‘Making up’ the healthy Black middle-class child

The tendency of much of the research on educational disadvantage has been to see schooling as a constant rather than a variable. Working-class disadvantage is theorized as attributable, in part, to schools valuing performances in such a way as to turn cultural or linguistic differences between children into deficits for working-class children. In this view the school is assumed to be ‘middle-class’ and thus to be well adapted to the middle-class child. However, much of the research which underpins this view can be reconstrued from a different perspective. Whatever schools do, it is for the most part mediated through verbal communication. A re-examination of communication research shows that it is possible to theorize in terms of a school communication failure rather than a working-class cultural/linguistic difference-cum-deficit. This failure is evident when school talk is examined from the standpoint of its metacognitive quality. The school communication pattern is ill adapted to both working-class and middle-class clients but middle-class children survive it better.

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The New Black Middle Class. By Bart Landry. University of California Press. 250 pp. $22.50

Social Forces ◽

10.1093/sf/67.2.545 ◽

1988 ◽

Vol 67 (2) ◽

pp. 545-547

Author(s):

E. Smith

Keyword(s):

Middle Class ◽

University Of California ◽

Black Middle Class

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The New Black Middle Class in Southern Africa (Roger Southall)

Strategic Review for Southern Africa ◽

10.35293/srsa.v38i1.314 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 38 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Roger Southall

Keyword(s):

Middle Class ◽

Southern Africa ◽

Black Middle Class

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Epilogue

Surrogate Suburbs ◽

10.5149/northcarolina/9781469631943.003.0008 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Todd M. Michney

Keyword(s):

African Americans ◽

Middle Class ◽

Geographic Mobility ◽

Black Middle Class ◽

Predatory Lending ◽

Elderly Home ◽

Foreclosure Crisis ◽

Mount Pleasant ◽

Bona Fide ◽

Middle Class Blacks

By the mid-1970s, upwardly mobile middle-class African Americans were increasingly departing neighbourhoods like Glenville, Mount Pleasant, and Lee-Harvard for a number of nearby bona fide suburbs. As a result, such former “surrogate suburbs” began to lose their lustre, although a core (generally elderly), home-owning black middle class still remains in these outlying city neighbourhoods to this day. Starting in the 1990s, Cleveland experienced a wave of predatory lending that culminated in the 2008 foreclosure crisis. Although middle class blacks in Cleveland as elsewhere have been disproportionately impacted by this trend, they have continued their historic strategy of outward geographic mobility in search of acceptable living conditions, even to the farthest metropolitan limits.

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Urban Change and Reform Agendas in Cleveland’s Black Middle-Class Neighborhoods, 1950–1980

Surrogate Suburbs ◽

10.5149/northcarolina/9781469631943.003.0007 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Todd M. Michney

Keyword(s):

Juvenile Delinquency ◽

Middle Class ◽

Traffic Safety ◽

Black Middle Class ◽

Reform Agenda ◽

Acceptable Quality ◽

The City ◽

Middle Class Blacks

This chapter looks at the ambitious reform agenda that black middle-class activist residents went on to mount in these outlying city neighbourhoods, encompassing housing upkeep, business revitalization, traffic safety, trash removal, and efforts to reduce liquor availability, juvenile delinquency, vice, and crime – all in an attempt to maintain what they considered an acceptable quality of life. Perhaps the most ambitious effort along these lines was a venture in which a group of African American investors purchased and renovated the Lee-Harvard Shopping Center, making it during its existence from 1972-1978 the “largest black-owned commercial complex in the nation.” Sometimes these reform efforts involved moralizing or exhibited an explicit class bias; upwardly mobile middle-class blacks did not always recognize that less well-off newcomers were motivated by similar concerns with liveability. In the end, however, their various attempts to take charge of their lives and communities contributed to the long-term vitality of these neighbourhoods and the city as a whole.

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Mobility and Insecurity

Surrogate Suburbs ◽

10.5149/northcarolina/9781469631943.003.0006 ◽

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.

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