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Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril Among the Black Middle Class. Mary Patillo-McCoy. Chicago, IL, and London, UK: The University of Chicago Press, 1999. xii + 276 pp. (Cloth US$25.00; Paper US$15.00)
"Groveland is home to one of the top gang leaders and drug dealers in Chicago," Mary Patillo-McCoy writes, "as well as to one of the highest-ranking black officials in city government" (p. 68). This sentence evokes the complex set of negotiations, identifications, and associations that characterizes black middle-class life, and the set's often paradoxical roles and relationships are Patillo-McCoy's specific concerns. Black Picket Fences explores the socio-geographical landscape of the black middle class, arguing that it occupies a precarious position between the comfort of Chicago's predominantly white suburbs and its dangerous, inner-city black neighborhoods.
Patillo-McCoy produces an ethnography of Groveland, a black middle-class neighborhood on Chicago's South Side, to show that as barriers to black social and economic mobility become stronger, the "[B]lack middle-class way of life is in constant jeopardy in black middle-class neighborhoods" (p. 28). Groveland residents engage in a constant struggle to maintain their middle-class economic standing and avoid "downward mobility" (p. 7), as well as to balance the standards of a "decent" lifestyle with the allure of "street" culture (p. 92). This two-pronged struggle, Patillo-McCoy deftly argues, responds to a number of geographic, social, economic, and cultural factors: Groveland's spatial proximity to black neighborhoods with higher crime rates, social networks that operate across neighborhood boundaries, shifts in the late-capitalist mode of production, and the USA's history of racialized economic stratification.
Black Picket Fences-nine chapters, a conclusion, and an appendix detailing Patillo-McCoy's research method-is a focused and...