>From: Peter Farruggio <pfarr@uclink4.berkeley.edu> To: PROGRESSIVE SOCIOLOGISTS NETWORK <psn@csf.colorado.edu> Subject: black middle class

this article appeared in yesterday's Oakland Tribune. Is anyone familiar with this research? Are there any articles related that are available online?

Thanks,

Pete Farruggio

http://www.newschoice.com/newspapers/alameda/tribune/default.asp

Black middle-class woes need attention, book says problems too, prof says

February 20, 2000

By William Brand
STAFF WRITER

BERKELEY -- Growing up, as an African American kid in a big Midwestern city, sociologist
Mary Pattillo-McCoy watched what happened to her childhood friends with fascination and
dread.

Many went to college or got good, stable jobs out of high school. But others ended up killed in
gang warfare, or on drugs, chasing the American dream down a crack pipe. It's an old, old
story in the urban ghetto.

The trouble is, Pattillo-McCoy was no ghetto child. Her friends didn't come out of poverty.
They were middle class like she was. They came from loving families, from parents with white
collar jobs and education, who mostly owned their own homes, who cared deeply what
happened to their children.

And yet there were failures, far more than one would expect, far more than in a typical white
middle-class community. "I was curious. What was it that allowed these diverse outcomes?"
she said.

Pattillo-McCoy, an associate professor at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., who was
lecturing this week at the University of California, Berkeley, said she got her answers after three
years of research.

She has written a book about it: "Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril Among The Black
Middle Class" (University of Chicago Press, 1999).

A great deal of attention has been paid to African Americans living in poverty and that's
appropriate, she said. Their problems are wide and deep. But the black middle class has been
mostly ignored, she discovered.

Her investigation began when she was a doctoral candidate at the University of Chicago,
studying under imminent African-American sociologist William Julius Wilson, now at Harvard.
Her project included living in the black middle-class neighborhood on Chicago's South Side that
she was studying.

It was the same story from her youth: "Many kids went on to college. But I also heard too
many stories and read too many obituaries of the teen-agers who were jailed or killed along the
way: The son of a police detective in jail for murder. The grandson of a teacher shot while
visiting his girlfriend's house."

Middle-class African Americans don't do as well as whites on standardized tests, are more
likely to be incarcerated for drug offenses, are less likely to marry, and more likely to have a
child without being married, she said.

It's the payoff of an unequal, less-advantaged, segregated society, she said.

"The problem, I discovered, is the impact of racial segregation -- even on the black middle
class," she said over capuccino on a sunny Berkeley cafe patio, a world away from urban wars.

"People imagine the black middle class has escaped -- they've out-migrated like whites to the
suburbs -- where the only crime they see is on the front page of the local newspaper,"
Pattillo-McCoy said.

"It's true, most of the black middle class wants to live in an integrated environment, but they
don't. Mostly, they continue to live in nice, but very segregated neighborhoods, very close to
the poor.

"So even in middle class black neighborhoods there is great economic diversity and it makes
things harder. Poor people have less money to support businesses and institutions. Even
churches, which are everywhere in poor, black communities, find their collection plates coming
up short."

So the burden falls more heavily on the black middle class, Pattillo-McCoy said. And where
there's higher poverty, there's more crime, less well-funded schools and less political clout to
fix things.

"People are keenly aware of how racial segregation devalues their neighborhood. I hear it over
and over again... 'If this neighborhood was white, we wouldn't have to wait as long for
services, the streets wouldn't be in such disrepair.'

"The neighborhood where I lived was filled with people with white collar jobs; 20 percent were
college-educated; 70 percent of the residents owned their own homes," she said. "Nevertheless,
they were part of a racial ghetto."

"White middle-class families, especially city residents, have problems, too," Pattillo-McCoy
said, "but not nearly to the extent of black middle-class families."

In the first place -- it's a matter of resources. A sizable black middle class is a recent
phenomenon -- fueled by the liberalization that followed World War II and the Civil Rights
movement.

Pattillo-McCoy found that middle class blacks were four times as likely to have been poor when
they were young than middle-class whites. Middle class blacks are more than three times as
likely as whites to have at least one sibling who is currently poor -- an extra drain on a middle
class person's resources, she said.

Pattillo-McCoy looks around the cafe crowded with UC Berkeley students of every ethnic
background, sipping lattes and smoothies, studying, talking. Apparent winners, so far, in the
rough game called life.

There are special problems for kids growing up in today's materialistic world, problems that
every middle-class family faces, she said. But they're magnified in black neighborhoods.

"Kids are looking for excitement, whether they're white, black, Hispanic or Asian. They're
looking for ways to push the boundaries of what their parents want them to do," she said.

Popular culture romanticizes poverty's desperate life. It's cool to imitate the gang bangers and
gangsta rappers.

That's perhaps OK if a kid lives in a safe white suburb. But for most middle-class black kids,
trouble can be right next door, she said.

"In my book I tell a story about a young man whose parents were professionals with jobs in the
Chicago public schools. There are gangs who hang out at a park near his house, selling drugs.

"He said if he wanted to make some extra money for some fancy gym shoes or an extra pair of
jeans, he only had to cross the street to hook up with the gang," she said.

"Black neighborhoods also usually have more police. A group of white kids can hang out on a
corner in a suburb at little risk. But a group of black kids standing on a corner invite trouble."

At UC Berkeley, associate professor of education Pedro Noguera, who is African American,
said his own research into reasons why middle-class black students don't have the same sort of
achievement as whites shows that the experience of blacks and whites are not the same,
because of the race factor: negative images and discrimination.

"My own son, who plans to go to college, is very much identified with poor black kids who
aren't," he said.

"The black middle class just doesn't have the same kind of wealth. There's little inherited money
and typically there's a lot of variation even within the same family. There's a cousin or relative
or someone who's very poor or may have been to prison.

"Black middle class people are just not that far removed from very severe hardship," he said.

There are many reasons other than segregation why black middle-class families choose to live
in a black neighborhood, said Pattillo-McCoy, who is 29, married and without children so far.
But she has made her choices.

"We want our children to have black friends; we live on Chicago's South Side and there are all
of these black cultural events around us that are important.

"But we also understand that in some way living where we do constrains our ability to ensure
our children's outcome. We can't be with our children 24 hours a day," she said.

The answer has to be integration, Pattillo-McCoy believes. As long as the black and white
middle classes remain separate and unequal, problems will continue.

"We need to enforce housing laws that prohibit segregation. Discrimination is still happening.
"My own mother, a woman with a master's degree, who was working for our U.S. congressman in Milwaukee, was attempting to buy a condo on Milwaukee's lake front.

"She got there and the Realtor saw her and told her it had been sold. It had not been sold. She
complained; they investigated and she won. But she didn't buy the condo. That was in 1993.

"This stuff still happens. We need to make property managers accountable for their racist
behavior," she said.

"Bluntly put, when there are problems, whites always have somewhere else to move," she said.
There's always some restricted suburb. But the black middle class is left behind to cope.