The New Black Middle Class in the Twenty-First Century

By Bart Landry

Although past research on the African American community has focused primarily on issues of discrimination, segregation, and other forms of deprivation, there has always been some recognition of class diversity within the black population. The New Black Middle Class in the Twenty-First Century is a significant contribution to the continuing study of black middle class life. Sociologist Bart Landry examines the changes that have occurred since the publication of his now-classic The New Black Middle Class in the late 1980s, and conducts a comprehensive examination of black middle class American life in the early decades of the twenty-first century. Landry investigates the educational and occupational attainment, income and wealth, methods of child-rearing, community-building priorities, and residential settlement patterns of this growing yet still-understudied segment of the U.S. population.   

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Nov 30, 2018
• ISBN: 9780813593982

Bart Landry

Bart Landry is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland.

Book preview

Century

Introduction

It has been thirty years since I published The New Black Middle Class, in which I distinguished between an old black middle class and a new black middle class.¹ The former had risen in a segregated era to serve the unmet needs of the black community in health care, education, and law. The latter emerged only after passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which banned discrimination in education and the labor force. With access to all colleges and universities, black graduates could enter a broader range of professional, managerial, and other white-collar occupations, creating a new black middle class. It was a new black middle class also because its members now had access to previously barred institutions of society: restaurants, parks, beaches, hotels, and transportation. While there had been discrimination in the North before 1964, it was especially in the South, where most blacks still lived, that the civil rights legislation had its greatest and most visible impact. College-educated middle-class blacks no longer faced the indignities of having to use Colored Only bathrooms, water fountains, and buses. Implementation of the law was sometimes slow, as when I was directed to a Colored Only bathroom during a stop for gas at a small town in Georgia in 1966. Nevertheless, change had come to the South, and the black middle class now lived in a new environment with greatly improved life chances. For the most part, they could spend their money where and how they pleased.

In defining the black middle class I follow the approach of Max Weber, who thought of class in terms of position in the economy.² The upper class, according to Weber, is composed of those who own property, which today includes large industrial and service corporations, major financial institutions such as banks and equity funds, as well as extensive real estate holdings. Members of the other classes achieve their position when they enter the labor market. Those with nonmanual skills (education) form the white-collar middle class; those with manual skills form the working class. In distinguishing between those who own property and those who do not, Weber agreed with Karl Marx’s class model of bourgeoisie and proletariat.³ Their agreement ended there, however. Writing at a time in the early twentieth century when corporations were creating large numbers of white-collar jobs, Weber recognized the emergence of a new class, one that occupied a place between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. One can further distinguish between an upper middle class of professionals and administrators/executives and a lower middle class of workers in technical, sales, and clerical positions. From Weber’s perspective, the compensation (salary and benefits) attached to jobs in the labor market determines one’s standard of living. The newly created middle class was distinguished by its higher compensation—in comparison with that of manual workers’ compensations—which translated into a superior standard of living.

One sometimes encounters articles announcing the decline of the middle class. The authors are typically economists who use income categories (quintiles) rather than occupation to define class. Incomes, they note, have declined or stagnated for many white-collar workers. This may erode living standards but does not mean that those individuals have dropped out of the middle class. An engineer with a lower or stagnant salary is still an engineer. Membership in a class is dependent on ownership or occupation, not level of income.

The emergence of a new black middle class was not without its challenges. Change, especially radical change in society, rarely unfolds smoothly. Sensitivity to this fact led Congress to create the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) in 1965 to administer and enforce the new law against employment discrimination. The EEOC was a place where individuals could go for redress in cases of discrimination in hiring and disparate treatment in compensation and promotion. With a greatly enlarged mandate beyond discrimination in the workplace, the commission continues to this day.

The New Black Middle Class appeared when academic scholars and policy experts were still primarily focused on the black poor. To some extent, this was understandable. In 1970, only 13 percent of employed blacks held middle-class jobs, up from only 10 percent in 1960. Poverty research had become an academic cottage industry that produced a voluminous literature on every aspect of poverty. These studies inadvertently helped stigmatize blacks as a community of poor people rather than one with a class hierarchy similar to that of whites. I wrote The New Black Middle Class to dispel this stereotype. Although small, there was a black middle class composed of an upper stratum of professionals and administrators and a lower stratum of technical, sales, and clerical white-collar workers. There was also a large working class. The relative proportions of blacks and whites in each class differed markedly (more whites in the middle class and more blacks in the working class); yet African Americans did have a class structure similar to whites. Equally important—and not surprising given the historical experiences of blacks—I found great disparities in educational, occupational, income, and wealth attainment between the black and white middle classes. Still, The New Black Middle Class firmly established the existence of a black middle class in the United States. This new black middle class has continued to grow over the decades. Following the Weberian approach in defining class by occupation, the black and white middle classes, composed of white-collar workers (professionals, executives/administrators, and technical, clerical, and sales workers) were approximately 52 and 63 percent of their respective labor forces in 2010 (see Appendix).⁴ The middle class is divided into upper and lower strata, with the upper middle class composed of professionals and executives/administrators; while technical, clerical, and sales workers form the lower middle class. The gap between the black and white upper middle classes has remained roughly the same, as both have grown significantly since 1983.

The New Black Middle Class was not the first book on the black middle class, but it was the first to use national representative data. E. Franklin Frazier’s Black Bourgeoisie, published in 1957, was an important book that raised many questions about the black middle class.⁵ Its use of anecdotal material, however, failed to provide solid answers to the questions raised. Other studies followed The New Black Middle Class. Prominent among these studies have been Joe R. Feagin and Melvin P. Sikes’s Living with Racism: The Black Middle-Class Experience (1994), Sharon Collins’s Black Corporate Executives: The Making and Breaking of a Black Middle Class (1997), Mary Pattillo-McCoy’s Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril among the Black Middle Class (1999), and Karyn R. Lacy’s Blue-Chip Black: Race, Class, and Status in the New Black Middle Class (2007).⁶ The literature on the black middle class has also included a large outpouring of scholarly articles on a variety of topics that my colleague Kris Marsh and I analyzed in our article The Evolution of the New Black Middle Class, published in the Annual Review of Sociology in 2011.⁷ We examined approximately ninety-four books and articles, which were divided into thirteen topics covering both historical and contemporary issues.

In the mid-2000s, I began thinking of a new study of the black middle class that would examine the changes that had occurred since publication of my book. This endeavor became The New Black Middle Class in the Twenty-First Century. I use both qualitative and quantitative data, an approach known in sociology as a mixed-method approach. Qualitative and quantitative studies have strengths and weaknesses. Quantitative studies use representative samples that allow one to generalize to larger populations but often lack in-depth insights that can only come from qualitative data. While qualitative data lack statistical generalizability, they provide a more nuanced and in-depth understanding of the subject. Combining both approaches in the same study maximizes the strengths of both while minimizing their weaknesses.

For quantitative data, I relied on various U.S. Census surveys. This allowed me to trace changes in topics such as education over fifty years and to compare the educational achievements of blacks with those of whites. The qualitative data come from thirty-one face-to-face interviews with upper-middle-class African American families in Prince George’s County, Maryland, which is located in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area. I interviewed both spouses. I should note that most of these couples are from the professional stratum of the upper middle class, although some of them were also managers and supervisors at different times in their careers. In this sense my sample does not include members of the black lower middle class (sales, technical, and clerical white-collar workers). This was done partly for time and resource reasons but also because upper-middle-class occupations form the class stratum that is most often thought of when we speak of the middle class in the United States. These occupations are also the aspirational destination of the upwardly mobile, the mark of success. Studying these occupations is a test of the degree of success that African Americans have achieved in the twenty-first century.

As was the case of The New Black Middle Class, the goal of this study is to present a comprehensive picture of new black middle-class life today, in the twenty-first century. I tried to anticipate questions someone might have when hearing that there is a black middle class. In the face of the vulgar level of economic inequality in the United States today, recently protested by the Occupy Wall Street movement, some might wonder about the income and wealth achievement of the members of today’s new black middle class. It is a topic that a number of scholars have investigated.⁸ Each has added something to our understanding of racial economic inequality. Wealth research, however, is plagued by a number of difficulties, including varying definitions of middle class, different measurements, and the tendency to compare all blacks with all whites. My approach, although not completely unique, focuses on the different components of wealth, with multiple comparisons across middle-class blacks and whites rather than all blacks and all whites.

Others may want to know about the bedrock issues of educational and occupational attainment, the sources of an individual’s living standard. In the United States, one’s life ambience, where one lives, is also part of an individual’s or family’s living standard. An upscale home in a quiet suburban neighborhood is the image most people associate with life in the middle class. Residential location is also an area that has historically been fraught with racial tension, exclusion, and violence. How members of the new black middle class are navigating this area today is an important part of this study. I explore their aspirations and achievements in finding places of their own.⁹ In spite of the long history focused on residential integration, the answers I found may be surprising to many. The middle class grows through upward mobility or inheritance of parents’ middle-class position. This does not occur by chance. I explore in depth the efforts of these families to ensure their children follow in their footsteps.

Throughout this book I give prominence to the voices of the interviewed couples rather than merely summarizing their responses. With the qualitative data, I use the interviewees’ own voices to tell the story of the new black middle class in the twenty-first century. I provide analytic frameworks and interpretations, where necessary, but I allow the interviewees to tell the stories of their lives. The quantitative data provide the historical and national settings for these narratives. It is my hope that this approach will offer lively reading as well as accuracy and authenticity. I end with an Afterword that fills some of the gaps since the couples were interviewed.

1

The New Black Middle Class and the Demographics of the Twenty-First Century

Place has always loomed large in African American history, beginning with the forceful removal of Africans from a place of their own to a place of chattel slavery in the United States, the Caribbean, and South America. The search for a place of their own continued in the post-emancipation period and accelerated in the twentieth century with the Great Migration of black individuals and families to urban manufacturing centers of the North and Midwest. In Places of Their Own, Andrew Wiese traces this migration to the suburbs of major metropolitan areas.¹

This movement to suburban communities did not come early. Although new modes of transportation facilitated migration from manufacturing cities to suburban areas in the late nineteenth century (for example, Manhattan to Brooklyn) and early twentieth century, the pace was slow and dominated by whites. Not until the post–World War II period did the American romance with suburban living become part of the American Dream. Suburbs were spacious, clean, and white; a good place to raise children. New federal loan programs (through the Federal Housing Administration and the GI Bill) provided guarantees to banks for home loans and helped lenders introduce the thirty-year mortgage. The cookie-cutter homes of the Levittowns (New York, 1947–1951, and Pennsylvania, 1952–1958) created new communities in wide-open spaces. President Eisenhower’s highway program and Detroit automobiles provided the incentives and means to flee deteriorating city centers. There was, however, one flaw in this scenario: blacks could not participate in this city-to-suburb movement of the 1950s and 1960s. A system of redlining shut out black families from bank mortgages in racially mixed or black suburban communities.

Recent changes in the demography of the U.S. population have increased interest in the racial and ethnic composition of communities in both the cities and suburbs of major metropolitan areas. Diversity and segregation dominate this research, and new terminology introduced into these discussions strains to capture the novelty and complexity of recent and contemporary changes. Many cities and suburbs have become melting pots because of the diversity of their populations, including Asians, African Americans, Latinos, and whites. While whites dominated the early suburbanization movement, it is Asians, African Americans, and Latinos who now lead the migration to suburbs today, according to demographer William Frey.² There are two ways to look at these suburban population shifts: as a group’s share of the total suburban population in these major metro areas or as the percentage of a group’s own metropolitan population that resides in the suburbs. The first reveals modest increases over the past three decades. Between 1990 and 2010, blacks increased their share of the suburban population from 7 to 10 percent, Asians from 3 to 6 percent, and Latinos from 8 to 17 percent. Although each group’s increase appears modest, nationally their combined shares rose to 35 percent of the suburban population of the one hundred largest metros, as the white percentage shrank from 81 to 65 percent.

Statistics of a group’s city-to-suburb migration yield more interesting findings. Nationwide, the percentage of blacks living in the suburbs of the one hundred largest metropolitan areas increased from 37 percent in 1990 to 51 percent in 2010. Their highest concentrations, according to Frey’s analysis, were in the southern metros of New Orleans, Louisiana; Jackson, Mississippi; Memphis, Tennessee; Atlanta, Georgia; Columbia, South Carolina; Charleston, South Carolina; Richmond, Virginia; and Virginia Beach, Virginia. Collectively, these cities had black suburban populations between 35 and 50 percent in 2010. The Washington, D.C., metro stood out with 51 percent of its black population living in its suburbs. With the exception of Miami, Chicago, New York, and Honolulu, Latinos and Asians, in contrast to African Americans, realized their highest level of suburbanization in the western states of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. Significant concentrations of suburban minorities are now in southern and western states. Among the southern and border metros, four led the way with the highest percentage of black suburbanites: Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, and Washington, D.C. These racial and ethnic migrations in the one hundred major metropolitan areas have changed the demography of suburban America, often from places of white residential communities to what Frey calls melting-pot suburbs: suburbs where at least 35 percent of residents are nonwhite. Melting-pot suburbs include thirty-six of the one hundred largest metro areas. Among these thirty-six, sixteen were majority-minority suburbs in 2010.³ The high rate of recent black movement to suburbs prompted Frey to write of a breakthrough black flight from cities with large black populations. Today a higher percentage of blacks, Asians, and Latinos in large metro areas live in suburbs than in central cities.

The increasing diversity of suburbs in the major metropolitan areas forecasts significant social, economic, and political changes. Suburban living has brought the American Dream closer to many minority groups and has become preferable to the inner-city spaces that nonwhites have historically occupied. Yet not all suburban residents have gained equally. We have only to think of Ferguson, Missouri, to realize that poverty has taken root in many of these suburbs. At times it is the result of spillover suburbanization: the migration of poor individuals and families from contiguous poverty areas in metropolitan cities. The reason for this migration may be a search for perceived safer and more organized communities or the push factor of rising rents.

Several scholars have researched rates of segregation and poverty in the suburbs of major metropolitan areas. Myron Orfield and Thomas Luce identify four types of suburbs among the 50 fifty largest metropolitan areas: (1) diverse, (2) mainly nonwhite, (3) mostly white, and (4) exurbs.⁴ Diverse suburbs are those with 20 to 60 percent nonwhite residents; mainly nonwhite suburbs have over 60 percent nonwhite residents; mostly white suburbs are more than 80 percent white; and exurbs, sometimes referred to as outer suburbs or exurbia, are less than 10 percent urban and predominantly white. Economic well-being, education, and governmental services vary across these four types of suburbs.

White suburbs have the best educational systems, the lowest poverty rates, and the best community services. Diverse suburbs rank second in these areas, while nonwhite suburbs often suffer from poor-performing schools, poor services, and high levels of poverty. With 44 percent of the total suburban population (53 million people) in 1,376 suburbs (up from 42 million in 1,006 suburbs in 2000), diverse suburbs represented the largest category of suburbs in the fifty largest metro areas in 2010, according to Orfield and Luce. Second in number of inhabitants were the largely white suburbs with 47 million residents, or 28 percent of suburban dwellers—down from 35 percent (54 million)—in 2000. Nonwhite suburbs ranked third, with 17 percent (20 million) of suburbanites in 478 suburbs. This was an increase of 12 percent from 2000.

Diverse, integrated suburbs are viewed by some scholars as the ideal type and the country’s best hope for progress beyond inequality and our segregated past. Orfield and Luce argue, Integrated [diverse] communities have the greatest success eliminating racial disparities in education and economic opportunity.⁵ Yet they note the vulnerability of these communities; diverse, integrated suburban communities are difficult to maintain over long periods. They found that suburban neighborhoods with over 23 percent nonwhite residents in 1980 were more likely to be predominantly nonwhite (over 60%) by 2005 than to remain integrated.⁶

John Logan, a sociologist at Brown University, points to another troubling characteristic of black suburban neighborhoods in 2010: higher poverty rates than those with mostly white residents. His research found that although exposure to poverty declines as black incomes rise, those with incomes above $75,000 lived in suburban communities with a higher poverty rate (9 percent) than whites with incomes below $40,000 (8.2 percent).⁷ Logan also found that suburban residents are divided by racial/ethnic boundaries and that blacks and Hispanics live in the least desirable neighborhoods, even when they can afford better.⁸

Research on the one hundred or fifty largest metropolitan areas of the United States has revealed major population shifts since the 1960s and 1970s. Suburbs are no longer synonymous with white residency and central cities with black residency. Increased Latino immigration and significant African American and Asian migration to the suburbs of the largest metropolitan areas have created a new, unfolding reality that has brought both new opportunities and challenges. For African Americans, this suburbanization process has progressed fastest in southern and border metropolitan areas, with four cities—Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, and Washington, D.C.—leading the trend. Among these four, the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area ranks highest, with 51 percent of its black residents living in suburbs.

When I published The New Black Middle Class in 1987, I did not address this issue since the level of black suburbanization was still minuscule. Today there is a need to assess these changes as they affect the lives of the new black middle class in these suburbs. To accomplish this, I conducted in-depth, face-to-face interviews with thirty-one couples in Prince George’s County, Maryland, the county with the highest concentration of middle-class black suburbanites in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area. Understanding black middle-class suburbanization in Prince George’s County not only provides insights into new black middle-class suburban life in the Washington, D.C., metro but also a better understanding of the growing black middle-class suburbanization in other major