American Black Upper Class

American Black Upper Class

The Black American Upper Class consists of African American professionals in fields such as law, medicine, business and entertainment that have incomes that amount to $100,000 or more. This class, sometimes referred to as the black upper-middle-class or The black elite, represents less than 1 percent of the total black population in the United States. This group of African Americans has a history of organizations and activities that distinguish it from other classes within the black community as well as from the white upper class. Many of these traditions, which have persisted for several generations, are discussed in Lawrence Otis Graham’s 2000 book, Our Kind of People: Inside America’s Black Upper Class.

Scholarship on this class from a sociological perspective is generally traced to E. Franklin Frazier's Black Bourgeoisie ( first edition in English in 1957 translated from the 1955 French original).

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