Reflecting on this week’s seminar, I was struck by Khytie’s rhetorical question about whether the talented tenth is synonymous with the black middle class. As Professor Bobo pointed out, the black middle class largely encompasses people employed in sales and clerical positions, and encompasses more than the community’s top decile of earners. Prior to reading statistics about the black middle class’ composition and occupations, however, I equated achieving middle class status with being a professional (doctor, lawyer, etc). This automatic association underscores how nebulous the term is, and how people representing a broad range of educational experiences, incomes, and other privileges may either identify themselves as part of the middle class or be labeled as a part of this group.
Given the fluidity inherent to social stratification, I am curious about how individuals’ identification with a social stratum is impacted by the class others may ascribe to them. Consider a child who grows up in a household earning $70,000 annually and occasionally wears designer clothes. Perhaps her friends could label the child as “boujie” or “rich,” leading the child to see herself as “upper class” despite her parents not be amongst the richest ten percent of black Americans.
In addition, I recently logged onto Amazon.com and searched for Black No More by George S. Schuyler, a book that Matt Clair and Professor Bobo referred to briefly. A work of fiction, it follows Max Disher as he bleaches his skin in 1930’s New York and gains access to white society. The book’s summary says that, in Max’s eyes, there are three options for black people in society, “Get out, get white, or get along.” I found it coincidental that Schuyler’s words could be used to reframe Frazier’s argument. Indeed, in Frazier’s eyes, the black middle class did not want to “get along,” alienating itself from the rest of black America, and could not “get white” since its constituents barred from entering white society. Frazier believes that the black middle class then “[got] out” of society itself, existing as a cultureless people that was neither black nor white. This parallel between Schuyler’s humor and Frazier’s polemic leaves me wanting to pick up the former work from the library.
Your point about class as a matter of relativity and self-identification as much as it is an objective measure as education/occupation/income is really interesting to me. So far, none of the scholars we’d discussed in class frame it this way – but our discussion of Pattillo may change that.
Schuyler’s conclusions make a great deal of sense in clarifying Frazier’s view, and they also leave room for disproving his argument. During the civil rights movement that exploded just as Frazier’s book was published, the black middle class seemed to be more than willing to “get along,” moving them from the cultureless margins to the center of discourse about solidarity and racial equality.