Pattillo-McCoy

In a community on Chicago's South Side, Mary Pattillo-McCoy (IPR-Sociology) studied an area virtually ignored by social scientists: the black middle class.

Pattillo-McCoy explores the choices and circumstances facing residents - especially youth - of one black middle-class neighborhood in her recent book, Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril Among the Black Middle Class (University of Chicago Press, 1999). She conducted her research during the three years she lived in that neighborhood she calls "Groveland." Her ground-breaking study shows the black middle-class experience is a segregated one, driven by racial discrimination.

Despite similar salaries and educational backgrounds, the black middle class doesn't enjoy the same amenities as residents of equivalent white neighborhoods. "A neighborhood's racial makeup is frequently a proxy for the things that really count‹quality of schools, security, appreciation of property values, (and) political clout," she explains.

White flight to outlying suburbs created racially segregated middle-class neighborhoods. By their location adjacent to low-income neighborhoods, black middle-class neighborhoods act as buffer zones to the nicer white middle-class neighborhoods and thus absorb the gangs, drugs, and lower quality schools and businesses from the low-income areas. "African Americans, like other groups, have always tried to translate upper-class mobility into geographic mobility, but remain physically and psychologically close to the poorer neighborhoods they leave behind," she writes. Also, businesses and the mass media glamorize low-income neighborhoods by creating styles that lull Groveland youth into a "ghetto trance," a term Pattillo-McCoy uses to describe rebellious and sometimes delinquent lifestyles.

The lives of many Groveland youth straddle the paths of deviance and success. Growing up, they make use of neighborhood networks to finish high school, become familiar with the work world, and get jobs. Many have parents who graduated from college, and they too wish to earn degrees. But the outcomes of these dreams differ. Some parents enroll their children in Catholic schools or academically demanding magnet schools, and many of these youth go on to college and graduate. Yet others leave college after one or two years, unable to cope with the financial strain or to handle their newfound responsibilities and freedom. Some move home and enter jobs with little potential for mobility.

Home life in black middle-class neighborhoods also differs from white middle-class. Communities like Groveland tolerate flexible family forms that result from single-parent households, adult children who never leave the home, daughters who give birth out of wedlock, and sons or sons-in-law who contribute to the family's resources with money from selling drugs.

Residents wrestle with their feelings toward individual gang members because they find it hard to differentiate between gang members as drug dealers and as neighbors. Residents have known gang members since they were children and in many cases are friends with their parents. While the local gang leader runs a drug trade outside of Groveland, he also raises a family and desires stability in the neighborhood. Residents consider him a "good citizen" for using his influence to keep drug dealing and violence out of their neighborhood.

The complexity of the issues shows the importance of studying black middle class neighborhoods and the need for social policies that address them. Pattillo-McCoy urges urban poverty researchers to realize that black middle-class areas like Groveland are contained within segregated black communities.

Researchers need to advance a "radical agenda" to promote access among the black middle class to better jobs, social services, and their neighborhoods' physical infrastructure, Pattillo-McCoy says.

More broadly, she concludes, social policy is needed that maintains affirmative action, ends residential segregation, and increases race-targeted antipoverty programs, specifically to help poor blacks.