Our Kind Of People Essay Research Paper

Our Kind Of People Essay, Research Paper

LAWRENCE OTIS GRAHAM: Our Kind of PeopleI: Inside America’s Black Upper Class (5 .5 pp) Through six years of interviews with more than three hundred prominent families and individuals, journalist and commentator Lawrence Otis Graham weaves together the revealing stories and fascinating experiences of upper-class blacks who grew up with privilege and power. Previously known for his provocative New York magazine expos. of elite golf clubs, when he left his law firm and went undercover as a busboy at an all-white Connecticut country club, Graham now turns his attention to the black elite. Bibliography lists 2 sources. BBblkeli.doc

LAWRENCE OTIS GRAHAM: Our Kind of People

Inside America’s Black Upper Class

Written by Barbara Babcock for the Paperstore, Inc., July 2000

Introduction

Debutante cotillions. Arranged marriages. Summer trips to Martha’s Vineyard. All-black boarding schools. Memberships in the Links, Deltas, Boul., or Jack and Jill. Million-dollar homes. An obsession with good hair, light complexions, top credentials, and colleges like Howard, Spelman, and Harvard.

This is the world of the black upper class, exclusive, mostly hidden group that lives awkwardly between white America and mainstream black America.

Contents

Through six years of interviews with more than three hundred prominent families and individuals, journalist and commentator Lawrence Otis Graham weaves together the revealing stories and fascinating experiences of upper-class blacks who grew up

with privilege and power. Previously known for his provocative New York magazine expos. of elite golf clubs, when he left his law firm and went undercover as a busboy at an all-white Connecticut country club, Graham now turns his attention to the black elite.

Simply looking at the table of contents gives an overview of this quiet class of privilege: The Origins of the Black Upper Class; Jack and Jill: Where Elite Black Kids Are Separated from the Rest; The Black Child Experience: The Right Cotillions, Camps, and Private Schools; Howard, Spelman, and Morehouse: Three Colleges That Count;

and The Right Fraternities and Sororities. As well as The Links and the Girl Friends: For Black Women Who Govern Society ; The Boule, the Guardsmen, and Other Groups for Elite Black Men; and Vacation Spots for the Black Elite. We also become acquainted with the Black Elite in Chicago,Washington, D.C., New York City; Memphis, Detroit,

Atlanta, and receiving honorable mention: Nashville, New Orleans, Tuskegee, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia. And finally: Passing for White: When the “Brown Paper Bag Test” Isn’t Enough.

Other Thoughts

According to Kirkus Reviews (1998), this non-fiction work is a record of the pleasures and the follies of an elevated black society. According to Graham, all racial, ethnic, and religious groups lay claim to their own privileged class that group which,

either because of family name, wealth, title, education, or other circumstance fashions itself a cut above the rest.

This class sets itself apart with their clubs, their fraternities, and their sororities,

while looking skeptically at any outsiders who can never make the grade. The reasons for forming such exclusive groups are often perfectly honorable, most commonly because members have been denied access to other organizations in the larger population. But matters can get out of hand, as Graham (Member of the Club: Reflections on Life in a Racially Polarized World, 1995) perhaps unwittingly demonstrates in his examination of what he calls the black elite. His is less of a critical examination and more of a glossary of people, places, and things constituting the black upper class. And as one might expect, this realm of the right colleges and degrees and pedigrees is downright incestuous, a world where cotillions and coming-out parties still matter. Graham, an insider and attorney,

knows it well. Yet his contemporary savvy matters less, in the end, than does his appetite for historical detail.

Graham insights into the story of blacks in vacation spots like Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts and Sag Harbor on Long Island, N.Y., for instance, are fascinating. Nevertheless, the ongoing claustrophobia of privilege (with many of the same people and

their cliques cycling and recycling) can weary a reader. One walks away with the impression that Graham’s effort could have been cut in half and all one would have missed is an extra afternoon of ceaseless croquet, followed by cucumber sandwiches down by the gazebo.

Our Kind of People is the first book written about the limited world of the black upper class by a member of this hard-to-penetrate group. A conservative network of families dating back to the first black millionaires of the 1880s, the black elite has developed its own rules for membership and for maintaining a place in a world that is unaware of its vast contributions.

Sometimes gossipy and always touching, Graham visits and profiles upper-class families and institutions in New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Detroit, Nashville, Memphis, Los Angeles, and New Orleans, always revealing who passes the “brown paper bag and ruler test” and who doesn’t. With photographs and stories, the author

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