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Looking at the communities of Central and West Harlem in New York City, this study explores the locus, form and significance of socioeconomic differentiation for African American professional-managerial workers. It begins by considering centuries of New York City history and the structural elements of class inequality to present readers with the larger context of contemporary events. The primary objective of this study is to examine the everyday lives of black professionals in Harlem and determine what bearing income-generating activities have on ideology, consumption patterns and lifestyle, among other factors.

Harlem has possessed class and racial/ethnic diversity since the 19th century. However, African American professionals have been coming to Harlem in unprecedented numbers since the early 1990s. This paper examines the forces behind the influx of the black middle class. It reveals that through what are often contradictory notions of development and belonging, African Americans are attempting to redefine what characterizes an attractive and desirable residential community. This paper also shows the range in the experiences and ideas of black professionals in cities today and details some of the specific social processes through which African Americans negotiate the landscape of race and class in contemporary American life.

A dearth of anthropological research on African American professionals has left major gaps in our knowledge of contemporary black life in the United States. This segment of the African American population more than doubled during the 1970s. While research in this area holds tremendous potential, only a handful of ethnographic studies have examined the lives of upwardly mobile blacks. A focus on socioeconomic fragmentation can expand the view of African American life by engaging questions of intra-racial differentiation and the impact of dissimilarities on identity formation, processes of historical change and other important topics. Looking at the communities of Central and West Harlem in New York City, this study explores the locus, form and significance of socioeconomic differentiation for African American professional-managerial workers (PMW). It starts by considering centuries of New York City history and the structural elements of class inequality to present readers with the larger context of contemporary events. The primary objective of this study is to examine the everyday lives of black professionals in Harlem and determine what bearing income-generating activities have on ideology, consumption patterns, and lifestyle, among other factors. I also examine the relationships women and men maintain with other African Americans in their neighborhoods and networks of kin and friends. This trajectory of ethnographic inquiry reveals the complex and contradictory ways African Americans have expressed and thought about racial belonging and how they have negotiated the many fissures and fragments of group membership. In theorizing about the interstices of race and class among black PMW in New York City, this study also interrogates the “middle class” concept and its utility for explicating processes of socioeconomic differentiation among African Americans.

ORAL HISTORIES SERVED AS THE RICHEST SOURCE OF INFORMATION I collected while engaged in field research in Harlem. Everyone I spoke with had a captivating story and although each person had a unique and, in a few cases, even unusual experience to share, a wide range of individuals touched upon similar themes in conveying their pasts and those of their kin. Familial experiences with migration, poverty, and racism were among the commonalities discussed by the Harlemites I met regardless of gender, class, age, or place of origin.

THE BROAD IMPACT OF LABOR ON THE HUMAN EXPERIENCE IS CENTRAL TO any thorough discussion of class. Work affects the natural environment, local infrastructures, transnational processes, and access to resources, prestige, and social identity. Work is the primary factor in determining how socioeconomic status is perceived and experienced. This chapter looks at income generation among the women and men that participated in this study from a perspective that will illuminate historical continuities and divergences from past patterns.

BASED ON ANECDOTAL, MORE SO THAN EMPIRICAL DATA, WRITINGS ABOUT relations within African American socioeconomic hierarchies have dualistically characterized these as either conflicting or cooperatively uplifting. The conflict model portrays black PMW as an isolated and white-identified population (Frazier 1957; Hare 1965). The movement of upwardly mobile blacks to suburban communities is often cited as proof of this disconnect or disjuncture (Wilson 1978; 1987).

THE IMPACT OF SOCIOECONOMIC STRATIFICATION EXTENDS BEYOND ITS most salient components such as employment, income, wealth, and access to strategic resources. Less tangible factors like belief systems, social practices, and personal tastes are also outgrowths of economic differentiation, albeit more difficult ones to systematically characterize when compared with the material and the structural.

HARLEM HAS CONTINUED TO METAMORPHOSE OVER THE PAST TWO hundred years. One element that has remained consistent in this series of communities, and African American black life in general, is the impact of racism. Dating back to slavery, racial inequality has been a persistent and determinant part of the black American experience from its origins. Enslavement constitutes the bulk of the experience of African people in the United States because it lasted close to 250 years. This is almost double the approximately 143 years that have passed since passage of the 13th Amendment.