Black Picket Fences, Second Edition: Privilege and Peril Among the Black Middle Class

First published in 1999, Mary Pattillo's Black Picket Fences explores an American demographic group too often ignored by both scholars and the media: the black middle class. Nearly fifteen years later, this book remains a groundbreaking study of a group still underrepresented in the academic and public spheres. The result of living for three years in "Groveland," a black middle-class neighborhood on Chicago's South Side, Black Picket Fences explored both the advantages the black middle class has and the boundaries they still face. Despite arguments that race no longer matters, Pattillo showed a different reality, one where black and white middle classes remain separate and unequal.
Stark, moving, and still timely, the book is updated for this edition with a new epilogue by the author that details how the neighborhood and its residents fared in the recession of 2008, as well as new interviews with many of the same neighborhood residents featured in the original. Also included is a new foreword by acclaimed University of Pennsylvania sociologist Annette Lareau.


Author: Mary Pattillo
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 07/02/2013
Pages: 352
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.95lbs
Size: 9.00h x 5.90w x 0.80d
ISBN13: 9780226021195
ISBN10: 022602119X
BISAC Categories:
- Social Science | Ethnic Studies | American | African American & Black Studies
- Social Science | Social Classes & Economic Disparity
- Biography & Autobiography | Cultural, Ethnic & Regional | General

About the Author
Mary Pattillo is the Harold Washington Professor of Sociology and African American studies at Northwestern University. She is the author of Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and Class in the City, also published by the University of Chicago Press, and coeditor of Imprisoning America: The Social Effects of Mass Incarceration.