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Is the protracted foreclosure crisis eroding the Black middle class? Foreclosure rates in the United States have reached an all-time high. Blacks have been hit especially hard by this crisis. I focus here on intraclass distinctions within the Black middle class precisely because scholars and journalists so often fail to distinguish between the experiences of the Black lower middle class and those of middle and upper-class Blacks, leaving the unintended impression that middle-class Blacks all have the same odds of losing their home. I argue that conventional explanations of the foreclosure crisis as a racialized event should be amended to account for the differential impact of the crisis on three distinct groups of middle-class Blacks: the lower middle class, the core middle class, and the upper or elite middle class.

This article suggests that Gilles Deleuze's writings on societies of control provide useful insights on changing configurations of biopower in contemporary societies. However, far from the dystopias depicted in many popular visions of the future, such as the films THX 1138 and Minority Report, societies of control are being shaped by the work of designers, creating the potential for an `ecology of control' that can become `benignly' woven into our lives. MoMA's exhibition SAFE: Design Takes On Risk is a fascinating introduction to designers' responses to risk and insecurity around the planet, along with work that interrogates critically our obsessions with risk, control, and insecurity. SAFE illustrates an emerging synergy between designers and policymakers that makes possible the intensification of control society through products of `communectivity' (such as the ironic `Homeland Security Blanket') and designer security. Indeed, `designing in' protection and `designing out' insecurity are mantras that are increasingly important to contemporary discourses of security in risk-obsessed states. The article expresses the author's concern that discourses of design and security suppress anxiety about the ethico-political consequences of control society, along with broader issues of security politics, at the same time as they install new policy initiatives and `synergies' through the desire to design out insecurity.