Preface

Class is a weird, weird thing for black Americans. Maybe I should only speak for myself, though recently published essays about what might be summed up as class ambivalence, one in as storied a venue as the New York Times, suggest black people’s strange feelings about class, and especially class privilege, run wide and deep.1 Among those of us—especially those of us grown folks—who can presently be counted as middle class, very few have lived inside that location in an uncomplicated, comfortable way since birth, and even fewer can point to a long legacy of ancestors so positioned. Instead, in each generation some of us, via education, aspiration, hard work (our own, and our parents’) and luck, find ourselves much more comfortable than our parents were—and some of those who started out in relative stability fall out of their family’s class position, at rates much higher than for white Americans.2 For many of us, middle-class status is neither a given nor a permanent status, and it is only rarely bolstered by the kind of generational wealth that would make it unnecessary to, say, borrow significant money for one’s education, accumulate consumer debt, or even live paycheck to paycheck.

But this describes only black folks’ complex relationship to the economic matter of class. We also tend to have a thorny relationship to other kinds of class markers, markers that are hardly acknowledged, at least not openly, to be about class at all, even as they have the potential to shape how we are perceived and treated and to affect the resources to which we gain access under this nation’s system of white supremacy. An anecdote might illustrate this better than any list of statistics. For much of graduate school I wore my hair cut very short, nearly bald—about two millimeters away from Danai Gurira’s General Okoye. When I let my hair begin to grow back in my final year there, a black woman administrator I liked said, upon seeing me with hair for the first time, “Candice! I didn’t know you had naturally curly hair!” I talked with friends about this later, trying to understand her pleased, incredulous tone. As they pointed out, she’d said it as if my hair texture were a talent or skill I’d been keeping hidden, like a secret ability to play the cello, or perhaps practice telekinesis. And while her comment was made in passing, and likely nothing she would even remember saying later, it was clear in that moment that my status had somehow improved, in her eyes, simply because my hair (for the record, generally a 4A on Andre Walker’s scale, with a few 3B/C sections mixed in) was less kinky than she must have expected, based on my coloring and features.3

This scenario captures one piece of what this book is about—the way class status can be, for black people, in the body in particular, phenotypical ways. But that tells only part of the book’s story. I make a larger argument, in these pages, that narrative representations of black class privilege in the late twentieth century, even those that pay little attention to skin color, hair texture, and the like, are particularly interested in the body—and not simply because “class,” for black people, is always closely related to, and often ambivalently projected through, the embodied identity categories of race and gender. This narrative preoccupation with the physical, or corporeal, also reflects the way that these fictional stories of class privilege are disrupted by a visceral sense of racialized vulnerability, such that even the most privileged black subjects are never quite insulated from racism. Class privilege is, in these texts, a complicated and even paradoxical matter: never as simple, or as safe, as it might first appear.

Class has never been a simple matter for me, either. Maybe for that reason, it has since childhood been a source of fascination and no small confusion. After my parents separated when I was nine, my mother—an alumna of Tuskegee and the first in her family to go to college—raised me on her own in the Midwest, moving us from the East Coast back to the Ohio city where my parents had met, years before, because she was able to return to an old job there. We were nowhere near our sprawling working-class family in Houston, though we had stopped there for a while on the way to our new life away from my volatile father; my Texas cousins told me with no particular malice that I “talked proper.” I am an only child, and I was lucky enough never to want for any genuine necessity, never to be hungry or homeless—my mother, whose degree was in biochemistry, was always able to work, in various kinds of modestly salaried, middle-class jobs (medical writer; drafter of abstracts for scientific publications; SSI claims adjuster) that kept the bills paid. But I remember different sorts of what I only now, when comparing my childhood to that of my own children, recognize to be deprivations—wearing mostly thrift store clothing; not having cable, or even color, television; and living in a rental apartment, not a house.4 Thinking back, it would be overstating the case to say that I consciously felt myself on the outside of any sort of class barrier, looking in, but I do remember noticing the differences between how we lived and how some of my mother’s (also black) friends from graduate school or the office did, in comfortable, suburban houses, where you could take your dirty towels down to the basement instead of, as we did, carting them to a nearby laundromat.

Yet I also remember, clearly, that the apartments we rented were decidedly not in “the ’hood”—like many other middle-class black people, my mother used what financial and cultural capital she had to keep us in spaces she perceived as safe, which in Columbus, Ohio, in the 1980s, typically meant moderately integrated but majority-white areas on the north side of town. We never made our home in truly wealthy enclaves—those areas were outside of the city proper and not accessible by public transportation, and we didn’t always have a car, yet another example of the precariousness of our middle-class status. Instead, we lived in townhouse apartment complexes set on the fringes of quiet neighborhoods not far from the bus route, where folks who had worked for the telephone company or the post office for twenty years tended patches of lawn in front of modest colonial or ranch-style homes. This is all to say: I didn’t exactly grow up poor, but I didn’t have many of the things that I associated then or now with being truly middle class, either. No single “class” category has ever felt like my home, an experience that is certainly not unique, especially for black folks, but for me has become an angle of vision on the world that I can’t quite shake. This sense of liminality traveled with me to Spelman College—a place where I finally saw the scale, and variety, of what both “blackness” and “the black middle class” could mean—and has continued to shape my thinking about the very notion of class, which has always seemed, to me, to be about much more than the money one has in the bank.

I once, in my mother’s hearing, talked about growing up “not exactly middle class,” and she later asked me, concern in her voice, whether I really felt that way—didn’t I think she had raised me to be middle class, at least in terms of values? The answer to this question is yes, but the question itself gets at the other part of what I am trying to do in Black Bourgeois—that is, to think through class as performance, and black class privilege in particular, as informed by culture. It seems to me that the ways that we signal class positioning—via behavior, consumption, or style—and the stories we tell ourselves about what that positioning means matter at least as much as the numbers on our balance sheets. Not because numbers are irrelevant—they clearly are not—but because those numbers tell only some of our specific class stories. And they are always already skewed against us by structural factors that we cannot control. News outlets reported in 2018, for instance, that women of color in academia make sixty-seven cents for every dollar that white men make—just the most recent in an avalanche of data that point to the persistence of both income and wealth inequality in the United States.5 Given such factors, it makes sense that “class privilege” might mean something more than simply money for black people.

My project in this book has been, then, to unpack some of the complexities of class privilege for black Americans by considering how texts from the post–Civil Rights era through the turn of the twenty-first century represent the embodied dilemma of being both black and middle class. This dilemma is one I know I will continue to ponder even as I send the manuscript off to press, because I am continually reminded—by a specious arrest at Starbucks or a microaggression in the office—of the ways that “privilege” is often paradoxically fragmented and incomplete for black people, and not just because of financial pressures. I wonder if, as Patricia Williams suggests in the epigraph, my persistent “anxiety about propriety and place, race and class” operates as its own kind of class credential.6 Like her, I am “hopelessly bourgeois” because I continue to be intrigued, or haunted, by where I come from and the place to which I’ve tenuously arrived. Like so many other members of the “black middle class,” the complicated distance between those points stays with me, its own kind of hidden talent—an ever present reminder that seems to reside in my very flesh.