Black Picket Fences: Privileges and Peril Among the Black Middle Class

Journal of Negro Education, The, Fall 1999 by Gregory, Toni A

Black Picket Fences: Privileges and Peril Among the Black Middle Class, by Mary Pattillo-McCoy. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999. 276 pp. $25.00, cloth. Reviewed by Toni A. Gregory, The Fielding Institute for Educational Leadership and Change.

In Black Picket Fences, Mary Pattillo-McCoy, an assistant professor of sociology and African American Studies and faculty fellow at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University, provides poignant commentary on the inherent duplicity of being Black and middle class in the United States. Crafted from data she collected during three-and-a-half years of ethnographic research, her work is a study of a Black middle-class neighborhood on the south side of Chicago. Central to the book are the experiences of the youth of that community, told through their stories, which bring to life the hopes, dreams, fears, challenges and contradictions of living in a Black middle-class community. Unfortunately, Pattillo-McCoy's largely unsupported commentary overshadows these stories-the major focus of the book-however, once introduced (not until chapter three), the stories are powerful indeed.

Black Picket Fences demonstrates its author's breadth of knowledge about the issues and arguments involved in the study of African American communities, particularly Black middle-class neighborhoods. Pattillo-McCoy's understanding of the complexities of conducting research in and about the black community is evident. Citing much of the primary literature in the field, her treatise on the interplay between race, class, structural inequality and social injustice in Black communities is woven throughout the book. She concludes that inequities and segregation still exist in the nation's middle-class neighborhoods, but points out that Black middle-class neighborhoods are much more diverse in their class distinctions than are White middle-class neighborhoods-that is, they carry a much greater burden of poverty and typically include a higher percentage of poor residents.

Inherent in this work's premise is a comparison of life in a Black middle-class community with that in comparable White communities. Although Pattillo-McCoy's intention is clearly to describe the experiences of residents in one specific Black middle-class neighborhood, the presumed comparison between the experiences of the residents of the neighborhood and their White middle-class counterparts remains unsubstantiated due to the lack of specific data from a comparable White neighborhood. Furthermore, key terms and concepts are used indiscriminately throughout the book, thereby creating some inconsistency and a lack of clarity. It is also unfortunate that much of the commentary and most of the examples used to substantiate it are derived from the work of others rather than from the author's research data. The book falls prey to one of the primary challenges involved in converting doctoral research into a marketable text: most of the important analysis connecting the cavernous stretches between data and conclusions is omitted.

Despite its shortcomings, Black Picket Fences provides a useful description of what it means to be Black and middle class in the United States. Overall, it provides a rich perspective and noteworthy commentary on the Black middle class, and raises important questions about the continuing struggle for equality.