By Cara Jepsen
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Encouraged by Wilson, Pattillo-McCoy was also gathering data for her dissertation on special difficulties faced by the black middle class. She had become interested in the subject after observing the experiences of her childhood friends from Milwaukee. “Some had children young, were sporadically employed, or were lured into the drug trade, while others had gone to college, or worked steady jobs and earned enough to start a family,” she later wrote in her book based on the dissertation, Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril Among the Black Middle Class. “We started pretty much at the same place, but we ended up running the full gamut of outcomes.” The research for Wilson’s study further convinced her that “there was a story to tell…about black middle-class kids like my friends, a story that was not simply about growing apart.”
Groveland, a neighborhood of brick bungalows on quiet streets, boasts an active community and a stable population that votes in much higher numbers than that of the city as a whole. “They understand the history behind the fight to get the ballot, and people who came up from the south are not going to throw that away,” says Pattillo-McCoy. “They understand the rewards of being politically involved.” Despite strong civic pride, however, she found that young residents faced serious difficulties and temptations. Two chapters of her book are devoted to personal stories–a man who flirted with gang membership and now works two jobs to make ends meet, and a young woman with a college degree who owns a catering business and lives at home. In another chapter, “Nike’s Reign,” Pattillo-McCoy analyzes the history and significance of clothing as a status symbol; she says after a while she found herself noticing people’s shoes as soon as she met them. In one passage, a woman compares her five-month-old infant’s Nike collection to that of a neighbor’s baby. “My friend Shauna, her boyfriend [is] not there for her. So she can’t really, she buy her baby gym shoes like once a month. [Whereas] Tim been here for five months and got seven pair of gym shoes….My friends, you know, they might buy they kids shoes once a month. I feel like, you know, some of ’em are under me, you know.” Other subjects talk frankly about selling drugs to be able to pay for shoes and expensive clothing.
Her findings contrast those in Wilson’s influential 1978 book, The Declining Significance of Race. He concluded that socioeconomics had at least as much to do with poverty as race, believing that middle-class African-Americans would soon enjoy economic and social parity with their white counterparts if they continued to make inroads in education and move to integrated neighborhoods. In subsequent years he came to place more importance on race. But according to Pattillo-McCoy, the damage had been done. “That really helped to turn social scientists’ attention away from that group, thinking that they were OK.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Dan Machnik.
