Obama & The Black Elite

When President Barack Obama appointed Valerie Jarrett as his senior advisor and Desiree Rogers as White House social secretary, there was, among the mainstream media, a bit of muffled gasping about from where on earth such designer-clad doyennes might have emerged. In what hidden universe do black people exist who can actually distinguish a fish knife from a shoe horn? And are there more of them?

The phenomenon of a black upper class has always been complicated, ambivalent. Often the descendents of “house slaves,” some significant percentage grew up imitating the manners, mores, and various condescensions of white plantation society—including setting up private clubs and exclusionary networks. More recently, the ranks of the black upper middle class have been increased with beneficiaries of the civil rights movement–with people such as Barack and Michelle Obama, who represent a generation able to take advantage of increased access to jobs and schools once off limits. This new mobility has not altogether erased some of the clubbishness and snob appeal of older black organizations, 

however. There are still fault lines and hidden hierarchies within black social life

For those whose only exposure to upper class African American social organizations may be the black student organization on one’s college or grad school campus, well, brace yourselves: there’s a world of black debutantes out there, and they mean to do serious, social-climbing business, the wheels of their black BMWs and silver Mercedes Benzes sinking up to their plantinum hubcaps in the soft white sand of the beaches on Martha’s Vineyard, the North Fork of Long Island, and the islands off the coast of South Carolina.

Colson Whitehead’s novel, Sag Harbor, reveals a glimpse of this Cosby-inflected world of strivers, arrivistes and “black boys with summer houses.” These relatively well-off African Americans come largely from the ranks of what the novel’s narrator describes as “the magic seven”: doctors, dentists, lawyers, preachers, teachers, nurses, and undertakers. This is the world that those African Americans not part of such networks sometimes refer to, with a dismissive sad sigh, as “boogie, ” which is a class reference seemingly unknown to most white people.

The New York Times, writing about Whitehead, spelled the word, with utter, and utterly cringe-worthy, uninitiated innocence: “bourgie.”

So, a little background for those terrified that the ship of state is about to be steered toward the shoals of Rush Limbaugh’s wildest fears: it may come as a surprise that the black middle class is just that, middle class. It is conformist, pleasantly centrist, relatively conservatively Christian, overweeningly upwardly
mobile and generally better (if more anxiously) dressed than its white
counterparts.

The media often speaks of “the black middle class” as though it were a solid singularity that includes any dark-skinned person with a job or an education—from bicycle messengers to Oprah Winfrey. Likewise, any black person without a permanent 9-5 job is tossed into “the underclass.” This is in stark contrast to the way “middle class” is applied to white citizens, where it connotes a specific income
level lodged above the “temporarily unemployed” and the working class and just
beneath the upper-middle class, with the wealthy and the super-rich above that. 

In other words, popular depictions frequently suppress the political presence of a large black working class, as well as a black upper-middle class, to say nothing of those wealthy African Americans who are bankers or industrialists or computer geeks rather than just movie stars or sports figures.

Source: The Daily Beast 

PATRICIA J. WILLIAMS