Since the first Africans arrived in what is now present day America in the 1500s, there has been reaffirming data supporting the importance of community to people of African descent. Despite large efforts to destroy this aspect of the African experience, many African Americans have maintained their kinships especially when the foundation is birthed from ethnic parallels. As a result of this affirmation, Dr. Mary Pattillo’s assertion on the present day black middle class and their commitment to restoring their community of North Kenwood- Oakland in her book, Black on the Block is no surprise. However, what is shocking is that the same declaration cannot be said for the African American middle class during what Dr. Pattillo deemed the ‘Black …show more content…
Pattillo’s declaration is that she provides an extremely distinct and commanding narrative surrounding the power of the black middle class ‘middlemen’ in chapter three. She asserts that these middlemen act as power brokers; the core liaison between the “man”; upper crust, well to do whites with power, and the “little-man,” the poor and mostly disenfranchised people who have little to no resources as well as those who are in need of the most assistance. With no true voice of their own and the inability to speak to or be heard by the “man,” the little-man not only relies on the middleman but heavily benefits from these agents of change who pool together their resources and use their college education, influence, philanthropic connections and collective power to bring about change that not only benefits them, but anyone else in the community they are advocating. As a result, in the most simplistic of terms, everyone wins. This train of thought is practical and believable based on Dr. Pattillo’s research. However, what is not as practical is how this same conceptual ideology is not applied to the black middle class of the ‘Golden Era’ of …show more content…
Pattillo references the benefits received by NKO as a result of its close proximity to Bronzeville, a predominantly African American community that was thriving as a black Mecca in the fifties and sixties with plentiful black businesses, which served as a safe haven for black life in Chicago. NKO was such a wondrous place that even the late Blues legend Muddy Waters called it home proving its allure. Unfortunately, when Dr. Pattillo shifts gears and provides context to the decline of NKO, she brings up the construction of the Olander Housing Projects, overcrowding as a result of subsidized housing along with increases in crime, drugs, and the rise of the poverty level. While her research is factual, she fails to mention the lack of middlemen by way of the black middle class to serve as conduits to prevent the unfortunate fate of NKO. She instead indirectly criminalizes and places blame on a number of variables specifically the residents of the projects with no mention of the emerging black middle class not using their power to evoke change in their respected
Harlem soon became known as the “capital of black America” as the amount of blacks in this community was very substantial. Many of the inhabitants of this area were artists, entrepreneurs and black advocates with the urge to showcase their abilities and talents. The ...
Originally published in 1999, Mary Pattillo’s Black Picket Fences explores the circumstances and conventions of the Black middle class, a group that has experienced both scholarly and popular neglect. In the Acknowledgments section of this work, Pattillo details the mentorship she received as a graduate student from William Julius Wilson at the University of Chicago. She recounts that Wilson often encouraged his students to extend, and even challenge his scholarly works, and that this urging provided the impetus for her research on the Black middle class (xiv). The challenge Pattillo (2013) refers to, becomes quite apparent when comparing her work to Wilson’s 1980 piece, The Declining Significance of Race. In this work, Wilson (1980) contends that in the industrial/modern era of the United States, class has surpassed race to be a salient factor of social stratification. He supplements his argument by referencing the progress and achievements of the Black middle class, relative to the “economic stagnation” of the Black underclass (p. 2). Pattillo (2013) offers a
Wilson created the atmosphere of not only binding black race with economical and social issues when there are other contributing factors as well. The plight of low-skilled inner city black males explains the other variables. He argues “Americans may not fully understand the dreadful social and economic circumstances that have moved these bla...
Fannie Lou Hamer and Malcolm X, like most civil rights activists, were exposed to the horrors of racism on a daily basis. These two leaders in particular, recognized a recurring theme of conscious oppression of Black Americans on the part of white Americans and identified the ways in which the “dominant” social group benefited from such oppression. Fannie Lou Hamer’s experience sharecropping and within the justice system helped her to develop an ideology of civil rights that centered on the empowerment of Black Americans. When Hamer was six years old the owner of the plantation on which her family lived and worked encouraged her to pick cotton. Making it seem like a game or challenge, the owner offered her a reward of food, knowing that the young girl was going hungry as a result of the limited amount of food he supplied to her family. Just like that, Hamer was tricked into picking cotton to earn minimal rewards.2 This anecdote from her life parallels the struggle of many sharecroppers at the time. Released from slavery, Black me...
Although an effort is made in connecting with the blacks, the idea behind it is not in understanding the blacks and their culture but rather is an exploitative one. It had an adverse impact on the black community by degrading their esteem and status in the community. For many years, the political process also had been influenced by the same ideas and had ignored the black population in the political process (Belk, 1990). America loves appropriating black culture — even when black people themselves, at times, don’t receive much love from America.
Marable, Manning. Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction and Beyond in Black America, 1945-2006. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007.
In the first section of Frazier’s Black Bourgeoisie, “The World of Reality”, Frazier introduces his discussion of the interplay of class and race. He outlines the historical roots of the social place of most African-Americans in the U.S.A. and that of the black middle class. Frazier asserts the inconsequential place of middle class African-Americans and their resulting inferiority complex. He depicts the black middle class as living in a “no man’s land” in the dominant white culture of America.
Newark began to deteriorate and the white residents blamed the rising African-American population for Newark's downfall. However, one of the real culprits of this decline in Newark was do to poor housing, lack of employment, and discrimination. Twenty-five percent of the cities housing was substandard according to the Model C...
Burton, O. V. (1998, April). African American Status and Identity in a Postbellum Community: An Analysis of the Manuscript Census Returns. Retrieved December 1, 2013, from
The downgrading of African Americans to certain neighborhoods continues today. The phrase of a not interested neighborhood followed by a shift in the urban community and disturbance of the minority has made it hard for African Americans to launch themselves, have fairness, and try to break out into a housing neighborhood. If they have a reason to relocate, Caucasians who support open housing laws, but become uncomfortable and relocate if they are contact with a rise of the African American population in their own neighborhood most likely, settle the neighborhoods they have transfer. This motion creates a tremendously increase of an African American neighborhood, and then shift in the urban community begins an alternative. All of these slight prejudiced procedures leave a metropolitan African American population with few options. It forces them to remain in non-advanced neighborhoods with rising crime, gang activity, and...
Progress and individualism are very much celebrated in American culture. Many people migrate to urban cities in the search of economic prosperity and to achieve the elusive “American Dream.” City life can often come as a shock to individuals not accustomed to a fast-paced lifestyle; conversely it can change a person. Such change can transform a person to lose the values and beliefs they were raised with which consequently attribute to losing the bonds that they once held with their families. This is not the case with the families portrayed in Carol Stack’s ethnography Call to Home. The book depicts Southern African-American families living in rural, North and South Carolina’s towns – which migrate to northern urban cities for economic opportunities – known as the Great Migration, and ultimately decide to return home. This essay explores the motives that caused Reverse Migration which include kin ties, structural and environmental violence endured, the role of the children, and the novel philosophies the diaspora brings with them upon returning home.
Carol Stack’s ethnography All Our Kin is an exceptional, analytical study of black urban kinship systems. Stack has a dual focus in this ethnography. She studies how residence patterns and household composition relate, as well as how reciprocity between kinship networks and poverty relate. Stack studies how family units are comprised in a poor, predominately black urban community in the Midwest, which she refers to as The Flats. She dispels various stereotypes about the black family; for example, that black families are matriarchal, lack fathers, and that their family structure contributes to their poverty. Her hypothesis is that groups of kin, who may or may not reside in the same home, cooperate and aid each other through the exchange of good and services in order to combat their poverty. Stack specifically studied second generation urban dwellers, that is the children of those who moved from the rural South, who were themselves raised on welfare and now depend on welfare to support their own
The Black Panther Party was born to elevate the political, social, and economic status of Blacks. The means the Party advocated in their attempt to advance equality were highly unconventional and radical for the time, such as social programs for under privileged communities and armed resistance as a means of self preservation. The Party made numerous contributions to Black’s situation as well as their esteem, but fell victim to the ‘system’ which finds it nearly impossible to allow Blacks entry into the dominant culture. Thus, the rise and fall of a group of Black radicals, as presented by Elaine Brown in A Taste of Power, can be seen to represent the overall plight of the American Black: a system which finds it impossible to give Blacks equality.
In his essay, “On Being Black and Middle Class” (1988), writer and middle-class black American, Shelby Steele adopts a concerned tone in order to argue that because of the social conflicts that arise pertaining to black heritage and middle class wealth, individuals that fit under both of these statuses are ostracized. Steele proposes that the solution to this ostracization is for people to individualize themselves, and to ‘“move beyond the victim-focused black identity” (611). Steele supports his assertion by using evidence from his own life and incorporating social patterns to his text. To reach his intended audience of middle-class, black people, Steele’s utilizes casual yet, imperative diction.
The image of African-American’s changed from rural, uneducated “peasants” to urban, sophisticated, cosmopolites. Literature and poetry are abounded. Jazz music and the clubs where it was performed at became social “hotspots”. Harlem is the epitome of the “New Negro”. However, things weren’t as sunny as they appeared.