Does the Black Middle Class Exist And Are We Members makes two contributions into the research of the black middle class. First, it explores how Black South Africans conceptualize middle classness. Second, it demonstrates how this conceptualization informs researchers’ social identity within the Black middle class.

First published in 1999, Mary Pattillo’s Black Picket Fences explores an American demographic group too often ignored by both scholars and the media: the black middle class. Nearly fifteen years later, this book remains a groundbreaking study of a group still underrepresented in the academic and public spheres. The result of living for three years in “Groveland,” a black middle-class neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side, Black Picket Fences explored both the advantages the black middle class has and the boundaries they still face. Despite arguments that race no longer matters, Pattillo showed a different reality, one where black and white middle classes remain separate and unequal. Stark, moving, and still timely, the book is updated for this edition with a new epilogue by the author that details how the neighborhood and its residents fared in the recession of 2008, as well as new interviews with many of the same neighborhood residents featured in the original. Also included is a new foreword by acclaimed University of Pennsylvania sociologist Annette Lareau.

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Drawing from stratification economics, intersectionality, and respectability politics, The Love Jones Cohort centers on the voices and lifestyles of members of the Black middle class who are single and living alone (SALA). While much has been written about both the Black middle class and the rise of singlehood, this book represents a first foray into bridging these two concepts. In studying these intersections, The Love Jones Cohort provides a more nuanced understanding of how race, gender, and class, coupled with social structures, shape five central lifestyle factors of Black middle-class adults who are SALA. The book explores how these Black adults define family and friends and decide on whether and how to pursue romantic relationships, articulate the ebbs and flows of being Black and middle class, select where to live and why, accumulate and disseminate wealth, and maintain overall health, well-being, and coping mechanisms.

In this edited book we are compelled to think about the convergences between the technological advances made possible by lockdowns brought on by the Covid-19 Pandemic and increased 4IR use in the South African context. The insights presented in this edited volume make a case that transformation of higher education scholarship cannot happen without making space for historically excluded knowers, thinking differently about historically marginalized knowledges and by constantly grappling with new developments and how they facilitate or encumber the transformation project. Consequently, Transforming Higher Education Scholarship After Covid-19 and in the Context of the 4th Industrial Revolution does a good job of illustrating how shifts towards the advancement of 4IR in the South African Higher Education sector impacted the transformation trajectory. In their efforts to reimagine universities in Africa into African universities the authors in this edited volume grapple with how race and gender intersect in making the experiences of Black women in the South African academy untenable. The chapters also contend for the significance of pluriversal knowledges by making a case for the place of Indigenous Knowledges Systems in building African universities. As we grapple with the changes the 4IR has on the world and the teaching and learning landscape, some of the chapters in this volume make a compelling argument for thinking both from a critical perspective about what the challenges the developments coming out of these technologies mean for South Africa and the continent as well as what possibilities for positive impact these tools bring. Transforming Higher Education Scholarship After Covid-19 and in the Context of the 4th Industrial Revolution, is timely and makes an important contribution to higher education transformation discourses.

This book analyses how racism and anti-racism affects Black British middle-class cultural consumption. In doing so, it challenges the dominant understanding of British middle-class identity and culture as being ‘beyond race’. Paying attention to the relationship between cultural capital and cultural repertoires, Meghji argues that there are three modes of black middle-class identity: strategic assimilation, ethnoracial autonomous, and class-minded. Individuals within each of these identity modes use specific cultural repertoires to organise their cultural consumption. Those employing strategic assimilation draw on repertoires of code-switching and cultural equity, consuming traditional middle-class culture to maintain equality with the white middle-class in levels of cultural capital. Ethnoracial autonomous individuals draw on repertoires of ‘browning’ and Afro-centrism, self-selecting traditional middle-class cultural pursuits they decode as ‘Eurocentric’ while showing a preference for cultural forms that uplift black diasporic histories and cultures. Lastly, class-minded individuals draw on repertoires of post-racialism and de-racialisation, polarising between ‘Black’ and middle-class cultural forms. Black middle class Britannia examines how such individuals display an unequivocal preference for the latter, lambasting other black people who avoid middle-class culture as being culturally myopic or culturally uncultivated.

EBONY is the flagship magazine of Johnson Publishing. Founded in 1945 by John H. Johnson, it still maintains the highest global circulation of any African American-focused magazine.