Summary Of Blue-Chip Black By Karyn Lacy

Karyn Lacy’s ethnography, Blue-Chip Black: Race, Class, and Status in the New Black Middle Class, aims to reveal “how different groups of middle-class blacks make their identity choices.” In examining the process of identity construction for middle-class suburban blacks, she incorporates spatial analysis and the intersection of race and class in order to highlight intragroup divisions. In doing so, Lacy argues that the intersection of race and class influences the identity construction of the black middle-class in terms of how members “define themselves” and the distinctions they draw against others. Her attention to the cultural components of black middle-class identity and focus on this understudied group make her work successful, as it challenges …show more content…
She attempts to define the black middle-class as it has evolved over the course of history: prior to the 1960s, black middle-class position was based on “the status that education conferred,” and the post-integration definition of the black middle-class comprised limited opportunity, including mainly working-class occupations, a phenomenon evident in the study of the black middle-class by sociologist Bruce Haynes in the suburb of Runyon Heights. Today, however, Lacy suggests a new definition of the black middle-class that differentiates it from the lower middle-class—a suggestion undergirded by the existence of variance in “socioeconomic indicators, lifestyle decisions, and…spatial patterns of middle-class …show more content…
Lacy finds that this is likely to occur while middle-class blacks are house-hunting, as revealed by her undercover real estate experiment posing as a home buyer. To create public identities, middle-class blacks also perform improvisation (autonomously negotiating race) and script-switching (demonstrating knowledge of middle-class lifestyles and indicating social position) as they move in between black and white arenas. These tactics of impression management evoke sociologist Erving Goffman’s concept of dramaturgy in which social life is analyzed in the context of stage production (1959). Furthermore, the artificial public identities crafted by middle-class blacks represent a form of cultural capital employed by members to manipulate social interactions to their advantage. Lacy proposes strategic assimilation to describe how middle-class blacks navigate the dual realm of the white mainstream and the black community using racial and class-based identities. Middle-class blacks in the study also sought to maintain ties with the black community. In contrast to the other two neighborhoods, Lakeview blacks had to actively seek out black social organizations as a result of the suburb’s majority-white makeup. Finally, suburban