Submitted for coursework in 2019, lightly redacted
It is common today to become misty-eyed about the old black ghetto, where doctors and lawyers lived next door to meatpackers and steelworkers, who themselves lived next door to prostitutes and the unemployed. This segregationist nostalgia ignores the actual conditions endured by the people living there—vermin and arson, for instance—and ignores the fact that the old ghetto was premised on denying black people privileges enjoyed by white Americans.
--Ta-Nehisi Coates, “A Case for Reparations,” 2014
“One of the great things that the White world does not know, but I think I do know, is that black people are just like everybody else. One has used the myth of negro and the myth of color to pretend and to assume that you are dealing essentially with something exotic, bizarre, and practically according to human laws unknown. Alas, it is not true. We are also mercenaries, dictators, murderers, liars. We are human, too. What is crucial here, is that unless we can manage to establish some kind of dialogue between those people whom I pretend, have paid for the American dream, and those other people who have not achieved it, we will be in terrible trouble.”
--James Baldwin, Debate with William F. Buckley, Jr., 1965
E. Franklin Frazier, Howard graduate, sociologist, and once head of the American Sociological Association (1948), originally published Bourgeoisie Noire first in France in 1955. When two years later the English version reached American shelves, it immediately sparked a backlash, primarily among the very class on which he had leveled his critique. Frazier’s sketch—based on census records, his own previous ethnographic studies of African American families, his own general observations, and a survey of newspapers and further secondary sources—bring into question the reality of the Black middle class during the mid-20th century. Frazier’s opinions about the prospects for Black business had once been optimistic after a visit to Denmark in the earlier part of the century, yet he quickly hardened against what he saw as an imaginative and self-congratulatory self-portrait of Black wealth, respectability, and achievement. It comes as no surprise then, that his first order of business is to frame his study of the Black Bourgeoisie with a brisk narrative of the Atlantic Slave Trade (supported by the excellent scholarship of John Hope Franklin) that quickly moves to a discussion in which light-skinned, enslaved mulattos and dark-skinned, enslaved African Americans find themselves competing for scarce resources in southern plantations. Frazier’s descriptive foreshadowing is fertile soil for subsequent chapters that critique Black institutions for cozying up to predominately white interests, which include churches, secret societies, schools, small businesses and newspapers.
It is within these latter chapters that the ink in Frazier’s acerbic commentary becomes washed in acid. His chapter on Black businesses, entitled “Negro Business: A Social Myth,” explores, essentially in Marxist terms, the Black Middle Class’ inability to own or control significant means of production. This chapter is meant as a wake-up call to the real and dire situation of African Americans, which directly contradicts the hopeful self-help rhetoric of in the Fourth Atlanta Conference on “The Negro in Business” of 1898 (131). Instead, he argues that within a segregated system, “the black bourgeoisie derives its income almost entirely from white-collar and professional occupations which give it a privileged status within the isolated Negro community.” In addition to his critiques of racialized capitalism and the inferiority complex brought on by a world that reinforced status-seeking behavior, Frazier embraced the political climate of the younger generation, some arguing that Malcom X’s “House Negro – Field Negro” rhetoric derived from this work.[1]
While Frazier was heavily critiqued for being the scholar-harbinger of the Moynihan Report, his legacy remains poignant. In recent years, developing Black capital has seen a resurgence in mainstream discourse. Frazier should be credited not just for his sharp critiques, but for a call for an honest evaluation of where the Black Middle Class stands. His focus exclusively on Black communities eschews the comparative model of Ethnic Studies programs and places him squarely within the Black Studies fields. For scholars researching segregation, ethnic enclaves, and ghettoization, Frazier should be a required point of departure.
[1] https://www.blackagendareport.com/pioneering-critique-black-misleadership-class-e-franklin-fraziers-black-bourgeoisie