from lower-middle class to middle-middle class to upper-middle class. Focusing on the latter two, Lacy explores an increasingly important social and demographic group: middle-class blacks who live in middle-class suburbs where poor blacks are not present. These "blue-chip black" suburbanites earn well over fifty thousand dollars annually and work in predominantly white professional environments. Lacy examines the complicated sense of identity that individuals in these groups craft to manage their interactions with lower-class blacks, middle-class whites, and other middle-class blacks as they seek to reap the benefits of their middle-class status.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520251168
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	07/03/2007
Series:	George Gund Foundation Imprint in Africa
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	302
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Karyn Lacy is Assistant Professor of Sociology and the Center for Afro-American and African Studies at the University of Michigan, a Ford Fellow, and was a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction

1. Defining the Post-Integration Black Middle Classes
2. Social Organization in Washington’s Suburbia
3. Public Identities: Managing Race in Public Spaces
4. Status-Based Identities: Protecting and Reproducing Middle-Class Status
5. Race- and Class-Based Identities: Strategic Assimilation in Middle-Class Suburbia
6. Suburban Identities: Building Alliances with Neighbors

Conclusion
Appendix: A Recipe for Studying the Black Middle Class
Notes
References

Editorial Reviews

An important contribution to research on the black middle-class. . . . Rigorous analysis of black middle-class suburban identity.

Journal Of Sociology

Offers a tremendously important contribution to scholarship on contemporary Black life and social class issues in America.

Journal Of Marriage & Family