Black Picket Fences: Privileges and Peril among the Black Middle Class

Abstract

After living for three years in Groveland, a black middle-class neighbourhood on Chicago's South Side, sociologist Mary Pattillo-McCoy sought to explain the discontinuities in their daily life, both troublesome and hopeful, she witnessed. Residents work in stable middle-class jobs and many have single-family homes with a backyard and a two-car garage. Some send their children to private schools and are able to retire with solid pensions. Yet despite such privileges, Pattillo-McCoy argues, they face unique perils. Continuing inequities in wealth and occupational attainment make these families economically fragile. Racial segregation confines many middle-class African Americans to neighbourhoods with higher poverty rates, more crime, fewer resources, less political clout, and worse schools than most white neighbourhoods. Finally, youths are targets of and participate in a popular consumer culture that romanticizes the hard life of poverty. Despite arguments that race no longer matters, Pattillo-McCoy shows a different reality: even the black and white middle classes remain separate and unequal.