Suchergebnisse

As Karyn R. Lacy's innovative work in the suburbs of Washington, DC, reveals, there is a continuum of middle-classness among blacks, ranging from lower-middle class to middle-middle class to upper-middle class. Focusing on the latter two, Lacy explores an increasingly important social and demographic group: middle-class blacks who live in middle-class suburbs where poor blacks are not present. These "blue-chip black" suburbanites earn well over fifty thousand dollars annually and work in predominantly white professional environments. Lacy examines the complicated sense of identity that individuals in these groups craft to manage their interactions with lower-class blacks, middle-class whites, and other middle-class blacks as they seek to reap the benefits of their middle-class status

We tend to think of the Census Bureau as merely a bean counter, but the institution performs another, less apparent, role: signaling which demographic shifts carry the most weight in society. Trump's insistence that the Census Bureau include a controversial citizenship question on the 2020 census would mark a decisive shift in the Bureau's ability to count unauthorized immigrants accurately and in the distribution of federal resources to communities where immigrants settle in large numbers. This essay considers what these consequences, should Trump prevail, would mean for social scientists who study immigration. This distressing prospect presents an opportunity for demographers to consider how the work of ethnographers could be utilized to circumvent the data limitations a citizenship question would likely impose.

The majority of Americans live and work in suburbs, but the social problems arising in these communities are rarely studied by sociologists. Far more scholarly attention is devoted to understanding the distinctive character of urban communities. This review directs attention to three emerging trends affecting the nation's suburbs disproportionately: the suburbanization of poverty, the settlement of post-1965 immigrants in the suburbs, and the impact of reverse migration to the South on black suburbanization. The review provides a critical discussion of the valuable contributions demographers have made to our general understanding of these trends, then it engages the work of ethnographers to assess the processes underlying these outcomes. These emerging trends constitute the basis for a robust research agenda rooted in the sociology of suburbs.

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.

Compares race relations in two suburban communities in order to show that middle‐class blacks meet with some success when they temporarily exchange their racial identity for a class‐based identity. Collects data through ethnography and individual interview to examine the conditions under which middle‐class blacks construct and assert a sub‐urban identity. States that success varies with the racial composition of the suburban community and the white neighbours' level of the satisfaction with the community.