Complicating the Narrative of Upward Mobility: Black Cultural Capital and Flexible Habitus among Middle-Class Blacks

• In Event: 2271 - National and International Perspectives on the Perceptions, Management, and Social Construction of Blackness

Abstract

Upward mobility in the U.S. context is often depicted as a progress through which individuals move up and out of lower status circumstances to join and embody a new social class or stratum. The individuals who are left behind in their community of origin failed to have the “right stuff” in the form of cultural practices, values, desire and motivation to succeed. In this article, the author examines how upward mobility is complicated when we incorporate an analysis of middle-class African Americans - those have been upwardly mobile and whose families have been middle class for some time. The different versions of habitus members of these groups exhibit and the types cultural and social capital they possess, can deploy and seek to reproduce. The author examines how, and if, this “up and out” framework of upward mobility maps onto the experiences of African Americans using data examining the parenting practices of middle and upper-middle-class African American mothers. This data suggests these mothers, both those that are upwardly mobile or whose families of origin have been middle class for some time, work to retain connections to their lower status communities of origin and to foster such connections for their children. To accomplish this task, it is strategically important that they continue to be able to embody different versions of habitus and retain, rather than shed, subordinate forms of social and cultural capital.

Author

• Dawn M. Dow, University of Maryland-College Park