Birthdays, Basketball, and Breaking Bread: Negotiating with Class in Contemporary Black America
Birthdays, Basketball, and Breaking Bread: Negotiating with Class in Contemporary Black America
This chapter discusses that many Harlemites have social relationships that extend across class lines and concerns class-stratified relationships among family members and friends to examine just how class differences can inform and reshape important social contacts, sometimes ending friendships and straining familial ties, other times providing alternative spaces for mutually beneficial relationships to thrive despite class differences. If friendships are difficult to hold onto amid class differences, familial ties can be just as hard. Some people live fairly close to relatives of different classes or status positions and purposefully avoid them. Maybe the person who has achieved a bit of socioeconomic success does not want to feel the guilt of that success juxtaposed against other people's failure. Class-stratified interactions do not necessarily have to be substantive to be important and formative. Sometimes a fleeting moment or a brief encounter with a stranger or a series of short interactions with acquaintances can have tremendous significance in terms of how people think about class. Role models may be important, but that is not the only way class differences affect people's lives.
Keywords: Harlemites, social contacts, black America, friendships, role models, status positions
Chicago Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
