Black Bourgeoisie

Author:	Frazier, Edward Franklin
Binding:	Softcover
List Price:	$16.00
Our Price:	$2.75 USD
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Additional Info
Overview

ISBN:	9780684832418
Publisher:	Free Press
Language:	English
Page Count:	264
Publication Date:	2/1/1997
Size:	8.44" l x 5.55" w x 1.01"
Series:	N/A

Category	Subject
Social Science	African American

When it was first published in 1957, Black Bourgeoisie was simultaneously revered and reviled because it cast a critical eye on one of the cornerstones of the black American community - its middle class. In the 1950s, before the recent burgeoning of the black middle class, Frazier identified the problems that occur in the aftermath of "black-flight" from the inner cities and black communities of the rural South. The book's relevance has only increased as over the years the divide between increasingly prosperous middle-class blacks and their increasingly desperate "underclass" brethren has grown into an almost uncrossable chasm. By tracing the evolution of the black bourgeoisie, from the segregated South to the integrated North, Frazier shows how the blacks who comprised the middle class have lost their cohesion by moving out of black communities and attempting to integrate white communities. The result of this integration "is an anomalous bourgeois class with no identity, built on self-sustaining myths of black business and society, silently undermined by a collective, debilitating inferiority complex." Frazier hoped to dispel the image of blacks as having thrown off the psychological and economical ravages of slavery to become economically powerful, because according to Frazier, it was a lie that was damaging the community.