Our Kind of People: Inside America's Black Upper Class FROM THE PUBLISHER
Our Kind of People is the first book written about the insular world of the black upper class by a member of this hard-to-penetrate group. A conservative network of families dating back to the first black millionaires of the 1880s, the black elite has developed in own rules for membership and for maintaining a place in a world that is unaware of its vast contributions. Through six years of interviews with more than three hundred prominent families and individuals, journalist and commentator Lawrence Otis Graham weaves together the revealing stories and fascinating experiences of upper-class blacks who grew up with privilege and power. With photographs and stories, the author takes us to the mansions they built in the 1880s, as well as to black-tie debutante cotillions and dinners hosted by the "best" families and social groups.
SYNOPSIS
In 1995, Lawrence Otis Graham wrote a first-person account of his observations of institutional racism perpetuated at an elite country club. In Our Kind of People: Inside America's Black Upper Class, Graham focuses his sights on the black upper class, looking at the people, places, and objects it comprises. His examination of the history of this elite — who refer to themselves as "our crowd" — serves as a first-person look at a small, tightly knit group that has wielded an increasingly large amount of power and prestige.
FROM THE CRITICS
Jack E. White
Our Kind of People: Inside America's Black Upper Class is the literary equivalent of the nose job Graham obtained so that he could 'further buy into the aesthetic biases that many among the black élite hold so dear.'...instead of reporting on the foibles of the black upper crust, Graham sucks up to it, providing little more than a breathless list of neighborhoods, vacation spots and social clubs dominated by folks who can pass the 'brown paper bag' test.
— Time Magazine
Entertainment Weekly
...[A] fascinating chronicle of a hidden community...
Andrea Lee
...[A] fascinating if unwieldy amalgam of popular history, sociological treatise and memoir....Gaham clearly loves and admires the people he is writing about, and this is both the charm of the book and its great failing....Still...[Graham] has made a major contribution both to African-American studies and to the larger American picture. — The New York Times Book Review
Library Journal
In this work, Graham, who exposed bias against African Americans in his sharp-tongued account of working at an elite country club (Member of the Club, LJ 5/1/95), here focuses on "America's black upper class": a conservative, well-to-do group that dates back to the first black millionaires in the 1870s and whose members are associated with institutions like the Links and the Oak Bluffs area of Martha's Vineyard.
Kirkus Reviews
A record of the pleasures and the follies of an elevated black society. According to Graham, all racial, ethnic, and religious groups lay claim to their own privileged class-that group which, either because of family name, wealth, title, education, or other circumstance fashions itself a cut above the rest. The class sets itself apart with their clubs, their fraternities, and their sororities, while looking askance at any outsiders who can never make the grade. The reasons for forming such exclusive groups are often perfectly honorable, most commonly because members have been denied access to other organizations in the larger population. But matters can get out of hand, as Graham (Member of the Club: Reflections on Life in a Racially Polarized World, 1995) perhaps unwittingly demonstrates in his examination of what he calls the black elite. His is less of a critical examination and more of a glossary of people, places, and things constituting the black upper class. And as one might expect, this realm of the right colleges and degrees and pedigrees is downright incestuous, a world where cotillions and coming-out parties still matter.
Graham, an insider and attorney, knows it well. Yet his contemporary savvy matters less, in the end, than does his appetite for historical detail. His insights into the story of blacks in vacation spots like Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts and Sag Harbor on Long Island, N.Y., for instance, are fascinating. Nevertheless, the ongoing claustrophobia of privilege (with many of the same people and their coteries cycling and recycling) can weary a reader. One walks away with the impression that Graham's effort could have been cut in half-and all one would have missed is an extra afternoon of interminable croquet, followed by cucumber sandwiches down by the gazebo.
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