Over the weekend, we went to a barbecue at a neighbor's home. Most of the guests were members of our neighbor's families. We had previously met few of them. They are a strong Black clan. On the husband's side, seven brothers (and no sisters); on the wife's side, five sisters (and no brothers). The families are strongly middle class. They are proudly middle class, too, in the sense that being middle class requires hard work and they are proud of the effort they have put forth. They are married families with children inside the marriages. Of course there have been missteps and confusions. One of our neighbor's daughters living at home has an infant child. Our neighbor has been active in conservative Black groups, such as Promise Keepers. We were introduced to some of the children and were told about more. All of them, who we learned about, are attending private school, from the elementary level to college. Some of the schools are religious schools. These families have made clear choices about values.
We traded child-raising stories, home buying stories, and job stories. Our lives were parallel with some of our neighbor's family. We started with small condos, moved up to larger condos, and finally moved to roomy, free-standing houses. They have obtained executive and professional careers. They and other Black middle class two-parent-present families represent about 15% to 25% of the Black population.
Several interesting values came up in the conversations carried in the evening. While comparing home-buying paths, one family talked about their reaction to the Los Angeles riots in 1992 in response to the Rodney King beatings. They lived in LA at the time. They knew immediately they wanted to move out of LA. The disagreement between husband and wife was between moving out of LA to a nearby city or moving out of California altogether (the wife's desire). Family ties kept them in the region. They moved to Glendale. Their choices illustrate the social problem with the Black lower-class community, that we have discussed in previous articles. The Black middle-class does not want to live with the Black working class without civil order and security. The consequent absence of a middle class is the absence of leadership and organizing abilities in the central city Black community.
The other interesting moment came the next evening. Our neighbor has two attractive daughters, both over twenty-one, not married, and living at home. Whom do they date? Both women clearly want to date Black men, but there are few Black men of their class. So the young men they date represent the working class Black male, in clothing, job opportunities, popular culture tastes, and family prospects. It is symptomatic of this situation that the one daughter did not marry the father of her child. For her birthday, one of the women had a party with many friends and attentive young men. The party was decorous; but, ah, for the music, playing on the back patio. For hours that evening, the music audible next door at our home, we had to listen to the female-exploitation lyrics of rap music. The lyrics repeated, unhappily and most noticeably, motha-fucka, motha-fucka, motha-fucka. I'm sure that sorting out their futures is not an easy dilemma for these young women.
(Revised.)
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