Tough article to excerpt
Quote of note:
Fifty years after its publication, Black Bourgeoisie reads as both overstated and prescient. Frazier exaggerated black middle-class capitulation to the Jim Crow racial order, and underestimated the black bourgeoisie s willingness to join with black working class people to bring down that order in the face of violent white resistance. Yet his attention to the ways that some successful African Americans put limits on the black freedom agenda holds important lessons for how historians might trace the roots of black class divisions, and how contemporary commentators might begin to make sense of figures such as Condoleezza Rice or Bill Cosby.Black Bourgeoisie, seen in its Cold War context, also reminds us of the extent to which the moment of antiracist promise at the victory over fascism in 1945 has receded in recent history into burgeoning prison construction expanding racialized poverty on a global scale.
Author: Franklin Frazier
ASIN: 0684832410
Format: Paperback
List Price: $13.00
Amazon.com Price: $9.75
March 1 , 2005
John Munro
With last year's semicentennial commemoration of the Brown vs. Board of Education decision, we have entered the season of 50-year anniversaries of the African American civil rights movement. 2005 marks 50 years since the Montgomery bus boycott projected the black freedom movement onto the national consciousness. Perhaps less noteworthy, 1955 is also when E. Franklin Frazier published the original edition of his notorious Black Bourgeoisie. It s not obvious what we should make of the concurrence of these two events, nor is any connection between the two immediately apparent. As everyone knows, Rosa Parks s refusal to relinquish her seat on a Montgomery bus galvanized all classes in the black community to work together to set in motion the beginning of the end of American apartheid. In light of this manifestation of racial unity against segregation, Frazier s brief against the black middle class appears ill timed and rather out of touch. But read with its Cold War context in mind, Black Bourgeoisie Frazier's indulgences in caricature notwithstanding serves as an important reminder that at mid century, while pathways in the struggle against racism were being cleared, other routes to liberation were being sealed off. Half a century later, we are still living with the consequences of that paradox.
...Frazier's indictment of the black middle class hinges on his juxtaposition between the world of reality and the world of make believe, which structures his two-part argument. Frazier describes the black bourgeoisie as white-collar workers whose education orients them away from the African American working class, and encourages an emulation of the white propertied classes. Reaffirming his earlier work on cultural survivals, Frazier argues that the black bourgeoisie has been uprooted from its racial tradition and as a consequence has no cultural roots in either the Negro or the white world.
Having abandoned black workers, the black middle class in Frazier's view use their new found pecuniary success to indulge in a false sense of superiority behind the segregated veil of the larger society. As one of the most powerful sectors of black business, the black press claims to speak for the entire African American community while only advancing bourgeois interests within it, one example being editorial timidity when covering international colonial issues. In the end, unwilling to face the economic underpinnings of segregation, members of the black middle class feel acute insecurity, anxiety, and self-hatred in their unfulfilled quest for inclusion into the white world of property.
