The Black Professional Middle Class

Race, Class, and Community in the Post-Civil Rights Era

Through an in-depth case study of the black professional middle class in Oakland, this book provides an analysis of the experiences of black professionals in the workplace, community, and local politics. Brown shows how overlapping dynamics of class formation and racial formation have produced historically powerful processes of what he terms "racialized class formation," resulting in a distinct (and internally differentiated) entity, not merely a subset of a larger professional middle class.