scholarly journals Racial Uplift? Intra‐Racial Class Conflict and the Economic Revitalization of Harlem and Bronzeville

2006 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
Derek S. Hyra
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Community Change ◽  
Urban Neighborhoods ◽  
Economic Transformation ◽  
Class Conflict ◽  
Black Middle Class ◽  
Valuable Insight ◽  
Racial Uplift

The study of revitalizing African American urban neighborhoods is needed to understand how race, class, and politics influence community development. While numerous investigations of urban neighborhoods stress inter‐racial conflict, few explore intra‐racial class discord. Class antagonism within black America is a controversial and debated topic. Several scholars claim that the common experience of racism has led to social and political unity among African Americans. However, others predict that with greater economic differentiation, shared feelings of social and political commonality will decrease. The economic transformation of Harlem in New York City and Bronzeville in Chicago, two historic African American communities, provides valuable insight into the importance of class conflict to community change. After decades of economic abandonment, these areas are experiencing a resurgence of residential and commercial investments, triggered, in part, by the return of the black middle class. Based on a 4‐year, comparative ethnographic investigation, using extensive participant observation, interviews, and archival data, this study reveals the conflict between lower‐ and upper‐income residents. I highlight the process by which members of the black middle class translate their preferences for community improvement, through local organizations, by advocating for the removal of the poor from these once low‐income neighborhoods. I argue that intra‐racial class antagonism plays a critical role in the economic development of these communities, and assess whether the redevelopment of Harlem and Bronzeville can be considered “racial uplift.” This study supports the notion that class conflict is essential for understanding community change and the black experience in urban America.

Mobility and Insecurity

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Todd M. Michney
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Geographic Mobility ◽  
Black Middle Class ◽  
African American Families ◽  
Structural Factors ◽  
White Families ◽  
Downtown Redevelopment ◽  
The American South ◽  
American Families

This chapter considers the structural factors and life dilemmas upwardly mobile black Clevelanders faced even after achieving geographic mobility, and explicates the dynamic whereby less-affluent African American families steadily moved into new, outlying black middle-class neighbourhoods. Topics discussed include lending discrimination, the unfavourable financing arrangements available to African American homebuyers and the associated economic setbacks they experienced, the role of black professional real estate brokerage associations, the phenomenon of isolated white families remaining in post-transitional neighbourhoods, and the forces driving lower-income African American families into outlying neighbourhoods, mainly downtown redevelopment and ongoing migration from the American South. It also investigates black middle class notions of status and the intra-racial, cross-class frictions that ensued around issues of property upkeep, personal comportment, child rearing, and leisure-time practices.

Viewer, I Married Him

Veil and Vow ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 140-162
Author(s):  
Aneeka Ayanna Henderson
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Film Theory ◽  
Black Middle Class ◽  
Culture Studies ◽  
Visual Culture Studies

This chapter uses film theory and visual culture studies to parse Malcolm D Lee's film The Best Man (1999) and Gina Prince-Bythewood's film Love and Basketball (2000) as well as the corresponding soundtracks, screenplays, and publicity. It illuminates how the films unsettle genre boundaries as well as encode progressive and pernicious messages about the formation of African American marriage and Black love for its Black middle-class characters.

Fenton Johnson, Literary Entrepreneurship, and the Dynamics of Class and Family

2020 ◽  
pp. 94-114
Author(s):  
Richard A. Courage ◽  
James C. Hall
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Military Service ◽  
Black Middle Class ◽  
George Washington ◽  
Art And Literature ◽  
Business Politics ◽  
American Cultural History ◽  
Black Writing

Fenton Johnson was both poet and journalist. His Champion Magazine (1916-1917) pioneered a monthly digest format aimed at a nascent black middle-class audience interested in “Negro Achievement” from sports, theatre, and popular musical entertainment to business, politics, military service, and the professions, to art and literature. Although Johnson proved inept as a literary entrepreneur and contradictory in ideology, his first journal was richly cosmopolitan in scope and highly professional in writing, design, and layout. Johnson’s local collaborators included older African American intellectuals such as George Washington Ellis, Richard T. Greener, John Roy Lynch, and W. H. A. Moore. Besides more accurately locating Fenton Johnson in African American cultural history, this chapter sheds light on black writing and thought on the cusp of the Harlem Renaissance.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Rebecca Tuuri
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
The United States ◽  
Business Leaders ◽  
Black Middle Class ◽  
National Council ◽  
Women's Activism ◽  
Racial Uplift ◽  
National Network ◽  
Bridge Building

This introduction highlights how the current scholarly focus on radical women's activism often overlooks the important bridge-building activism of black moderate and middle class women such as those in the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW). These black clubwomen were able to move between mainstream political and business leaders and marginalized activists who often demanded radical solutions to racism and poverty. Black middle class NCNW women not only engaged in community-focused racial uplift, but they also utilized a national network of professional and elite women to bring resources to those who could not attain them on their own. At times, the NCNW was hindered by its focus on respectability, which sometimes limited NCNW's criticism of the United States in order to build and maintain power in mainstream America.

Conclusion

2019 ◽  
pp. 115-124
Author(s):  
Bala J. Baptiste
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Black Middle Class ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Social Phenomena ◽  
Future Studies ◽  
American Press ◽  
Black Radio ◽  
Innovative Techniques

Sociologist E. Franklyn Frazier published Black Bourgeoisie in 1957 noting that the African American press, particularly Ebony magazine, drastically overplayed the accomplishments of the black middle class. “The Negro Forum,” which emerged 11 years earlier in 1946, did similarly, but it could not be convincingly argued that the Forum overstated black accomplishments. Frazier suggested blacks were serving their own need for attention, while Taylor provided his listeners models of black excellence and achievement. He became somewhat Afrocentric before the theory's rise in the 1980s. Afrocentricity places African Americans at the center, as the main focus of analysis of social phenomena. Nevertheless, this thick historiography of pioneering broadcasters noted that early advertisers used innovative techniques to push beer into the black communities. Future studies should consider the effects contemporary black radio announcers might have if they organized concerted efforts to broadcast conscious messages such as those intended to stop black-on-black murder.

Black Mothering in Action: The Racial-Class Socialization Practices of Low-Income Black Single Mothers

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 242-253 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer L. Turner
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Single Mothers ◽  
Low Income ◽  
Racial Socialization ◽  
Parenting Practices ◽  
The United States ◽  
Black Middle Class ◽  
Black Mothers ◽  
Black Single Mothers

African Americans have long dealt with racism, discrimination, and racialized state and vigilante violence. As such, African American parents must educate their children about the realities of racism in the United States and how to cope with racism and discrimination. This practice, known as racial socialization, is a key aspect of Black parents’ parenting practices. Much of this labor tends to fall on the shoulders of Black mothers. To date, most of the scholarship on Black mothers’ racial socialization practices focuses on Black middle-class mothers. In this study, the author uses in-depth interviews with low-income African American single mothers in Virginia to examine how low-income Black single mothers racially socialize their children, what major concerns they express regarding raising Black children, and how their racial socialization practices and the concerns they express compare with those of Black middle-class mothers. Paralleling previous studies, the findings show that low-income Black single mothers generally fear for their children’s, especially their sons’, safety. They also invoke respectability politics when racially socializing their children, encouraging them not to dress or behave in ways that will reinforce stereotypes of Black boys as thugs or criminals. Diverging from previous research, however, the author argues that low-income Black single mothers’ employment of respectability politics is largely aspirational, as, unlike middle-class mothers, they are not able to assert their class status in an effort to prevent their children from experiencing discrimination.

scholarly journals Encoding and Decoding Black and White Cultural Capitals: Black Middle-Class Experiences

2017 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ali Meghji
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Cultural Capital ◽  
Cultural Politics ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
Black Middle Class ◽  
Racial Uplift ◽  
Black Representation ◽  
Black And White ◽  
White Spaces ◽  
The Uk

Drawing upon 23 qualitative interviews, and ethnographic work in London, this article explores how black middle-class individuals in the UK decode forms of middle-class cultural capital. This decoding is two staged. Firstly, black middle-class individuals often decode dominant or ‘traditional’ middle-class cultural capital as white. This involves a recognition that certain forms of middle-class cultural capital are marked as racially exclusive, and are reproduced and recognised in ‘white spaces’. Secondly, black middle-class individuals also decode alternative forms of cultural capital as woven into a greater project of racial uplift. Such alternative forms of cultural capital are defined as ‘black cultural capital’, and tend to be based around fulfilling a cultural politics of black representation.

Addressing African American English in Early Literacy Assessment and Instruction

2008 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 54-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicole Patton Terry
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Early Literacy ◽  
American English ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Literacy Skills ◽  
African American English ◽  
Literacy Assessment ◽  
Learning To Read ◽  
Speech Language Pathologist ◽  
Early Literacy Assessment

Abstract Determining how best to address young children's African American English use in formal literacy assessment and instruction is a challenge. Evidence is not yet available to discern which theory best accounts for the relation between AAE use and literacy skills or to delineate which dialect-informed educational practices are most effective for children in preschool and the primary grades. Nonetheless, consistent observations of an educationally significant relation between AAE use and various early literacy skills suggest that dialect variation should be considered in assessment and instruction practices involving children who are learning to read and write. The speech-language pathologist can play a critical role in instituting such practices in schools.

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