In the United States, the black middle class consists of African Americans who have middle-class status within the American class structure. It is an occurrence that predominately began to develop in the early 1960s, when the ongoing African-American Civil Rights Movement led to the outlawing of de jure racial segregation. The gains accrued by the Civil Rights Era is strongly correlated with the emergence of a new black middle class.
Despite modest increases in wealth, the black middle class still faces societal and institutional forms of racism and discrimination, which constrains the upward mobility of African Americans. These societal and institutional forms of racism and discrimination are reflected in the racial wealth gap, housing discrimination, residential segregation, the achievement gap, and more. Moreover, the historical implications of slavery and marginalization has made race a proxy for disadvantage, which many African Americans face even despite achieving professional and educational success.
Read more about Black Middle Class: Definition of Middle Class, History of Black Middle Class in The United States, Challenges of The Black Middle Class, African Immigrants and The Black Middle Class, Poverty For African Americans
Famous quotes containing the words middle class, black, middle and/or class:
“If one really wishes to know how justice is administered in a country, one does not question the policemen, the lawyers, the judges, or the protected members of the middle class. One goes to the unprotected—those, precisely, who need the laws’s protection most!—and listens to their testimony.”
—James Baldwin (1924–1987)
“Three young rats with black felt hats,
Three young ducks with white straw flats,”
—Unknown. Three Young Rats (l. 1–2)
“Manhattan. Sometimes from beyond the skyscrapers, across the hundreds of thousands of high walls, the cry of a tugboat finds you in your insomnia in the middle of the night, and you remember that this desert of iron and cement is an island.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“There might be a class of beings, human once, but now to humanity invisible, for whose scrutiny, and for whose refined appreciation of the beautiful, more especially than for our own, had been set in order by God the great landscape-garden of the whole earth.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)