Abstract
In the 1990s, a plethora of American movies and television shows explored the experiences of people single, living alone, and part of the Black middle-class. Love Jones was an exemplar film of the times, highlighting broader demographic shifts through the lives of young Black professionals living in Chicago. The film inspired the name of Krish Marsh’s The Love Jones Cohort: Single and Living Alone in the Black Middle Class. The book merges typically separated analyses in sociological research: people who are single and living alone (SALA) and the Black middle-class. In doing so, Marsh examines how this group is constrained by structural forces, while having their own agency in how they articulate membership in being Black and middle-class, define their romantic and nonromantic relationships, choose where they live, accumulate and disseminate their wealth, and maintain overall well-being. The Love Jones Cohort gives voice to an oft misunderstood and understudied group.
Marsh establishes that this group is not happenstance but instead a burgeoning population (13% of all Black middle-class households are SALA as of 2014) that is formed by social structures that constrain and shape their social class and family formation. Data for the book includes 62 in-depth interviews with members of this group: Black adults, ages 25 to 65, in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area who have never married, have no children, live alone or with individuals they have no romantic connection with, and qualify as Black middle-class based on Marsh’s previous development of an objective Black middle-class Index (BMCi). Based on her previous conceptual scholarship on the Love Jones Cohort, all members and in turn those within the book identify as Black, have a professional career (occupation); a college or postsecondary graduate degree (education); a household income at or above the median for Black households (income); and are a homeowner (a proxy for wealth). The combination of building on previous quantitative demographic work, engagement with public debates on the subject, and the book’s interviews provide scholars from all methodological backgrounds an example on how to conduct more nuanced research and supplies the reader with data-rich findings.
The inclusion of the strict objective measures allows for Marsh to historically situate each of these measures for Black people to solidify this population as undeniably Black middle-class. With the interviews, the reader not only learns what the Love Jones Cohort entails but also gets a glimpse into how the respondents in their own words understand their relationship amongst other members of the cohort and those who are not. This effort to isolate the population as much as possible ensures that subsequent conversations in which the Love Jones Cohort names subjective measures as part of their definitions of the Black middle-class does not detract from their social positions, despite often overlapping with other Black social classes.
In centering the voices of the Love Jones Cohort, Marsh finds that they often share similar views on their relationship to the Black community as other findings on people who are non-SALA Black middle-class. Moving on to their SALA status within this group, she finds that in the face of structural trends in the increased number of never married Black adults, sex-ratio imbalances between Black men and Black women within the cohort (30%–70%, respectively), and generally personal, political, and practical reasons, the SALA status of the cohort is based on circumstance, choice, and for several interviewees both. Nevertheless, choice is the largest factor across age and gender, highlighting the importance of the respondent’s agency.
In allowing the cohort to be their total selves, the reader can recognize they are not a “problem” to be fixed, but a group that academics should better understand. Marsh underscores single and living alone does not mean lonely, without close social relationships, or unhappy. She pushes our conversations from “what is causing people to be unmarried,” to the fact that people are making choices. Accordingly, we can and should focus on how they spend their lives. The Love Jones Cohort provides such findings on lifestyles choices that includes their homes, neighborhoods, institutional ties, organizations, occupations, continuing education, middle class behaviors, freedoms, and happiness.
Ultimately, Marsh wrote an incisive book about an underexamined population that sets the stage for scholars to contend with who and what they think of when they consider the “Black middle-class” and “SALA” individuals. For scholars of gender and race, Marsh’s book serves as an exemplar in conducting deep dives on contemporary definitions of families and family formation, gendered expectations of lifestyle choices, including partnership, and the agency we provide respondents within these definitions.