In the video that Khytie linked, Mary Pattillo describes the misperceptions of the black community as one of the motivations behind her research. She describes the lack of coverage of the black middle class, both by academia and the media, as giving rise to wrong assumptions of the number of poor blacks in the United States and yet simultaneously to unfocused and uninformed opinions about the state of the black community as a whole.

As we talked about in class, Frazier creates a great distance between both the black middle class and the white middle class, as well as the black middle class and the black poor. Pattillo mentions in the video that Henry Louis Gates, Jr. overstates the fragmentation in the black community and argues instead that there is great fluidity across class and both upward and downward mobility. Though there may be large economic distance between the middle class moving into a neighborhood and the original residents, Pattillo describes family, friendship, institutional – church and employment – connections as easily crossing the middle class boundary and that even if a person is considered middle class, blacks are three times as likely to have a poor sibling than those in the white middle class.

Here we see the complicating factors that make up the situation of the black middle class. More people in the black community are middle class than are poor, and yet the middle class continues to be ignored by the mainstream media. The black middle class, unlike the white middle class, often lives in racially homogeneous communities, and often in close proximity to poorer black neighborhoods, resulting in social and cultural mobility. Frazier describes the straddling position of the black middle class as they attempted to leap to a higher social status, but even his depiction was wildly oversimplifying.