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African American and Africana Studies Social Science Speaker Series: Karyn Lacy

Date:
-
Location:
College of Law Courtroom
Speaker(s) / Presenter(s):
Karyn Lacy

As part of the AAAS Social Science Speaker Series, Karyn Lacy will present a talk titled,  “Growing Up Around Blacks:  Identity Construction in Middle-Class Suburbia”

Sponsored by:  African American and Africana Studies and Sociology

Karyn Lacy is Associate professor of Sociology and African American Studies at the University of Michigan. She is a Ford Fellow, and was a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation. Her book Blue-Chip Black: Race, Class, and Status in the New Black Middle Class (University of California Press) received the Oliver Cromwell Cox Book Award from the American Sociological Association’s Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities. Lacy’s current work explores the construction and reproduction of racial and class-based identities among members of an elite social organization. 

Description of Dr. Lacy's upcoming talk:  While white ethnics and immigrants of color have been studied in terms of their attempts to assimilate into the American mainstream, sociologists assume that ongoing racial discrimination obviates the need for an extensive examination of the actual assimilation trajectories of middle-class blacks.  Many middle-class blacks travel from the black to the white world rather than existing exclusively in one racially distinct environment. Yet, we do not fully understand how middle-class blacks conceptualize their own integration into American society. Drawing on data collected through in-depth interviews with middle-class blacks and ethnographic research in a white and a black suburb, I establish the link between an affinity for black spaces and the alternative assimilation trajectories of middle-class blacks. I find that middle-class blacks engage in a variant of segmented assimilation, privileging the black world as a site for socializing even if they live in a white suburb.  This selective pattern of assimilation, what I term strategic assimilation, suggests that this population of middle-class blacks does not perceive itself as permanently constrained to the bottom rung of a racial hierarchy.