{"id":211,"date":"2015-10-03T02:03:41","date_gmt":"2015-10-03T02:03:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/aaas16\/?p=211"},"modified":"2015-10-03T02:04:04","modified_gmt":"2015-10-03T02:04:04","slug":"reflections-on-tuesdays-seminar-ambiguity-class-identity-and-a-surprising-parallel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aaas16\/2015\/10\/03\/reflections-on-tuesdays-seminar-ambiguity-class-identity-and-a-surprising-parallel\/","title":{"rendered":"Reflections on Tuesday’s Seminar: Ambiguity, Class Identity, and a Surprising Parallel"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reflecting on this week\u2019s seminar, I was struck by Khytie\u2019s 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\u2019s top decile of earners. Prior to reading statistics about the black middle class\u2019 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. <\/span><\/p>\n

Given the fluidity inherent to social stratification, I am curious about how individuals\u2019 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 \u201cboujie\u201d or \u201crich,\u201d leading the child to see herself as \u201cupper class\u201d despite her parents not be amongst the richest ten percent of black Americans.<\/span><\/p>\n

In addition, I recently logged onto Amazon.com and searched for <\/span>Black No More <\/span><\/i>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\u2019s New York and gains access to white society. The book\u2019s summary says that, in Max\u2019s eyes, there are three options for black people in society, \u201c<\/span>Get out, get white, or get along.” I found it coincidental that Schuyler\u2019s words could be used to reframe Frazier\u2019s argument. Indeed, in Frazier\u2019s eyes, the black middle class did not want to \u201cget along,\u201d alienating itself from the rest of black America, and could not \u201cget white\u201d since its constituents barred from entering white society. Frazier believes that the black middle class then \u201c[got] out\u201d of society itself, existing as a cultureless people that was neither black nor white. This parallel between Schuyler\u2019s humor and Frazier\u2019s polemic leaves me wanting to pick up the former work from the library. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reflecting on this week\u2019s seminar, I was struck by Khytie\u2019s 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\u2019s top decile of earners. Prior to reading … Continue reading Reflections on Tuesday’s Seminar: Ambiguity, Class Identity, and a Surprising Parallel<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7289,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[142770],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-211","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-black-middle-class-week-4"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aaas16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aaas16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aaas16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aaas16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7289"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aaas16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=211"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aaas16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":212,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aaas16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211\/revisions\/212"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aaas16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aaas16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aaas16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}