THE BLACK BOURGEOISIE REVISITED
Kilson, Martin
Since the publication of E. Franklin Frazier's brilliant book Black Bourgeoisie in 1957, this class of blacks has acquired a new prominence in both American and Afro-American life. The size of...
...It also carries fuller portraits of major black business innovators (such as Henry F. Parks, founder and owner of the largest black meat processing firm, Parks Sausage Co...
...6, 60...
...In the September and October 1979 issues, this column listed the following instances of occupational dispersion: Hallie Anderson, promoted to supervisor of the Group Claims Division at the Phoenix Mutual Life Insurance Co...
...One Hundred Black Men's current membership is a Who's Who of the city's black elites...
...And this structural change is even more impressive when some of its qualitative dimensions are recognized...
...The difference is fundamental: the old black bourgeoisie faced a fierce ceiling on its professional and social mobility...
...The numerous local black-elite magazines mix high-society and power-centered presentations, sometimes skewed to high-society preferences and often in a rather tacky fashion...
...Through corruption, stealth, norm-breaking, law-breaking, and coercion (both institutional and extralegal) American elites, regardless of ethnicity, have historically exhibited a leadership posture in which they try to undercut the force of America's democratic tradition, hoping to tilt the rewards of private markets and the political process disproportionately in their favor...
...10.2 percent of women school teachers (black males 5.5 percent...
...Since [the members of] the black bourgeoisie live largely in a world of makebelieve, the masks which they wear to play their sorry roles conceal the feelings of inferiority .. . that haunt their inner lives...
...Power-Seeking vs...
...At any given time, the mainstream integration of upper-strata blacks is erratic, characterized by breakthroughs on one front and setbacks on another...
...The setbacks, because of residual racist practices, slow down the replacement of race-linked with class-linked attitudes among the black bourgeoisie, thereby restricting the ideological 89 range of class differentiation among AfroAmericans...
...Though long in coming, this deghettoization of the black bourgeoisie's education and job markets spawns a behavioral and structural metamorphosis that symbiotically disentangles the new black bourgeoisie from the old...
...and it stimulates a new kind of bourgeois consciousness, which reaches beyond black confines to the national arena...
...Yet their claim, in fact, is thoroughly dubious...
...It distributes upper-strata blacks more randomly among jobs, technologies, organizations, and networks that define the American economy...
...Washington Living (Washington, D.C...
...Stephen Daniels, appointed manager for Reservations at Trans World Airlines (New York Region...
...Of course, Reaganite Republicanism—so naked in its deference to the powerful and greedy and so bent on scuttling any federal role in sparking social mobility—also threatens the interest of a significant segment of the white bourgeoisie, much of which (the white-ethnic especially and the redneck-WASP) emerged in the post-World War II era and can claim no more than one generation of viable bourgeois status...
...two foundation heads—Franklin Williams (president of the Phelps-Stokes Fund), Franklin Thomas (president of the Ford Foundation...
...Louis), About Time (Rochester, N.Y...
...While persistent racist practices by police, business firms, unions, and by hoodlums like the Ku Klux Klan continue to threaten all blacks, these practices now are a weaker constraint upon Afro-Americans than they were ever before...
...Thus when queried about their acceptance of middle-class status, the affluent Pill Hill families were much more likely to react favorably: 51 percent of the Pill Hill families were "positive" or "very positive" about being bourgeois, 31 percent "ambivalent," and 14 percent "negative...
...On others, upperstrata blacks will converge with lower-strata blacks, which means that some combinations of class and racial or ethnic concerns are operative and yet that sometimes racial concerns alone predominate...
...While "success anxiety" of upper-strata blacks has not disappeared, it is now aggressively countered by the power-seeking sector of the black bourgeoisie, a process reinforced by further interlocking of the black bourgeoisie with national power networks...
...The last employ the heads of 30 percent of white-collar black families, compared to 16 percent for whites...
...For the elites of the Irish, Italians, Germans, Orientals, Jews, and other ethnics, their caste burden (whether religious or national) diminishes or dissolves after two generations of class mobility...
...Gannett Publications - 7 percent minority managers and 8.5 percent professionals in 1980...
...As all the various attitude and voting data show, this tilt applies to between 60 and 70 percent of Jews in general and Jewish elites in particular, despite the strong pull of conservative Zionism and the new ethnocentrism that evolved among Jews in the 1960s and '70s...
...The number of blacks completing high school increased from 42 percent to 75 percent between 1960 and 1980, and today nearly one out of every ten college students is black, up from 6.1 percent two decades ago...
...Preferences for "high-society" life styles are challenged today from many quarters, and they must coexist with strident powerseeking appetites...
...The membership of One Hundred Black Men includes: several political figures—Charles Rangel (congressman), Basil Patterson (New York secretary of state), David Dinkins (city clerk), Vernon Jordan (former head of the National Urban League...
...Also in William Wilson, The Declining Significance of Race (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp...
...Where can we learn to swim and snorkle...
...Cressworth Lander, appointed managing director for the Civil Aeronautics Board...
...In recent years, exemplifying the vanguard black policy-makers at the state and federal level are William T Coleman (trained at Harvard Law School), secretary of the Department of Transportation under President Ford...
...Full equality is far from being a viable reality for all blacks...
...Yet the forces of race or ethnicity persistently intersect with the class-based realities of the lower class and the black bourgeoisie, far more so than in lower-class and middleclass relations among other American ethnic groups...
...Columbus Coleman, promoted to executive vice-president and general manager of Wells Fargo Securities Clearance Corp...
...12 Mike Kennington, "The One Hundred Black Men," Opportunities for the Minority College Graduate, 1980 (15th Annual Edition, 1980), pp...
...Thorstein Veblen considered this a congenital condition of the American reality, sparked by the status tension and insecurity that bedevil the struggle for social mobility in America...
...Both qualitative and quantitative aspects of blacks' expansion into middle and upper occupational ranks during the 1970s are significant, as shown in Table 1. While the number of employed blacks increased by 1.3 million (17.3 percent) between 1972 and 1980, the largest employment gain for blacks was in white-collar occupations (nearly 1.2 million or 55 percent) and the sharpest increases were in professional/ technical jobs (354,000 or 55.4 percent) and managerial/administrative jobs (168,000 or 69.1 percent...
...The cumulative impact of these developments is transforming the customary character of American race relations...
...Where are the jazz concerts and discos...
...Clifford Alexander (Yale Law School), secretary of the Army under President Carter...
...The black bourgeoisie today increasingly derives its awareness and orientation from nationwide milieus, and it is indeed no longer consigned to segregated "slots," The shift from the ghetto to nationwide milieus is hardly instantaneous...
...If viewed as class-linked, upper-strata blacks 90 are likely to respond as conservatives...
...Social class undoubtedly has an influence on the relationship of upper- and lower-strata blacks...
...It is therefore not as cognizant as the new black bourgeoisie of how Reaganite policies threaten its status, though in recent months poll data suggest a new awareness of that danger...
...This process is revealed in miniature in the functioning of New York City's One Hundred Black Men, which was founded in the late 1960s...
...After all, even among white ethnic and WASP elites, who have had far more opportunities than Afro-Americans, a vibrant appetite for conspicuous leisure and garish consumption persists...
...Yet certain issues that are both class- and race-linked can also evoke a liberal response from bourgeois blacks—for example, Affirmative Action, or federal aid to black businesses...
...It allows, above all, new milieus to shape class awareness and identity—milieus within which middle-class blacks derive not merely professional but also social and political orientations...
...10.8 percent of women personnel and labor specialists (black males 7.9 percent...
...Whither the New Black Bourgeoisie...
...Edward T. Gilliam II, appointed manager of Finance and Administration for Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority...
...leading lawyers—Judge Samuel Pierce and Judge Herbert Evans...
...Far from it...
...Though it remains to be seen whether whites are tolerant enough to allow this to happen and whether the black bourgeoi94 sie is resourceful enough to seize the opportunityutilizing the liberal/moderate wing of both the Democratic and Republican partiesthere are certainly enough new realities differentiating today's black bourgeoisie from that described by E. Franklin Frazier 30 years ago to warrant some optimism about the prospect...
...Today there is still fear and apprehension of elite blacks among lower-strata blacks, because there has risen within the black bourgeoisie a viable, mainstream black political force— nearly 6,000 elected officials and perhaps 20,000 administrative and policy technicians at city, county, state, and federal levels...
...The erratic manner by which upper-strata blacks are co-opted into the American mainstream leaves them, as it were, both "insiders" and "outsiders...
...To speak of status-deracialization is another way of identifying those alterations in the historical dynamics of racism in American life that William Wilson characterizes as the "declining significance of race" (see Note 3...
...88 While the few pre-1960s black proponents of power-seeking life styles never obtained more than a marginal foothold, today's situation is quite different...
...Though one can debate the actual size of this segment, it might well comprise about 60 percent of black families—those in the elite and middle class (35 percent) and in the upper blue-collar class (25 percent), but not the marginal blue-collar and lower class (about 40 percent...
...Like Wilson's term, status-deracialization does not imply that racism has ceased to exist...
...For both the old and the new black bourgeoisie, racism hinders the quest for parity with the white bourgeoisie...
...These associations are now the dominant agencies shaping a new black/white leadership symbiosis and a new bourgeois identity among Afro-Americans...
...Black Family (Chicago), Pride (St...
...Where are the not so respectable singles clubs...
...The size of the black bourgeoisie surpasses anything Frazier could have imagined...
...Roger Wilkins, a prominent Afro-American lawyer and journalist, offers another variant of recent efforts to dress up black rulership...
...0.5 percent of women medical and dental practitioners (black males 2.1 percent...
...This process nationalizes the black bourgeoisie's networks, increasingly intersecting black and white power structures...
...For example, by 1980 some 14 percent of black women held professional/ technical jobs compared to 17 percent of white women, whereas 8 percent of black males held such jobs compared to 16 percent of white males.' Table 1 Employment change by occupation and race, 1972 and 1980, annual averages [Numbers in thousands] Black employment White employment change, 1972-1980 change, 1972-1980 Occupation Number Percent Number Percent Total employment 1,344 17.3 13,306 18.2 White-collar workers 1,185 55.3 10,022 27.4 Professional and technical 354 55.4 3,592 33.8 Managers and administrators . 168 69.1 2,639 34.2 Sales 88 51.9 698 13.5 Clerical 580 52.7 3,094 23.8 Blue-collar workers 215 6.8 1,760 7.0 Craft and kindred workers 217 „ 32.3 1,427 14.2 Operatives, except transport 73 5.8 -209 -2.3 Transport equipment operatives 41 9.0 204 7.5 Nonfarm laborers -116 -14.7 337 10.0 Service workers 21 1.0 1,826 21.2 Private household workers -238 -41.8 -159 -18.6 Other service workers 259 15.9 1,985 25.6 Farmworkers -74 -31.9 -302 -10.8 Farm managers -23 -51.1 187 -11.4 Farm laborers -51 -27.3 116 -9.9 Source: Monthly Labor Review, June 1982, p. 30...
...and in-depth reports on black firms that have penetrated major spheres in the economy...
...Yet the past 25 years of independent African states offer little evidence of enlightened rulership, while any judgment of the new bona fide elite status of the AfroAmerican bourgeoisie requires more time...
...E Michael Kyle, appointed Internal Audit manager at Toro Co...
...Max Bond, nephew of the late scholar and educator Horace Mann Bond...
...And now, in an era of rising expectations, reinforced by black ethnic militancy, bourgeois blacks paradoxically resent racism even more than they did in the past...
...High-Society Life Style EVIDENCE of the life styles of today's upperstrata blacks can be found in a number of new black journals...
...In achieving these goals, the association insists upon being exclusive in regard to the high level of talent and success required of its members...
...their cry has a ring less pathetic than phony...
...Thus the new black bourgeoisie enjoys an option that the old black bourgeoisie, in Frazier's gloomy perspective, could only "play" at: it is becoming a bona fide elite or upper class...
...And this, in turn, affects the character of class perceptions among Afro-Americans...
...Ambivalence and ambiguity must characterize the "split personality" of the black bourgeoisie at a time of emergent statusderacialization...
...But here the similarity ends...
...and Aldred Fornay, appointed creative director at Revlon Corp...
...WHITHER THE BLACK BOURGEOISIE...
...The integrative function of the new Afro-American professional class and their associations rests upon a fundamentally new position for blacks in the upper ranks of the American economy...
...2 Dan Cortz, "The Negro Middle Class," Fortune, November 1966...
...There is emerging what might be called, for want of a better term, status-deracialization...
...it now is several times what it was 30 years ago...
...By the 1970s, some 10.1 percent of black college-educated males were entering managerial jobs compared to 14.8 percent of white college-educated males...
...Exxon Corp...
...Some 61 percent of the affluent families gave a combined response of "disagree/ ambivalent" to the statement "I am not embarrassed by the behavior of lower-class blacks," as did 58 percent of the average middle-class families...
...In specific white-collar jobs, by 1980, black females were - 7.4 percent of women accountants (black males 3.6 percent of male accountants...
...Although representatives of American ethnic elites often think otherwise, racial or ethnic affinity between lower and upper classes is seldom much of a constraint upon irresponsible leadership and governance...
...Writing in Harper's (March 1982), Wilkins suggests that, owing to a special identity angst experienced by "blue-chip" blacks like himself (that is, blacks now within national power networks), the black bourgeoisie will revitalize its relationship to lower-class blacks...
...These findings suggest that we cannot dismiss the Frazier hypothesis out-of-hand...
...The spirit of play or make-believe has tended to distort or vitiate the ends of their most serious activities...
...Such occupational dispersion of white-collar blacks affects their class identity...
...4.6 percent of women banking and financial officials (black males 2.6 percent...
...Indeed, it might be said that Painter and Wilkins seek to alter national perception of lower-class blacks as the only truly depressed (and truly needy) segment of Afro-American life, claiming that the identity angst of bourgeois blacks is a comparable burden...
...This insider/outsider condition is also shaped by the newness of this upward mobility, for the vast majority is first-generation elite and middle class, coming from blue-collar families whose experience with customary racism influences its class perceptions...
...INSOFAR AS RACE-LINKED REALITIES continue to compete with class-linked forces in shaping the behavior of the black bourgeoisie, today's black bourgeoisie is similar to its predecessor as dissected in Black Bourgeoisie...
...The affluent families' greater tendency for tolerance reappeared in response to a second query about lower-class blacks—"I am not embarrassed by the behavior of lower-class blacks...
...Among the major foundations with black executives are: Charles Kettering Foundation, Borden Foundation, Avon Foundation, Lilly Endowment, John Hay Whitney Foundation, TRW Foundation, Clement & Jessie Stone Foundation, Cummins Engine Foundation, Josiah Macy, Jr., Foundation, the Twentieth Century Fund, Borg-Warner Foundation, Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, Phelps-Stokes Fund, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Rockefeller Foundation, and the Ford Foundation...
...IN 1974 WILLIAM SAMPSON AND VERA MILAM of Northwestern University undertook a study of bourgeois values and ethnic solidarity in two black middle-class communities in Chicago and adjacent Evanston...
...Xerox Corp...
...If we combine the "disagree," "strongly disagree," and "ambivalent" responses, then both the affluent and average middle-class black families in the SampsonMilam study are actually not very favorably disposed toward the behavior of lower-class blacks...
...The black bourgeoisie today would have to be daft to misconstrue the Reaganite-conservative stance as being in their interest (not to speak of the interests of lower-strata blacks to whom many bourgeois blacks are tied by kinship...
...Though this transformation is protracted and, so far, imperfectly realized, the growth of a national-minded black bourgeoisie produces crucial changes in the Afro-American social structure...
...Above all, class perceptions among blacks display numerous inconsistencies...
...Such complex policy issues place the typical upper-strata black in a bind—a bind more difficult in an era of status-deracialization, when the black bourgeoisie experiences increasing relations with upper-strata whites...
...Jack Bell, elected president of the Texas Restaurant Association and the first black to head this 5,500-member group...
...and 7.1 percent of women lawyers and judges (black males 3.1 percent...
...Today the interplay between conservative and liberal feelings among the black bourgeoisie revolves around whether social and political issues are viewed as class-linked or race-linked...
...The national black journals are now the prominent purveyors of what might be called power-seeking life styles, devoted to black entrepreneurial innovation and growth, professional advancement, and strategic positioning throughout American society...
...Thus Frazier's assertion, at least for this study, has proved erroneous...
...The issue of "individualism" further distinguished the two communities, for some 35 percent of the Pill Hill families considered themselves "individualistic," compared to 23 percent of the Evanston families...
...On the other hand, the affluent Pill Hill families' greater tolerance of lower-class blacks might be a function of noblesse oblige— not uncommon among some affluent Ameni91 cans toward the poor...
...Bethpage, N.Y...
...1 E. Franklin Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie (Free Press, 1957), pp...
...three publishers—Ed Lewis, Earl Graves, John Procope...
...This compares with 52 percent of whites in white-collar jobs and 32.4 percent of Hispanic Americans...
...New England Black Weekly (Boston), and Sun Belt, a state magazine in Mississippi that is funded by white banks and dedicated to black economic entrepreneurship...
...For over a decade each monthly issue of Black Enterprise has carried a column entitled "Making It," comprising a job profile of persons exemplifying the occupational dispersion of the black bourgeoisie...
...As with the rise to leadership by the white bourgeoisie (WASP, Irish, Italian, Jewish, German, and so on) between the middle nineteenth century and World War II, the bid of today's black bourgeoisie for greater clout is surrounded by rhetoric that plays upon the moral and progressive idioms of American history...
...The Pill Hill families had a $39,270 mean income and were 53 percent college-educated...
...Wilson Riles, third-term superintendent of the Department of Education in California...
...Occasionally, issues of concern to workingclass and lower-class blacks engage the attention of One Hundred Black Men—such issues as the lack of professionalism among city police, or police brutality, unemployment among black youth, and the availability of adequate health facilities for New York City's blacks...
...some 15,600 blacks among total employees of 197,000, nearly 8 percent, and comparable proportions of black managers and professionals...
...Yet until all racist threats to full equality for Afro-Americans are wiped out, status-deracialization will remain a relative and not an absolute phenomenon...
...Minneapolis...
...Fair Lawn offered excellent public schools and modest homes with tidy lawns...
...But Wilkins offers no specifics of such revitalization (for example, living in lower-class neighborhoods, expanding elite voluntary activity among lower-class blacks, or shoring up the lowerclass blacks' fledgling political structure...
...It has the comfort of some security, but also shows numerous signs of fragility—for instance, the boredom of its youth and its heavy drinking, sex, vandalism, and general disarray...
...William A. Sampson and Vera Milam, "The IntraRacial Attitudes of the Black Middle Class: Have They Changed," Social Problems, December 1975...
...See Westcott, "Blacks in the 1970s," pp...
...What about the problem of "humanizing" the new black bourgeoisie, moving it away from self-serving goals toward other-serving perspectives—a problem that exercised Frazier 30 years ago...
...When I sit down with a corporate head or a city official, they know I represent a group that is made up exclusively of the most powerful and influential and successful black men in the city...
...The growth of class awareness is likely to proceed, as it were, by fits and starts...
...Bill Baker, appointed manager of Communications for Blue Cross and Blue Shield (Colorado...
...The first five years of the 1960s saw some 380,000 nonwhites (mainly blacks) acquire white-collar employment, placing about one in five nonwhites into the middle class—some 4 million persons.2 By 1980 about two out of every five employed blacks were wcrking in white-collar jobs...
...Noteworthy too is the doubling of the proportion of black managers and technicians in the following list of eight top-level Fortune 500 firms: AT&T - 4.5 percent minority (mainly black) managers in 1972 and 12 percent in 1981...
...Sea-Land Industries - 13 percent minority managers, 17 percent professionals, and 21.4 percent salespersons in 1981...
...The differentials in affluence and college education that separate the communities govern a great deal of the interplay between ethnic patterns and bourgeois values...
...Reynolds Farley, "The Long Road: Blacks and Whites in America," American Demographics, February 1980, pp...
...and stimulating the return of extravagant debutante balls among affluent blacks...
...At other times it forges new kinds of functional divisions within the black upper strata...
...This is apparent in the persistence of upper-strata black fraternities and social clubs, now again captivating students at some black colleges (especially at Howard University in Washington, D.C...
...stay at least until their children go to college, as nearly 80% do...
...and for good reason...
...the architect who heads the School of Architecture at Columbia University—J...
...12.2 percent of women school administrators (black males 6 percent...
...When reinforced, in turn, by the increasing shift to suburban living among upper-strata black families—now 33 percent and increasing at a rate twice that of middle-class whites—we have the essential ingredients of a mainstream black bourgeoisie...
...Why these inconsistencies...
...No previous generation of the Afro-American technocratic and business elite has ever experienced the real world of American capitalism as thousands of blacks in "Fortune 500" firms do now, and this experience is reflected in both the composition and behavior of black professional associations...
...Collegeeducated black males in teaching declined by 94 percent between 1960 and the early '70s, while black males in engineering increased by 194 percent, in the natural sciences by 200 percent, and in business management by 262 percent...
...It frees the black bourgeoisie from the traditionally segregated job market, to which customary racism had doomed the pre-1960s black bourgeoisie...
...205-206, 213...
...Willie Brown, leader of the Democratic legislators in California and the first black to hold majority-party reins anywhere...
...Curiously enough, this self-serving argument has surfaced recently from intellectual proponents of the black bourgeoisie, appearing in such prominent national organs as the New York Times, Washington Post, and Harper's...
...Equitable Life Assurance Society — 6.2 percent minority managers, 10.2 percent professionals, 16.3 percent technicians, and 20.9 percent clerical workers in 1981...
...And as racial realities in America are often beyond the control of any segment of the black community, the relations between upperstrata and lower-class blacks will never be easy to delineate...
...The Insider/Outsider Syndrome THIS CONVERGENCE of the black and the white bourgeoisie cuts two ways: it helps to reduce the older virulent forms of racism experienced by middle-class blacks...
...It has tended to encourage a spirit of irresponsibility or an attitude of "play" or make-believe among them...
...However, the greater commitment to "individualism" by the Pill Hill families did not preclude a self-defined ethnic solidarity...
...Some 30 percent of the Pill Hill families said they "disagree" or "strongly disagree" with the statement, while 37 percent of the average middle-class Evanston families offered this response...
...Frazier was virtually alone in his critical characterization of upper-strata blacks (middleclass and elite): The exclusion of middle-class Negroes from [equal] participation in the general life of the American community has affected their entire outlook on life...
...For example, in September 1975 Black Enterprise reported the black penetration of the executive ranks of American foundations.' Equally noteworthy is the black penetration of the middle-level technical and managerial ranks of big and middlesized corporations.' The importance of this occupational dispersion with regard to black middle-class identity cannot be overemphasized...
...Nell Painter, a black historian at the University of North Carolina, offers a variant of this argument in the New York Times (December 17, 1981), suggesting that new black elites in both America and Africa might prevail more benignly than is usual for modern elites, because of the pathological racist constrictions they have shared with the black masses...
...a sports promoter—Don King...
...More complicated still are such issues as a national health plan—issues that entail some federal constraints on certain upper-strata blacks (in this case on doctors, dentists, pharmacists, health-field entrepreneurs) but produce benefits for lower-strata blacks...
...Finally, in aggregate terms, some 13,000 black family heads are doctors and dentists, 22,000 accountants, 25,000 engineers, and 191,000 managers and administrators...
...While possessing upper-strata capabilities, and therefore being increasingly acceptable to national power structures, the black bourgeoisie is still vulnerable to residual racism...
...Reinforced by every advance of upper-strata blacks into mainstream American power structures, status-deracialization is evolving into the cutting edge of class awareness and differentiation in the black community...
...Bourgeois Blacks vs...
...Thus while 30 years ago E. Franklin Frazier was rightly wary of the conservative potential in the black bourgeoisie's self-serving values— then a black elite still without a populistoriented civil rights movement—it is possible today to be somewhat less pessimistic...
...The most prominent of them appear monthly and have a nationwide circulation: Black Enterprise (250,000), Essence (600,000), Black Collegian: The National Magazine of Black College Students (250,000), and Dollars and Sense (110,000...
...These results, of course, contrast markedly with the long-standing Frazier hypothesis that the more middle-class or bourgeois blacks are, the weaker their ethnic or race commitment...
...This is no idle projection...
...The second query—"I am not embarrassed by the behavior of lower-class blacks"—warrants a closer look...
...It is no surprise, then, that "high-society" life styles still appeal to the Afro-American upper strata...
...Its first president was Bruce Llewellyn, former head of a giant super87 market chain (Fedco) and now president of the Federal Overseas Private Investment Corporation, which initiates and services American investments in African states...
...The monthly Black Odyssey: A Magazine on Travel and Leisure is the most prominent...
...At some point the new associations of upper-strata blacks will, like a molting skin, give way to yet another metamorphosis, to fulfill these integrative tasks in wholly new ways...
...Like the old black bourgeoisie, the new black bourgeoisie sustains a racebound organizational infrastructure...
...34-36...
...The average middle-class families in Evanston, on the other hand, were only 35 percent "positive" or "very positive," 37 percent "ambivalent," and 18 percent "negative...
...Among these organizations are the National Association of Black Manufacturers (1971), National Association of Black Accountants (1970), National Association of Black Contractors (1972), National Black Media Coalition (1973), National Black Network (1973), Council of Concerned Black Executives (circa 1975), and the Organization of Black Airline Pilots (1976...
...Whereas the old black bourgeoisie's associations defended ghetto markets, the new black bourgeoisie's racebound associations function integratively—as ramrods against residual racism in the national economy (job markets, skill markets, credit markets, and more) and in general institutions...
...and 82 percent of the Evanston families said they "agree" or "strongly agree" (16 percent agree, 66 percent strongly agree...
...126-134...
...Class-identity formation among the black bourgeoisie cannot be grasped by using, as Frazier did, one-dimensional assumptions...
...The study found 73 percent of black doctors identifying themselves as "liberal," compared to 47 percent of white doctors...
...While greater access to the middle and upper power ranks propels bourgeois blacks—as it does bourgeois whites—toward an establish93 mentarian outlook, residual racism functions as a powerful countervailing force, pulling bourgeois blacks toward liberal/left orientations...
...The well-paid ranks of bluecollar workers (craft and kindred workers) also increased—by 217,000 or 32.3 percent...
...Moreover, the nationwide associations are reinforced at the local level (city) by a plethora of similar associations, ranging from the Dallas Alliance for Minority Enterprise, the Durham (Black) Business and Professional Chain, to New York City's powerful One Hundred Black Men...
...Sometimes it sharpens the differentiation between upper- and lower-strata blacks...
...9 These include the National Black Caucus of State Legislators, the National Association of Minority County Officials, and the National Caucus of Black Schoolboard Members...
...Unlike the pre-1960s associations, the new ones have greater professionalism and more viable mainstream linkages...
...that whites did not regard the activities of Negroes as of any real consequence in American life...
...This hindrance generates much frustration, and this frustration, for both the old and new black bourgeoisie, distorts the character of bourgeois existence, especially the quality of its leadership role...
...Power-seeking life styles now vie with the older "high-society" outlook, whose attenuation might be attributed to E. Franklin Frazier's Black Bourgeoisie (1957), which launched a devastating critique of Ebony's gaudy marketing of high-society values...
...This purpose is heralded in the subtitle of Dollars and Sense— "the compendium of information for black business and professional men and women"— which is Chicago's contribution to this new black journalism...
...And the oldest black monthly, Ebony (6 million...
...No previous generation of middle-class blacks has been exposed to this type of black media, inundating blacks with a message on the need to penetrate American power networks...
...But the black bourgeoisie has such a heavy caste burden (the essence of white racism) that few social scientists feel safe in predicting precisely when that caste burden of race will give way to class achievement as the defining axis for the Afro-American middle class and elites...
...What and where are the museums in the cities in which we live and visit...
...He minimized the complex influence of persistent racism upon the self-image of upper-strata blacks...
...Hartford...
...Over time we will see a growing proportion of upperstrata blacks acquiring social, professional, and political attitudes that are more class-linked than race-linked, resembling what may be found among upper-strata whites...
...For example, a study of the political ideology of black and white doctors in New York City in the 1960s, testing Frazier's assertion that black doctors "have generally acquired a conservative middle-class outlook on life," found that in fact only a minority of black doctors define themselves as conservatives...
...Tom Finch, formerly director of Matrix Operations for Meadowlands and Giants Stadium (New Jersey), was appointed director of Promotions at Arlington Park Race Track Corp...
...But, like the growth of a nationalminded black bourgeoisie, status-deracialization is a protracted process...
...Lower-strata blacks feared the loss of their ethnic leaders or worse—that elite blacks would join in perpetuating racist rule...
...The association's primary concerns, however, include expanding credit from white banks for black businesses, advancing professionalism among blacks in white and black firms and professions, advancing blacks in the city's political establishment, and expanding a variety of exchanges between black and white elites...
...This recently advanced segment of the white bourgeoisie is in crucial ways marginal...
...Prior to the 1960s, lower-strata and upper92 strata blacks alike were apprehensive about this option...
...The Black Collegian, patterned after Black Enterprise, covers the whole gamut of career options available in American institutional life...
...When asked to respond to the statement, "I find the way of life of poor blacks repugnant," 63 percent of the average middleclass Evanston families replied "agree" or "ambivalent" (48 percent agree, 15 percent ambivalent), compared to 49 percent of the affluent Pill Hill families offering the same response (35 percent agree, 14 percent ambivalent...
...Educational advancement was, of course, basic to this occupational advancement of Afro-Americans...
...and upper-strata blacks today surely differentiate themselves from the life styles of lower-class blacks...
...It would appear that the average middleclass families in Evanston were reacting out of their less well-off and more tenuous status, perhaps reflecting a fear of slipping in class position...
...It's because we're exclusive that we can be effective...
...3.5 percent man95 agers in 1972 and 14.6 percent in 1981, as well as 6.4 percent professionals in 1972 and 16.3 percent in 1981...
...Most families...
...Only a small segment of upper-strata blacks is second-generation, but some came from elite and middleclass families who often cultivate strong black ethnocentrism in their children—a facet of the pre-1960s black bourgeoisie that E. Franklin Frazier neglected...
...As one leading member put it: I know that when some folks call us elitist they intend it as a putdown...
...These national journals are supplemented at the local level (city and state) by an array of other new black journals: New City (Washington, D.C...
...It takes time and is mediated through a new type of middleclass infrastructure...
...They no longer have to respond to the frustrations associated with racism as did their predecessors— by channeling frustrations into what E. Franklin Frazier considered pseudoelite behavior, a "world of make-believe" where scarce resources were frittered away on aping white "high society...
...One Hundred Black Men now has 500 members, characterized by one observer as "the cream of the city's black achievers...
...Drew Days (Yale Law School), director of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice under President Carter...
...Hewlett-Packard — 9.7 percent managers in 1981, 11.2 percent professionals, and 15.8 percent technicians...
...To one degree or another One Hundred Black Men is replicated in numerous local and national black elite associations...
...Freeman, Black Elite, p. 60 passim...
...Now both the training milieu and job markets are mainly free of ghettoization—a feature in the elite formation of white ethnics (Irish, Italians, Slavic Americans, Jews, and so on) that took two generations to achieve, compared to three or four generations for Afro-Americans (from the late 1880s to the 1960s...
...3.4 percent minority managers in 1977 and 14.9 percent in 1980, as well as 8.9 percent minority professionals in 1977 and 14.9 percent in 1980...
...96...
...In the short run, it seems that its more self-serving and exploitative proclivities vis-à-vis lower-strata blacks are likely to be checked by the bourgeoisie's need to play a leading part in ridding American society of all vestiges of racism...
...Taxation issues also can be baffling...
...This role, for both the old and new black bourgeoisie, must seem problematic when compared to the leadership of the white bourgeoisie...
...and Leonard Coleman (Harvard Kennedy School of Government), secretary of the Department of Energy under New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean...
...5.3 percent of women college teachers (black males 3.3 percent...
...Only among American Jews, who experienced a more rigid caste burden than other white ethnics, is there any comparable experience...
...And these advocates of power-seeking have an important goal—the convergence of the black and the white bourgeoisie...
...New York...
...James Lockhart, formerly vicepresident for Legal Affairs at Budget Rent-a-Car Corp., was appointed vice-president for Public Affairs at Transamerica Corp...
...While clearly skewed to persons of affluent tastes, Black Odyssey also appeals to the more Spartan, noting in an editorial, on p. 1 of its Summer 1979 issue, that . . . some of us want to know where the nearest picnic area is located...
...Lower-Class Blacks THE INSIDER/OUTSIDER SPLIT manifests itself in various ways...
...upper-strata blacks feared they would fail as a bona fide elite and would be manipulated for purposes beyond their control...
...0.5 percent of black college-trained males were entering design careers compared to 0.5 percent of white college-trained males...
...Jay Francis, elected vice-president of Westinghouse Broadcast Co...
...Reality, however, belies the rhetoric...
...An equally crucial qualitative feature of the expansion of middle-class and middle-income Afro-Americans is that both males and females shared in this development, as shown in Table 2. Both at the lower and top ranks of white-collar jobs, black women strengthened their position 85 relative to their white counterparts, more so in fact than did black men...
...The energies and resources that generate black upward mobility now can be harnessed in behalf of bona fide influence and power in the American mainstream—though racist constraints, while weakening, have by no means disappeared and must be dealt with...
...Above all, the occupational and professional milieus of the new black bourgeoisie intersect (though not necessarily directly) those of the white bourgeoisie...
...Where are the respectable singles clubs...
...It means that racism now has less capacity to dictate the structure and behavior of an expanding segment of Afro-Americans...
...It has meant that whites did not take Negroes seriously...
...Meanwhile the new associations help to merge black and white bourgeois identity and awareness...
...For instance, in the sizable population of black lawyers in Washington, D.C., there now is a division between the majority of ordinary black civil servants and a minority elite cadre that enters top white law firms and the policymaking ranks of key government agencies...
...This peculiar structure of caste and class gives Afro-Americans a tilt toward the liberal/ left in American life—a sort of necessitarian liberalism...
...Yet these values, though now widely questioned, are far from dead...
...Reporting on a premeditated railway derailment (that killed the engineer and injured many) as an example of this disarray among new bourgeois white youth in the suburban town of Fair Lawn, New Jersey, Samuel Freedman observed in the New York Times (July 10, 1982) that [this] was not what parents had in mind when they moved to this suburb of 32,229...
...86 and government agencies...
...For example, the Sampson-Milani study put another ethnic-commitment question to their subjects from a more class-linked perspective, querying their attitude toward lowerclass blacks...
...This will, no doubt, prove nearly as difficult as for the white bourgeoisie...
...In general, upper-strata blacks share with upperstrata whites a conservative view on taxation, while at the same time recognizing the importance of federal taxation powers to a wide range of national policies beneficial to lowerstrata blacks—for instance, the Job Corps, CETA, Food Stamps, and Aid for Dependent Children...
...9.4 percent of women computer specialists (black males 4.1 percent...
...Their escape into a world of make-believe with its sham "society" [conspicuous status-seeking] leaves them with a feeling of emptiness and futility.' More than anything else, the enormous growth of the black bourgeoisie in the 1960s and 1970s stimulated its behavioral and structural metamorphosis...
...32-33...
...Its dual status, within the American and Afro-American settings, is infinitely more complex and less dysfunctional than that described by Frazier a generation ago...
...And they listen...
...14-18...
...This trend is also reflected in the rise of national black magazines dedicated to marketing expensive use of leisure time...
...Frazier's view of the black bourgeoisie was too one-dimensional, attributing too much significance to social class as such...
...6.7 percent of women engineers and science technicians (black males 5.6 percent...
...Black Enterprise, published in New York, carries several monthly columns (in addition to "Making It"), titled "On the Move" and "Names in the News," which offer brief career biographies celebrating a preference for a power-oriented life style...
...Attracted to the Reaganite conservatives' skillful appeal to old American ideals (thrift, work ethic, the family, sexism, religion, nationalism), the new white-ethnic and the redneckWASP bourgeoisie nurses its own variant of "false consciousness...
...A Mainstream Black Bourgeoisie THE GROWTH of white-collar occupations in the 1960s and 1970s alters the long-standing isolation of the black bourgeoisie from the mainstream American society and economy.* A new occupational differentiation also appears, away from the traditional black professions of teaching and preaching toward engineering, business management, science, and technology...
...There is also an influential annual, Opportunities for the Minority College Graduate (now in its 15th edition...
...The residents, largely Jewish and Italian people bound for the middle and upper-middle classes, left Newark, Paterson, New York City after World War II...
...is now partly recast as a journal concerned with black achievement of positions of power, so modifying its former obsession with high-society life styles...
...But that doesn't bother me...
...It influences bourgeois blacks in several ways...
...it alters the historical mode of racial or ethnic interaction...
...The study revealed much about the complexity of class-identity formation among the black bourgeoisie...
...IBM Corp...
...If seen as race-linked, they respond as liberals...
...a leading banker—Hughlyn Pierce...
...Such an alliance would offer the black bourgeoisie unique political opportunities...
...Yet the Frazier hypothesis continues to have weight...
...3 Current occupational data on blacks are elaborated in Diane Westcott, "Blacks in the 1970s," Monthly Labor Review, June 1982...
...Consequently, Negroes have "played" at conducting their schools, at running their businesses, and at practicing their professions...
...Where the pre-1960s associations, such as the National Negro Business League (founded in 1900), function protectively, shielding upperstrata blacks from the pressures of white supremacy and shoring up ghetto markets, the new associations function integratively—opening broad opportunities for upper-strata blacks throughout American economic and institutional life...
...Necessitarian liberalism causes middle-class and elite blacks to back public policies that are often rejected by bourgeois white ethnics and that sometimes even oppose their own selfinterest if viewed in class terms...
...Some 49 affluent black families in Chicago's Pill Hill section (formerly a community of white doctors) and 145 average middle-class black families in Evanston participated in the SampsonMilam study...
...Thus the context of middle-class and elite identity for Afro-Americans today is quite variegated...
...Today as in the past, the liberal/left sectors of American life remain the black bourgeoisie's natural allies in the struggle against racism...
...But here the similarities between old and new black bourgeoisie end, for there are some fundamental differences...
...See also Richard Freeman, Black Elite: The New Market for Highly Educated Black Americans (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976), pp...
...If this development persists, it could produce for the black bourgeoisie a kind of alliance with its heretofore unavailable white counterparts...
...George Brown, promoted to executive vice-president at Grumman Energy Systems, Inc...
...Arlington Heights, Ill...
...Since the early 1970s, the black bourgeoisie has been forging a new nationwide network of organizations.' And the new black political "cadre," nearly 6,000 elected officials (compared to 125 in 1960), is also fashioning a network of organizations.' Though all-black in composition, like the pre-1960s associations, the new ones have a different relationship to America's power elite...
...the Evanston families had a $19,236 mean income and were 21 percent college-educated...
...On some issues, upper-strata blacks will converge with upper-strata whites...
...These family experiences function as countervailing forces, pulling class perceptions among upper-strata blacks into a race-linked direction while their expanding inclusion in mainstream power structures propels them in another direction...
...When asked, "Do you feel a special obligation to try and help poor blacks," some 80 percent of the Pill Hill families said they "agree" or "strongly agree" (16 percent agree, 64 percent strongly...
...The old black bourgeoisie's political economy was essentially ghetto-bound--while the new black bourgeoisie's political economy is essentially national...
...It could open what might be called transethnic or transracial leadership leverage at many levels of American politics, with blacks emerging as sustained spokespersons for whites' interests and vice versa...
...9.2 percent of women health technicians (black males 8.4 percent...
...It might be argued that the new black bourgeoisie's more difficult evolution immunizes it against this tradition...
...and 0.7 percent of black college-trained males were entering architecture compared to 0.5 percent of white collegetrained males.' This occupational shift reflects a fundamental fact: upper-strata blacks are employed increasingly not in ghetto but in national job markets-in national (white) banks, insurance companies, retail firms, industries, universities, Table 2 Percent distribution of employed persons by occupation, race, and sex, 1972 and 1980 [Numbers in thousands] Bleck men White men Black women White women Occupation 1972 1980 1972 1980 1972 1980 1972 1980 Total employed 4,347 4,704 45,769 55,033 3,406 4,394 27,305 36,043 Percent 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 Professional and technical 6.4 8.2 14.3 16.1 10.6 13.8 14.9 17.0 Managers and administrators 4.0 5.6 14.0 15.3 2.1 3.4 4.8 7.4 Sales 1.7 2.5 6.6 6.4 2.5 2.8 7.8 7.3 Clerical 7.6 8.4 6.8 6.2 22.7 29.3 36.2 36.0 Craft and kindred workers 14.8 17.6 21.2 21.5 9 1.4 1.3 1.9 Operatives, except transport 17.4 15.5 12.1 10.7 14.8 13.8 12.5 9.4 Transport equipment operatives 10.3 9.9 5.7 5.4 .4 .7 .4 .7 Nonfarm laborers 17.4 13.0 6.8 6.5 .9 1.4 .9 1.2 Farm and farm managers 1.0 .4 3.4 2.6 - - .4 .4 Farm laborers and foremen 3.5 2.4 1.7 1.5 1.1 .5 1.5 1.3 Private household workers .3 .1 - - 16.4 7.4 3.0 1.9 Other service workers 15.8 16.4 7.3 7.9 27.6 25.4 16.2 16.0 Source: Monthly Labor Review, June 1982, p. 30...
...WE HAVE NO BETTER SOURCE for documenting the occupational and social dispersion of upperstrata blacks than the journal Black Enterprise, the first black multimillion-dollar entrepreneurial magazine (circulation 250,000), owned by Earl Graves...
...the new black bourgeoisie, while still confronting residual racism, takes over much of the professionalization and mobility dynamics of the white bourgeoisie...
Vol. 30 • January 1983 • No. 1
