The problem of the Black Middle class
One of the great achievements of the last forty years in race relations in this country has been the formation of a strong and present Black middle class. People like my mother blazed a trail, working their way up from poor rural Michigan farms, into the halls of medical school and onward to high paying government research jobs. As a result subsequent generations have produced people like Obama and myself:
- many more of us openly mixed race then in previous generations
- we didn’t grow up in impoverished situations
- we’ve attended the best schools and had solidly successful careers from the beginning
- we have been raised mostly as minorities in a white context, rather than struggling up from segregated ghettoized neighborhoods
In cities with high concentrations of Black people (Atlanta, New York, and so forth) you’re even seeing the formation of entire Black middle class communities. This, in and of itself, is a great thing. But it requires that we, as Americans, now revise our definition of what it means to be Black and to add a lot more shading to our goals as a society. Basically, I think that we need to start taking apart the assumption that poor Black people are representative of the Black community on a whole — in the past this was largely true, but it’s increasingly less so.
The assumption that there is one “Black community” leads the mainstream white culture to use the success of Black middle class people to argue or prove that there is no longer a problem with race relations in this country. In reality the situation is still extremely dire for poor Blacks. And in this way, I think, the Black community is quickly becoming more and more like the white community.
Poor white people have a very hard time. All you have to do is watch an hour or two of the E! channel and you’ll see some ass or another making fun of “white trash” or “blue states” or some other term used to talk about poor whites in some way or another. The idea that this kind of validation of bigotry against the poor may become the norm against Black people as well makes me ill to my stomach. Not only do I think that we, as a society, have largely turned our backs on poor White people, but the proportion of poor Blacks compared to the Black community is much much higher than the proportion of poor Whites to the the White community on a whole.
I think that we’ve made a lot of progress on the race-relations front. But I think that the problems we have remaining hit on deeper issues that we have in this country regarding class. The intersection between racism and classism is a nasty place to be, but unfortunately, that’s where we are. As a middle class Black guy, I really hope that we can avert people in my position being used as ammunition against the working class Black folk continue to suffer in a very oppressive society.