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Black Picket Fences. Privilege and Peril among the Black Middle Class, by Mary Pattillo-McCoy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. 276 pp. $25.00 cloth. ISBN: 0-226-64928-8.
CARL L. BANKSTON, III
Tulane University
The black middle class has been the subject of more assumptions than investigations in sociological research. True, Bart Landry's The New Black Middle Class (1987) attempted a general description of this expanding category, and Sharon Collins has done some excellent work on black middle-class employment. For the most part, though, the black poor have been at the center of sociological concerns. In William Julius Wilson's influential theories, for example, racial inequalities in contemporary America are seen largely in terms of the inner-city poor, who have been left behind as members of the rising black middle class move out of minority neighborhoods. The departing middle class, in this view, is frequently assumed to have blended into the larger American society, so that black-white differences are increasingly class differences between poverty-stricken inner cities and the suburbs.
Mary Pattillo-McCoy, one of Wilson's former students, has provided an important revision of Wilson's perspective by producing an intriguing ethnography of a black middle-class community. Pattillo-McCoy lived in a Chicago neighborhood that she calls "Groveland" for three and a half years. The neighborhood enjoys a relatively high income and a high rate of home ownership, two of the hallmarks of middle-class communities, but it is also...