Black Picket Fences Rhetorical Analysis

In Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril Among Middle Class Blacks, Mary Patillo McCoy investigates the black-middle class experience with a focus on youth in the neighborhood context in a country seemingly obsessed with race where policy makers and citizens alike go about as if race is a thing of the past. The success of many African Americans emerging into the middle class have created a false idea or belief that race is not the obstacle preventing progress. McCoy argues from a perceptive account, shining light on a different reality, one in which the middle classes of black and whites remain separate and unequal.

McCoy begins by stating that scientists have assumed that the black middle class is secure so she can argue in the contrary.

She contends that deep racial disparities persist preventing the black middle class to translate their socioeconomic success into residential mobility. Housing segregation is an example of a limit that is as real for middle-class blacks as is for the poor. Houses were partitioned into even smaller dwellings causing many middle-class families to leave to peripheral areas. McCoy feels that black middle-class out-migration is merely a result of “spillover” of black urban enclaves as opposed to a successful integration into white neighborhoods (36-40). Though they could afford to live in white middle class neighborhoods, whites often left areas in which blacks took residence resulting in the hypersegregation that exists today.
McCoy defends her argument that the changing economic structure is preventing advancement for the current youth who are struggling to keep up with their parents’ investments.

She would agree that the growth of the black middle-class has been impressive, however she urges people to look deeper from a comparative perspective. The black middle class continues to lag behind it’s white counterparts as evidenced by a large earning gap among workers in the same field as well as the ratio of people unemployed in the different ethnic groups. Home foreclosures resulted causing an abundance of boarded up homes. McCoy pushes for continued affirmative action, access to higher education, a plan to create real family-wage jobs, and alleviation of residential segregation to support gains already made by the black middle class

(43-50).
According to Mary Patillo McCoy, the social ties between poor and middle-class blacks has had a great impact on the youth in the neighborhoods.

She states that social ties across class lines, lifestyles, and the law exist partly because of the assignment of most African Americans to the “black side of town” (80). Blacks, living so close to the poor, struggle to overcome the crime, dilapidated housing, and social disorder in the deteriorating poor neighborhoods that are steadily expanding towards them. Most middle-class whites do not face this kind of problem (103). Neighborhood youth has easy access to two different paths growing up in the “in-between” neighborhood. One side is the path of gang violence and crime while the other leads to an education and a career. McCoy says that this peculiar limbo explains the disparate outcomes of otherwise similar young people in Groveland (132). The temptation for crime is always present, as is the opportunity for success when there is a such diverse group of role models in one community

(217).
McCoy makes her case that the mass-media and consumer-culture environment are more influential to the youth in a negative way by glamorizing rebellious delinquency (128). McCoy offers real life accounts from people who, in their youth, were boy scouts before turning to the Black Mobsters. She exemplifies Nike’s reign to support her argument further that blacks were an important and sizable target market. This only intensified when Michael Jordan signed with Nike. The idea that the economic status gap could be minimized just by looking good was a common idea pushed upon the black middle-class causing them to spend beyond their means to be equal in the eyes of whites (159-160). Since poverty rates were higher in the black-middle class, the youth gravitated to the financial perks of crime (218). Their attraction to the flashy lifestyle of the “gangsta” is nurtured by mass cultural productions McCoy insists.
Mary Patillo McCoy has made it evident that institutions have the capability of guiding and shaping life options of different groups of people. The black-middle class is clearly unequal to its counterpart, the white middle-class, in the many ways as outlined above. Mary Patillo McCoy’s Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril Among Middle Class Blacks is one of the first books that have begun to show us the still existing racial disparities among the black-middle class and how these racial inequalities are only perpetuating a higher poverty rate among blacks preventing them from translating their successes further.