>The black middle class is a
>buffer group. I know cause
>I grew up on the
>fault line between the black
>underclass and the black middle
>class. Don't just look at
>PG County Maryland -- check
>out the Chicago 'burbs. Middle
>class black people often see
>poor blacks as the problem
>just like whites. Black people
>don't like crime, either; and
>they are just as programmed
>to view us in the
>ghetto as criminals, drug addicts,
>and welfare queens as white
>people. They believe in the
>empty American dream and will
>conform to get it. Don't
>be fooled by their "Afrocentricity";
>progressive black politics threatens the
>status quo, and believe me,
>the black middle class has
>an investment in the status
>quo, or believes it does.
>However, the burgeoning intellectuals that
>grew up along the fault
>line like myself (or were
>brought face-to-face with the contradictions
>of their class) are trying
>to set the agenda for
>us in the new century.
>Hip-hop intellectualism alone won't save
>us w/o recourse to Delaney,
>Cruse, Woodson, and all the
>people young black people in
>college are being exposed to.
>Not everyone is getting their
>minds blown...most are just in
>college so they can get
>that paper or some symbolic
>power...but the mental liberation afforded
>by the gains of the
>black middle-class is affording the
>incubation of proto-revolutionary thought.
>So, the black middle class itself
>is useless, but is necessary
>as an incubator for the
>next niggaz who may bring
>the pain to this distressed
>system we live in.






Yo! whoever you are, your "clear cut" analysis is to be respected. The dynamics you've mentioned pretty much "summed up" the totality of this topic. Don't get me wrong. There are a great deal of Afrikans in America of middle class and upper class status you have done great things "our" people and mankind in general, but these individuals are of a small group. The late great Afrikan intellectual "W.E.B. Dubious" comes to fruition. He was a snob! No doubt! But his contribution to the intellectual community and the study of Black/Afrikan folk was "off the hook".

Within my research, the "Black middle class" has been "created" as a buffer group to put across the rest of the race a "mythology of individaul progress".