Our Kind of People: Inside America's Black Upper Class

Our Kind of People: Inside America's Black Upper Class

By: Lawrence Otis Graham  

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Average Customer Rating: 3.0 out of 5

Debutante cotillions. Million-dollar homes. Summers in Martha's Vineyard. Membership in the Links, Jack & Jill, Deltas, Boule, and AKAs. An obsession with the right schools, families, social clubs, and skin complexion. This is the world of the black upper class and the focus of the first book written about the black elite by a member of this hard-to-penetrate group.

Author and TV commentator Lawrence Otis Graham, one of the nation's most prominent spokesmen on race and class, spent six years interviewing the wealthiest black families in America. He includes historical photos of a people that made their first millions in the 1870s. Graham tells who's in and who's not in the group today with separate chapters on the elite in New York, Los Angeles, Washington, Chicago, Detroit, Memphis, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Nashville, and New Orleans. A new Introduction explains the controversy that the book elicited from both the black and white communities.

Publisher: Harper Perennial

Release Date: 1999-12-22

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
Our Kind of Reading - An inside look at debutantes, Jack and Jill, Links and all of the requirements to be a part of the high levels of society. A must read to be really informed.

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
Veeeerrry Enlightening - It is terribly unfortunate that the race finds itself separate and unequal ironically among itself because of skin color. A diseased mentality, no doubt seared from slavery. Shameful and sad nonetheless, what will it take to remedy this tragedy? I say we put an end to the pavlovian reward of the need to be accepted and educate ourselves to earn the right to be respected based on character, good deeds and accomplishments rather than skin color, associations or even organizations like the NAACP.

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
loved this book - I read this book at a time of my life where I struggled with skin color. Many may not like it for many reasons but it truly helped me come out of a fog about my experiences and observations and I commend the author for being brave enough to write it.

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
"Wow, I didn't know that" - I haven't read the book in a few years, but the contents have stuck with me. I was dismayed at a lot of the eye-opening information - particularly about groups like Jack and Jill of America. I guess after facing segregation, some people decided to pass it on - only to members of their own race.

If you don't understand what I'm talking about, read this book and you'll say, like me, "Wow, I didn't know that."

Customer Review: 2 out of 5
A complicated book - This is a complicated book about the always complicated subject of race in America, by a very complicated author. Arguably, it would have been a much better book and would have helped immensely if the author had gotten out of his own way and allowed the story to tell itself. However, since the book proved to be as much his own therapy project as it was research on the meaning of black elites, Mr. Graham, apparently lacked the ability to resist using the manuscript to fight his own inner demons: Apparently the "scar tissue" from the author's own "inner rejection" (for not having been admitted to the very club he is describing), was his primary motivation for writing the book, and the scars cut so deeply that too much of the book was about his subjective, mostly hurt feelings, and too little about why black elite created their own little insular community within a community. The author, in perhaps his most telling revelation about his own feelings, was careful to point out that his wife IS a member of the club. (Well, hoop-de-do!)

There is plenty of pathos, psychological pathology and much "feigned heroism" between the covers of this book, but powerful little sanity, almost no courage and absolutely no recognizable humanity. The pathos lies in the reality upon which the black elite has built its own little insulated fantasy world of "faux white superiority" spawn directly out of slavery - any references to which the group otherwise greatly abhors. And this very abhorrence of references to slavery is just the most curious of many curious contradictions that black elite classism brings to the fore of this author's account. Their highest (unacknowledged) value of course is being able to "pass for white." That this is so, says about all that needs to be said about the values of this group.

While there is certainly something to be said for being single-minded and serious about the pursuit of individual achievement and about the ability for a subculture to be able to insulate itself from the pathologies of a larger mostly "sinking" black community, one hardly thinks that "Our Kind of People" is what W.E.B. Du Bois had in mind when he referred to "the talented tenth." What we see here is the same kind of pathetic, self-absorbed preoccupation with the empty accumulation of wealth and other kinds of pettiness associated with the trappings of anti-black racial superiority that we normally associate with "racist white people." Yet here "in the flesh", the so-called "black elite" with their "brown paper bag" test for skin tone and the "ruler test" for hair straightness, would make even the worse white racist seem meek and tame in comparison.

While I must admit that I lived on the periphery of this kind of madness myself as a youth, having joined a black fraternity, etc., apparently I was impervious to how deeply it actually ran. The psychological pathologies wrapped up in such insular nonsense are too deep to even contemplate, let alone analyze in a short review. However, suffice it to say that "racist projection," "deep self-hatred" and "slave-like mimicry" would not be too far from the center of such an analysis.

No matter how much Mr. Graham lauds and compliments the achievements of members of this group, their achievements cannot possibly offset the immense sadness and pathology that the existence of such a group itself represents. It is not only second-order racism, but also second-order social pathology. Two Stars

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