Values of middle-class blacks and whites: A replication and extension

1987 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 135-144 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronald E. Goldsmith ◽  
J. Dennis White ◽  
Mew T. Stith
Daedalus ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 140 (2) ◽  
pp. 90-100 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard E. Nisbett

The achievement gap between blacks and whites owes nothing to genetics. It is not solely due to discrimination or social-class differences between blacks and whites. It is due in good part to environmental differences between blacks and whites stemming from family, neighborhood, and school socialization factors that are present even for middle-class blacks. The gap is closing slowly, but it could be closed much more rapidly, with interventions both large and small. Preschool programs exist that can produce enormous differences in outcomes in school and in later life. Elementary schools where children spend much more time in contact with the school, and which include upper-middle-class experiences such as visits to museums and dramatic productions, have a major impact on poor black children's academic achievement. Simply convincing black children that their intellectual skills are under their control can have a marked impact.


1976 ◽  
Vol 63 (2) ◽  
pp. 375
Author(s):  
Raymond Wolters ◽  
William A. Muraskin

Author(s):  
Todd M. Michney

By the mid-1970s, upwardly mobile middle-class African Americans were increasingly departing neighbourhoods like Glenville, Mount Pleasant, and Lee-Harvard for a number of nearby bona fide suburbs. As a result, such former “surrogate suburbs” began to lose their lustre, although a core (generally elderly), home-owning black middle class still remains in these outlying city neighbourhoods to this day. Starting in the 1990s, Cleveland experienced a wave of predatory lending that culminated in the 2008 foreclosure crisis. Although middle class blacks in Cleveland as elsewhere have been disproportionately impacted by this trend, they have continued their historic strategy of outward geographic mobility in search of acceptable living conditions, even to the farthest metropolitan limits.


Author(s):  
Todd M. Michney

This chapter looks at the ambitious reform agenda that black middle-class activist residents went on to mount in these outlying city neighbourhoods, encompassing housing upkeep, business revitalization, traffic safety, trash removal, and efforts to reduce liquor availability, juvenile delinquency, vice, and crime – all in an attempt to maintain what they considered an acceptable quality of life. Perhaps the most ambitious effort along these lines was a venture in which a group of African American investors purchased and renovated the Lee-Harvard Shopping Center, making it during its existence from 1972-1978 the “largest black-owned commercial complex in the nation.” Sometimes these reform efforts involved moralizing or exhibited an explicit class bias; upwardly mobile middle-class blacks did not always recognize that less well-off newcomers were motivated by similar concerns with liveability. In the end, however, their various attempts to take charge of their lives and communities contributed to the long-term vitality of these neighbourhoods and the city as a whole.


2008 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-267 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carlos R. Mccray

This article attempts to provide some transparency with regard to how the intersection of race and class negatively affects African Americans in their effort to fight for social justice with regard to classism. Based on the explicit historical attempt to definitively make race and class synonymous, such a manufactured intersection is powerfully ingrained within the American psyche, and it has successfully created a quagmire with middle-class Blacks in their effort to fight against class injustice—specifically, those who are discriminated against in our society because of their lack of educational pedigree, economic standing, and job occupation. Thus, this article attempts to infuse sociological theoretical concepts with strands of critical race theory to provide insight into the potential barriers of middle-class Blacks’ amalgamation with African Americans of lower-wealth communities.


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