Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril among the Black Middle Class FROM THE PUBLISHER
Black Picket Fences is a stark, moving, and candid look at a section of America that is too often ignored by both scholars and the media: the black middle class. After living for three years in "Groveland," a black middle-class neighborhood on Chicago's South Side, sociologist Mary Pattillo-McCoy writes, "I had seen three groups of eighth-graders graduate to high school, high school kids go on to college, and college graduates start their careers. I also heard too many stories and read too many obituaries of the teenagers who were jailed or killed along the way. The son of a police detective in jail for murder. The grandson of a teacher shot while visiting his girlfriend's house. The daughter of a park supervisor living with a drug dealer who would later be killed at a fast-food restaurant." Both troublesome and hopeful, these are the discontinuities in the daily life of Groveland residents that Pattillo-McCoy seeks to explain.. "Despite arguments that race no longer matters, Pattillo-McCoy shows a different reality: Even the black and white middle classes remain separate and unequal.
FROM THE CRITICS
Library Journal
This book is the product of a three-year ethnographic study of Groveland, a black middle-class neighborhood on Chicago's South Side. Sociologist Patillo-McCoy challenges the myth that a thriving black middle class has relocated to white suburban neighborhoods, abandoning the black underclass in inner-city wastelands. She demonstrates that the majority of the black middle class are living in black communities, which encompass poor black neighborhoods. As a result, a vulnerable, underemployed black middle class has to contend with inadequate public schools and high crime and poverty rates. Patillo-McCoy focuses on Groveland's multigenerational families, primarily its youth, and neighborhood networks, concluding that the future advancement of African Americans will require that the black middle class be factored into the debate on policies regarding affirmative action, segregation, and poverty. For specialized collections in African American studies, urban studies, and sociology.--Sherri Barnes, Long Island Univ. Lib., Brooklyn Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.
Trudy C. Palmer
Fences explodes myths and confirms truths.
Christian Science Monitor
Ebony Magazine
Through the prism of a South Side Chicago neighborhood, the author shows the distinctly different reality middle-class black face as opposed to middle-class whites.
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