Abstract
This article explores the distinct social reproductive practices of the Black upper-middle class. In particular, this study focuses on the role of community organizations in socializing the collective habitus of a community at the intersection of Blackness and class privilege. I draw on interview data from members of one Black upper-middle class organization, Jack and Jill of America Inc., to identify how families and institutions collaborate to socialize children into a particular raced-classed habitus, passing on ideologies, discursive habits, and behavioral strategies aimed at producing citizens who are both culturally empathetic and socioeconomically mobile. I find that mothers rely on the blurred boundaries between family and social organizations to legitimate and reinforce the lessons taught at home. In particular, mothers explicitly socialize identity and affinity within a racial community while simultaneously socializing implicit, but powerful, behavioral habits related to social class.
Introduction
Journalists and scholars have long been intrigued by the Black upper-middle class experience of simultaneous affluence and stigma, integration, and exclusion (Feagin 1991; Feagin and Sikes 1994; Frazier 1957; Graham 1995). Recent sociological research has illuminated how individuals use strategic behaviors to facilitate social inclusion into the American elite (Lacy 2007; Pattillo McCoy 1999; Pittman Claytor 2020), but less attention has been paid to the role of families and institutions in strategically cultivating such modes of inclusion. This study examines how Black upper-middle class parents explain race and class to their children, how organizations sanction and amplify such messages, and how former child-participants (or “children”) internalize or resist the lessons of their youth. My data reveal a complex social reproduction strategy by Black upper-middle class mothers. As mothers socialize behaviors that will facilitate social integration with their neighbors, school peers, and work colleagues (who are often White elites), they also cultivate ideological and moral norms that encourage affective solidarity and cultural competency with Black Americans across social strata while developing and deploying behavioral norms that reassert an upper-middle class status. These discursive norms and behavioral strategies ultimately reproduce a particular raced-classed (intersectional) community over time.
This study is an up-close observation of how raced-classed identity-making occurs in a cultural institution led by mothers, and how these social actors articulate the identities, concepts, and behavioral strategies that reflect their social positionality. By interrogating the reproduction of raced-classed communities, this project seeks to bridge sociology of race and sociology of culture literatures. It contributes to racial formation theory by examining how social actors develop a racial project against stigmatized Blackness within an early childhood socialization organization. The project responds to social reproduction theory by demonstrating how Black families and institutions collaborate to socialize class-related ideologies, discourses, and behavioral habits. Finally, this project examines the articulation, socialization, and strategic activation of an intersectional (raced-classed) habitus, adding racial diversity to scholarship on elite socialization and intersectional formations (Curington 2016; Graham 1999; Khan 2011; Lacy 2007; Lareau 2003; Sherman 2016; Sherwood 2010).
Literature Review
In Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s theory of racial formation, phenotypic differences are saturated with meaning via sociohistorical processes of group-making, resource inequality, and political power (Omi and Winant 1994). Race is a dynamic process, in which social actors at all societal levels advance projects that define and stratify racial categories. Racial projects are dynamic, sociohistorically contextual, multilevel, and fundamentally co-constructed with other social categories to achieve hegemonic centrality in society’s cultural ideology (Curington 2016; Kandaswamy 2012). In this view, race-based social movements, organizations dedicated to dismantling White supremacy, and individual claims of colorblindness all constitute racial projects, each with its own set of ideas vying for hegemonic dominance. At the micro-level, parents engage in the project of teaching children about race using both formal educational strategies and informal socialization techniques. Navigating racial stigma and reinforcing affirmative messages about Blackness are significant components of child-rearing in Black families across class lines. Shannon Malone Gonzalez’s work details how Black mothers engage double consciousness to teach children about the symbolic weight their bodies carry within a racist social world and to manage and reduce violence (Malone Gonzalez 2019). Simultaneously, Black mothers work to cultivate a sense of racial safety, comfort, and pride for their children, strategically managing their children’s peer-group and media consumption and ensuring that they are exposed to affirming Black role models (Dow 2019). Black organizations and institutions are often partners in complex peer, media, and cultural management strategies.
Jack and Jill clubs are racial project sites because as a community, club members collectively articulate the meaning of racialized bodies, the substance of Black culture, and strategies toward racial solidarity. My data reveal how community members articulate their stigmatized social position, a strategy that works to both warn and protect their children from racist violence, and also to justify a strong, emotional “in-group [racial] orientation” (Goffman 1963) despite an economic privilege that facilitates overwhelmingly White residential, educational, and occupational networks. While preparing their children for danger, the Black upper-middle class mothers in Jack and Jill also redefine the meaning of Blackness to affirm bodily beauty, cultural depth, and community strength.
Bourdieu’s theory of social reproduction demonstrates that persistent class stratification is the function of explicit and implicit lessons through which social actors develop ideological indoctrination, discursive alignment, cultural appreciation, and behavioral ease, marking their social strata (Bourdieu 1984; Lamont and Molnar 2001; Khan 2011). Norms in socioeconomically privileged households are reified and legitimized within formal and educational institutions because they enjoy widespread social legitimacy, assumed meritocracy, and cultural investment (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977; Lareau 1987; Lareau and Horvat 1999; Willis 1981). Young elites demonstrate embodied capital through behavioral fluency in privileged spaces (Khan 2012).
Contemporary research on the Black middle class shows how families carefully navigate race and class identities, narratives, and behavioral norms (Banks 2012; Dow 2019; Moore 2008; Pattillo McCoy 1999). Many Black middle-class families have tenuous class status and maintain meaningful relationships with the Black working-class through family, neighborhood, or cultural and religious institutions. They are, therefore, incentivized to develop strategies to facilitate and manage relationships with the Black working class due to this affective and material proximity. They may articulate logics of deservingness, moral responsibility, and discipline to decide when and how to provide material and symbolic support to kin and community (Hill 2022). Parents may facilitate interclass relationships that blur or reinforce class boundaries according to their own class identities and moral-ideological priorities (Dow 2019). Dow found that Black mothers raised in working-class families display strategies focused on socioeconomic boundary-crossing, facilitating tight relationships with working-class communities, while those raised in middle-class families were more likely to socialize boundary-policing strategies where racial identity remains salient, but cultural celebration is prioritized over collective socioeconomic struggle (Dow 2019). To augment this strategy, some boundary-policers join organizations like Jack and Jill of America, Inc. (hereafter, “Jack and Jill”), as a site of cultural, historical, and professional education (Dow 2019; Lacy 2007; Sherman 2016).
Research on the American elite shows how cultural commitment to meritocratic epistemologies shapes the ideological, discursive, and behavioral norms that perpetuate class stratification. Symbolic boundaries explain and justify social distance through “soft values” of moral, emotional, and social ethics, rather than material prestige (Anderson 1999, 2011; Jones 2009; Lamont 1992; Lamont et al. 1996; Sherman 2016) and reject “traditional” snobbery by promoting an ideology of meritocratic inequality, discursive class silence, and consumptive omnivorism (Khan 2011; Khan and Jerolmack 2013; Sherwood 2010). While Bourdieu’s traditional elites draw boundaries around cultural and economic distinction, Americans use “discursive repertoires” of hard work, openness, and choice to justify their status (Bourdieu 1984; Frankenberg 1993; Khan 2011; Khan and Jerolmack 2013; Stuber 2006). These norms reinforce American individualism and obscure stratification in the United States (Lamont 2000). Despite these narrative distinctions, scholars have shown that American elites continue to use clubs and institutions to “[accumulate] social advantage” for themselves (Calarco 2014; DeLuca and Andrews 2016; Kendall 2002, 2008; Khan 2012; Sherwood 2010). The social legitimacy of elite institutions ultimately obscures how social relationships, consumption patterns, and cultural signaling work to reinforce boundaries around elite social strata over time. If educational institutions or other legitimate capital transmission mechanisms are ever restricted or socially delegitimized, “clandestine circulations of capital in the form of cultural capital become determinant in the reproduction of the social structure” (Bourdieu 1986: 26). Public institutions are ideologically bound to provide equal opportunity to all, but private social organizations continue to be critical mechanisms for the transmission and conversion of material and symbolic capital while also having the internal imperative to maximize returns to their membership. “Select clubs” are “deliberately organized to concentrate social capital so to derive full benefit from the multiplier effect implied in concentration” (Bourdieu 1986:22). An investigation into Jack and Jill communities adds to the literature on private organizations and their crucial role in social reproduction and capital accumulation.
I contribute to these literatures by examining how individual families and private organizations work together to advance a socially reproductive project of race-class identity and habitus. The Black upper-middle class employs various material and cultural competencies to integrate into majority-White, elite spaces in the predominantly White neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces of my subjects. Elite class norms signal similarity and legitimacy, but for Jack and Jill members, they also indicate membership in the local raced-classed community. Just as systemic racism binds these social actors together in a protective stance, the strategic accumulation and reproduction of capital incentivizes this community to highlight boundaries around a classed community, conceptually stratifying the existing racial collective. Ultimately, the narratives of a community located at the intersection of racial Blackness and the American professional class illuminate the navigation of identities, the development of integrative strategies, and their communal aspirations. This case study shows how raced-classed identities can be articulated and reproduced over time, and how social actors invested in the reproduction of this raced-classed identity harness the power of legitimate organizations, engaging them as sites of social reproduction and capital accumulation.
Methodology
Jack and Jill of America, Incorporated is a nonprofit organization dedicated to the well-being and advancement of Black children in the United States. Founded by Marion Stubbs Thomas in Philadelphia in 1938, the organization is part social club, part extracurricular activity, part community service organization, and part philanthropic mechanism. Mothers, who hold sole membership, organize enrichment activities for their children, including visits to museums and theater performances, guest lectures, and tours of cultural or historic sites. Members and their children must raise charitable donations for selected external institutions and participate in at least one community service project annually. 1
Because of its explicit interest in socializing children and bringing families together, Jack and Jill is a sociologically rich site for the study of social reproduction. The goals of the organization are described in the Handbook for Members, one of the earliest, yet enduring, organizational documents available in the archive: “1. To create a medium of contact for children, and 2. To provide a constructive recreational, social, and cultural program for children and mothers” 2 (Metropolitan Chapter 1948). Jack and Jill’s motto, “Let’s work, let’s play, let’s live together,” highlights maternal aspirations of intimacy, recreation, and cultivation within each club chapter. Thus, Jack and Jill blurs the boundary between family and institution, functioning as a third space beyond (and between) them and drawing on aspects of both realms to facilitate an environment of affective nurturing and pragmatic instruction. As a group of “like-minded” families, Jack and Jill can be both privately invisible and publicly visible (as an incorporated organization with philanthropic and lobbying mechanisms).
Many mothers I interviewed described Jack and Jill as an extended kinship network, where families can share responsibility, support, and emotional connection without biological ties. “People say, ‘every Jack and Jill mom is a mom to every Jack and Jill kid’ and . . . there’s always a handful [of moms] that really become kind of your kid’s extended moms, or godparents or something,” recalled Mrs. Vallencourt. Community childcare and othermothering are sociohistorically critical in marginalized communities (Collins 1991), and the extension of this ethos into the organization illuminates how the mother-members of Jack and Jill understand their relationships, expectations, and agency within the club. In fact, when analyzing and comparing interview and archival data, it was often difficult to isolate the opinions and expectations of mothers from the interests and practices of the formal organization. For example, Mrs. Bennet argued that Jack and Jill teaches children about race, socializing “the concept that you are my color, but not my kind. . . So, it provides opportunities for young people to interact with people of their kind.” In her view, this framework is dangerous because it can inhibit young people’s ability to “transcend class,” so I asked whether mothers were “kind of tempering that message, that ‘we are of color, not of kind,’ and not the organization?”
Well, the mothers make the organization.
Fair enough.
This anecdote is both an early glimpse into the raced-classed attitudes of the community and evidence that the boundaries between family and the formal organization are porous—the lessons and strategies used within the organization are often extensions of the logics and desires of individual mothers at home. Mother-members organize local club meetings, trips, activities, competitions, and service projects. While chapters receive thematic guidance from national leadership and occasionally have mandated workshops or activities to complete, they are relatively autonomous and free to interpret national themes and facilitate activities to meet chapter members’ expectations and expertise.
Jack and Jill’s membership practices are also sociologically interesting. Potential members of the organization must be invited by a current member in good standing and are evaluated on four key factors: the potential member’s ability to meet Jack and Jill’s financial requirements (chapter dues, charitable giving, and tickets or fees for sponsored activities); their displayed interest in the organization; their ability to meet Jack and Jill’s time commitments (for mandatory meetings and group activities); and displayed like-mindedness, an uncodified trait that indicates ideological and cultural homophily with the local chapter. Thus, the community is fundamentally intersectional, with gender and class identities being essential to membership: one must be a mother, have sufficient capital to be a contributing member to the community, and be “like-minded.” There is no evidence of an official policy that members are Black, but racial homophily has been consistently maintained since Jack and Jill’s creation. These strict membership practices foster community homophily, making the organization’s social reproduction particularly efficient (McPherson, Smith-Lovin, and Cook 2001).
This article draws on data from semi-structured interviews, archival materials from the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and Temple University Library’s Blockson Collection, and a content analysis of SCOPE magazine, an annual internal publication that articulates programmatic themes and celebrates chapter successes. I interviewed a snowball sample of Jack and Jill members and “children” (former participants over 18) from the Northeast Region of the organization. After each interview, I asked for recommendations for potential interviewees. This sampling method illuminates some of the unique challenges of researching elites and other social groups that maintain close-knit networks that may be “hidden by choice” (Atkinson and Flint 2011; Biernacki and Waldorf 1981; Faugier and Sargent 1997; Noy 2008; Odendahl and Shaw 2002), and also placed me, as a researcher, within the very social dynamics of gatekeeping, vetting, trust, and disclosure that members of the community experience regularly. The following analysis uses pseudonyms and anonymized identifiers, with mothers indicated with formal names (Mrs. Tellor and Mrs. Tucker, for example), and children by their first name (Eli, Jasmine).
Between 2016 and 2019, I interviewed 12 current and four former mother-members, and 15 former child-participants. The sample of mothers was occupationally diverse but representative of America’s professional class: 43 percent were lawyers, 19 percent were educational administrators, and the remainder were business executives, physicians, and one civil servant. All mothers were between the ages of 37 and 62, had at least a bachelor’s degree, and most had advanced degrees. Seventy-five percent of the mothers sent their child to private school, and most were heterosexually married—those who were not married spoke about ex-husbands or the fathers of their children, but none revealed any queer identity. Former Jack and Jill participants, or “children,” were all pursuing college (86 percent) or postgraduate or professional (13 percent) degrees. Women were 67 percent of the children’s sample, and all attended private school for some time between kindergarten and high school. All children’s interviews took place in restaurants or coffee shops and averaged 60 minutes. I used Atlas.ti to organize and code all data. After several rounds of coding, the transcript data’s raw meaning units were reorganized into larger, more coherent “meaning units” (Kvale 1994). Deductively, I looked for units directly related to my theoretical frameworks of social reproduction and racial formation. Inductively, I found concepts respondents shared that I did not expect (narratives of bodily pride and cultural navigation, for example).
The following analysis explores how Jack and Jill communities articulate and reproduce raced-classed ideologies and behaviors. The data show how mothers develop a particular framework of race where children are warned about the persistent stigma of their racialized bodies while simultaneously cultivating ethnocultural pride. These dual messages work to foster racial in-group cohesion with a larger Black community. In addition, the data demonstrate how mothers disassociate themselves from class identities while simultaneously cultivating specific forms of cultural and social capital to their children. Such socialization highlights a strategic out-group orientation (Goffman 1963) and helps Jack and Jill children integrate into local residential, educational, and professional spaces, most of which are populated by White class-peers.
Reproducing Race: Pride and Stigma Build Bridges with Black Folks
Despite their educational, professional, and socioeconomic success, the Black upper-middle class still faces racial isolation and social inequality. Most of the respondents in my sample (eight mothers and six children) reported living in majority-White neighborhoods, with half as many (four mothers and three children) 3 living in majority-Black neighborhoods. Many mothers reported that their children experienced racial isolation and aggression at school, emphasizing their interest in co-ethnic peer groups and safe spaces. Due to their unique social positions, community members explicitly socialize racial identity into their children, using cultural forms to promote race-based solidarity and pride, and Jack and Jill clubs for safety and education. Mrs. Dixon, a lawyer with an elementary school-aged son and daughter, tells two stories about peer and role model representation. I asked her what she wants her children to learn about race, and she said that she wants them to “love people, regardless of whatever they look like. To see past skin.” She avoids classifying people by their race when talking about others, but she knows her kids will notice phenotypic differences:
I think that it’s interesting, because when they were in daycare, they were like the one-of-the-onlys [sic], right?
One of the only Black kids, you mean?
Yeah. And they never saw color, or race, or anything like that. And literally when they drew pictures of themselves, they drew pictures of themselves as like yellow. And when they started going to their current school [where Black students are the majority], I noticed for the first time that they started coloring themselves brown. Browner than they are. Which I thought was really, really, interesting.
Mrs. Dixon uses a colorblind narrative to help her children “see past skin” and not “see” race, yet her children’s drawings defy expectations that they will ignore phenotypic differences. While they may simply be mimicking their peers’ crayon choices, when surrounded by Black peers their crayon choices matched their skin more accurately. “I think they’re starting to see race,” she says. Mothers often joined Jack and Jill because they worried about their children being “the only one” of African descent in their peer groups. Charlie, a 20-year-old New Jersey college student, describes how Jack and Jill serves as an important peer-management tool, particularly for children growing up in majority-White neighborhoods. “She put me in, definitely, 100%, [to] be exposed to a Black community, and we didn’t necessarily grow up in a black neighborhood,” he said when asked why he thought his mother joined, “She was exposing me to so much African-American culture and movements, and just learning a lot of African-American stuff through Jack and Jill.” These two stories show how mother-members recognize a psychosocial need for racial inclusion and facilitate their goals for Black peers and Black culture via Jack and Jill.
Mothers in my sample try to balance a belief in a meritocratic American Dream with teaching their children about the inherited social dangers of being Black. Mrs. Coby (a counselor with two sons, 12 and 7, and a daughter, 9) contends that when she was young, an explicit, de jure racist society meant that Black children had a sense of systemic racial hierarchy even as their own parents tried to instill aspiration and self-efficacy. Unlike her upbringing where “we knew what [being Black] meant,” her children have received the message that “we’re all equal,” which she appreciates because she does not “want them to carry my burden” of the psychological weight of explicit racism. Yet, Mrs. Coby makes a sharp turn after expressing this relief, highlighting the ways that race remains meaningful, even within class-homogenous spaces:
I need my son as he gets older, especially my 12-year-old, to understand if you should ever be stopped by a police officer, you are not equal. Like, you’re not equal, don’t get it twisted. Be vigilant, get his name on his ID badge. You “yes sir,” you keep your eyes where they’re supposed to be, you keep your hands where they’re supposed to be, ’cause you will not get the benefit of the doubt that your blonde-haired, blue-eyed friend will probably get. And that’s just the reality.
Black mothers must teach their children to avoid violence and must tailor their message to respond to the raced-gendered antecedent stereotypes that justify particular patterns of violence against Black Americans (Malone Gonzalez 2019, 2022). Mrs. Coby’s strategies for her son reflect her genuine fears of public violence, whether by the state or misguided strangers. She socializes habits of vigilance and acquiescence, steering him away from clothing like hooded sweatshirts and sneakers that might further stigmatize his black body and instructing him to follow specific behaviors that mitigate stereotypical assumptions of Black male threat (Anderson 1990; Jones 2009).
Jack and Jill’s SCOPE magazine outlines biannual themes like “Achieving Excellence, Inspiring Greatness, and Motivating Youth to Lead and Serve!” (2010–2012), “Power & Potential: Parents Empowering Youth through Leadership Development, Cultural Heritage, and Community Service” (2012–2014), and “The Power to Make a Difference” (2014–2016). In a sample of programmatic thrust statements published in SCOPE magazines between 2012 and 2022, three themes consistently emerged: Education and Leadership Development, Cultural Heritage, and Civic Engagement. For example, in the 2014–2016 programmatic thrust, the Cultural Heritage expectation is met with lessons that “continue to educate our youth on the value and importance of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs).” Jack and Jill mothers often organize chapter programming that highlights Black professionals and community leaders, even when they are acting outside their expertise. When asked how Jack and Jill teaches children about race, Mrs. Dixon replied, “I think they are learning more about loving their race and loving the accomplishments of people in our race.”
For example, when the kids are in the [two- to four-year-old group] we have a legislator, an African American legislator, come and read stories to the kids. [Interviewer: A legislator came and read a story to the kids?] He did! I got him to come! It was my activity! So, in preparation . . . we watched School House Rock and then after that the legislator came and read to them.
Did they read a story about law?
It was a book about how to follow rules. So little things like that!
Ok, so somebody who has a very important job, talking about it in a way that two-year-olds can understand? And it was important for you to have an African American legislator to have this interaction?
That’s right. Absolutely.
Mrs. Dixon wanted a Black legislator to interact with the two- to four-year-olds, even though their activities are mostly free play and story time. She expected this experience to help the children appreciate Black Americans’ achievements, even if they could not understand legislation. Mothers and children alike cited racial-cultural identity, education, and comfort as key lessons to learn for young people. This kind of activity displays a strategy to articulate meanings of Blackness that challenge racist stereotypes while also socializing Black children into cultural contexts where Black legislators are normal, unremarkable, and embedded in their intimate networks. My data show how particular classed representations of Blackness are sought and reinforced within Jack and Jill activities, even as mothers want their children to “transcend” class identity.
The last substantive technique for socializing a destigmatized racial identity is centered on Black cultural consumption, appreciation, and ease. Interviewees emphasize using art and culture to build racial-cultural capital that shows solidarity with the Black masses. In a deviation from Bourdieu’s assertion that cultural stratification is a primary method of class boundary-making, American patterns of cultural consumption show that racial and class groups often engage in overlapping cultural arenas. “Differentiation without segmentation” implies that Black upper-middle class social actors reject full convergence with White-elite cultural choices. That is, they consume mainstream culture like White elites but also have “dual engagement” with music, art, or other historically Black art forms as ways to show racial in-group affinity (Banks 2010, 2012; Dimaggio and Ostrower 1990; Moore 2008). Destiny remembers activities centered on “excellent” Black arts and culture as key to the unique racial education that she received in Jack and Jill:
I think I learned that race is something to be celebrated, especially our cultural background, racial background. That’s not only the point of Jack and Jill. I think that’s something that is like built-in, but it depends on the chapter. Some chapters don’t focus on it that much for the kids, but ours was like, “You gotta go to the black history museums.” And we got to see Alvin Ailey and we have to see these examples of excellence, because that’s what we want you to aspire to. Also, because we want you to know that as a black person you also can do that. It’s great to know that you are special, but you also need to celebrate your peers who are also black, special, and can achieve these things.
In this community, the ability to easily engage with Black cultural materials indicates strong in-group affect. Racial isolation in majority-White communities means that Jack and Jill moms must expose and intentionally cultivate Black for their children. Still, while Jack and Jill is focused on “excellent” Black culture, other children in my study highlight how the mastery of popular Black cultural forms was an equally meaningful lesson that constituted a sort of code-switching, particularly for boys. Instead of translating speech or behavior out of stigmatized Blackness, this kind of successful code switching required a switch from mainstream culture into a presentation of Blackness. Eli, a physician from Manhattan and one of the few “children” who attended public schools, shows how children internalize and express ease in performing Black cultural capital. Even in the all-Black contexts of Jack and Jill, fluency in Black cultural capital can boost prestige among peers:
So, public school experience gave us the capital of knowing the current dances, so you know, you go to these regional conferences and at that time, if you could do the Soulja Boy well, if you could do all of the dances, everybody was just very impressed, right? So, at Jack and Jill events, we were the fun people, we were the cool people. And this is not the same for women. For the women, it was opposite; if you were able to do those things, it was kind of looked down upon by other women. But for the guys, it was awesome. I think, for us, we were able to provide the blackness in the sense where we were able to provide the fun, knew all the songs, knew the dances, we knew [them all], so I think that was our capital.
For Eli, the capital manifested with the display of embodied cultural ease served boys well in the Jack and Jill community, but also worked as currency among Black people outside of it. Importantly, he illuminates the gender inequality in the adoption of such practices—Jacks are praised for displaying popular cultural markers of Blackness while Jills are punished for identical behavior.
These findings on Black upper-middle class racial identity formation demonstrate that racial ideas are always already loaded with classed and gendered concerns. Lessons about race, and strategies for resisting racist discrimination, are present at home and in Jack and Jill. Children in this community clearly rearticulate racial ideas and seek out and celebrate Black culture. Parents and clubs collaborate in socializing racial identities that serve as psychological buffers against systemic injustice, and as mechanisms for appreciating Black people and culture.
Conceptualizing Class: Raising Elites (Not Snobs)
Unlike the strategies for racial identity, patterns for the socialization of class identity were more implicit and subtle. The data in my study show how Jack and Jill members have adopted the American hegemonic elite’s pattern of class distinction. Discourses on class reveal that mothers dislike explicitly marking socioeconomic boundaries and insist that class is not a relevant element in their lives. Mothers steer children away from class narratives in favor of interpretations of socioeconomic differences as a matter of values, morals, and choice Yet, mothers socialize behaviors that allow their children to authentically execute embodied ease, especially in privileged contexts. Ultimately, respondents’ class-neutral frameworks obscure how Jack and Jill’s interactions are saturated with class interests and socialize class-based skills into children of their community.
In interviews, mothers were reluctant to identify class as a fundamental component of their life experience, and resistant to the idea that lessons about class are part of their childrearing practices. “I never really harped on it,” recalls Mrs. Griffin, a Philadelphia lawyer and mother of two adult children. “You know, it was what it was, they were in the situation they were in. It wasn’t really a conversation that we’ve ever had to have.” Although she did not talk to her children about class, Mrs. Griffin felt they “inherently” picked up on class even if she did not talk about it. They attended a prestigious private school, frequently visited friends’ homes whose “houses would have like, fifteen bedrooms. So, my kids got used to that because that was the environment that they were in.” Class homogeneity within neighborhoods and school settings normalized upper-middle class identities, rendering them invisible. In fact, several mothers reported joining Jack and Jill particularly to find class homogeneity. Mrs. Stewart, a lawyer with two children in the DC region, displayed this logic when I asked her why she joined Jack and Jill:
The choice I made about Jack and Jill is because I did not want my children to feel that they had to apologize to anybody for any experience and opportunity that they had. Because their father and I work very hard to do the things that we’ve done for them, or to give them the advantages or benefits, opportunities, privileges, whatever, however you want to say it, so they have nothing to apologize for.
Mrs. Stewart’s and Mrs. Griffin’s interviews illuminate how, in contrast to the working class, American elites tend to display ambivalence, ambiguity, and apprehension in explaining and analyzing class dynamics. When asked to identify their class status, they engage in evasive and minimizing linguistic strategies that lead to an epistemological “blind spot” around their own class status, performing uncertainty, and point to socioeconomic homogeneity as the reason for their “class-blind” habitus (Stuber 2006). Children, in turn, demonstrate internalization of these lessons through their own discursive apathy around class topics, and their insistence on the fact that their parents did not teach them anything about class. When asked about working-class contexts, children often discussed visiting family “in the city” and “in the country,” using geography as a proxy for class as they distinguished these spaces from their homes in suburbia. Samara, a sophomore at an Ivy League university, remembers ignoring class distinctions, particularly in familial relationships:
Status didn’t matter that much, I guess, with my mom’s family is an example. At family reunions most of our family on my mom’s side lives in Durham. A lot different than where I live. I would say this: they weren’t as well off. They knew that as well as we knew that. Their status didn’t determine what type of people they were. Despite the fact that they weren’t doing so well economically sometimes, I guess asking my family for money, stuff like that. They were always offering me love, reaching out to me on my birthdays and stuff like that. I didn’t feel like there was any real separation. We were still family.
Samara’s memory exemplifies how class diversity within Black families encourages family members to downplay class distinction in favor of familial love and solidarity (Hill 2022). Samara could remember explicit conversations about race and police, especially with her brother, but no meaningful lessons about class. Status “didn’t matter” because her family was emotionally close. No interviewees revealed dense ties to working class social actors outside of familial groups, but class-diverse families were so common that developing a “class-transcendent” identity and discursive model was an urgent project. White elites may downplay class to adhere to American discursive standards, but Black families have more intimate cross-class relations that require politeness, affection, and a sense of commonality that strong class discourse may disrupt. Mothers in my sample described interactions with the Black working class through community service or philanthropic projects, but they did not report class integration or reciprocal learning and engagement between Jack and Jill and working-class youth.
Other respondents reframed the discussion to emphasize “classiness,” an aggregation of cultural, moral, and etiquette standards. For example, when I asked Mrs. Edwards, a school administrator and mother of three young children, what her children learn about class, she sighed deeply before answering:
Don’t embarrass me. Don’t embarrass me, don’t embarrass yourself. So, class and status, do not necessarily have to do with financial net worth. And no matter what you’re doing, and how much money you have, I would want my kids to always maintain their values, maintain their dignity, and stay as cultured as possible. Because you can obviously be classy no matter [the] class you’re in.
And by “classy,” what do you mean?
Cultured and educated. I mean, if you have to tell people you have class, you probably don’t. My kids should work hard to represent themselves in a manner that’s befitting for them. Just because of how they were raised, who their parents are, who their grandparents are. And what their values are.
This definition of “classiness” combines moral and emotional standards (do not embarrass me; display your values) with cultural capital (cultural knowledge; “education”). Mrs. Edwards deliberately distinguishes class from material capital and then dismisses the notion that class is a meaningful category at all. Mothers expressed anxiety about how their children’s class experience may lead to a decline in manners, and they are especially sensitive to allegations of elitism. Although I never introduced the words “elite” or “elitist” in my interview protocol, 13 respondents (mothers and children) did use them, particularly while asserting that their experience in Jack and Jill was not elitist. Mothers describe themselves as strict with children who might seem “spoiled” or “entitled,” and preemptively justified Jack and Jill’s organizational class homogeneity by talking about how the organization uses its status to benefit local communities through community service projects and other philanthropic endeavors.
Kelley, a policy analyst who grew up in New York, clarified the balance between inheriting material privilege and upholding moral standards so that in-group members perceive you as “positive”:
I mean, I guess I do live a good life, but I was never spoiled. I went to school, and especially here, here is a different lifestyle. High school, they’re coming to school in the newest white Jeep, their parents were millionaires and stuff. It’s crazy, I go to a house, it’s crazy, they have maids and all that stuff—spoiled. My parents instilled the rules since I was like in elementary school. Chores, you know? I’d want certain things, they’d be like, “No, we don’t got it like that,” or “You gotta understand, you don’t need everything that you want.” Explaining manners and being a gentleman, being humble, not being an asshole.
How would you know if somebody is spoiled, or being an asshole?
Someone who’s bratty, like they don’t get something that they want, and they freak out, they don’t know how to react.
Kelley emphasizes the conflict inherent in the unearned, but inevitable, access to material capital that children have when they have access to parental wealth. Parents lavish “a lot” on their children but want them to grow up humble and grateful, not spoiled. His example shows how that can be accomplished through a work-and-reward system: he frames his parent’s chore requirements as part of the “rules” and marks their boundaries around “wants” and “needs” as implicitly guiding him toward a locally defined “positive” habitus.
As respondents sought to brighten moral boundaries between themselves and the spoiled, affluent people “above” them, some set boundaries between themselves and people “below.” To construct these boundaries, they use narratives about behavioral and cultural values, arguing that people “like them” demonstrate these values. Mrs. Wadia, an Ivy-League-educated physician with a daughter in middle school and a son in elementary school, explains class socialization and how “education” works as an implicit marker of class identity. She says, “you know, I can only speak in terms of education, and education certainly does not absolutely mean class”:
I don’t talk to them in terms of class. I talk to them in terms of education. I would love for both of them to be physicians, and we are gearing towards that. And everything that we do, we say “you know, it’s not a big deal to be a doctor. You know, if you’re a doctor you can still sell pizza. Or you can still be a teacher if you’re a doctor.” Everything I do, I try to talk to them in terms of, you know, “You could still do that if you were a doctor. You could be a singing doctor! You can be a journalist doctor! But you’re going to get your MD first”.
Mrs. Wadia seeks to disassociate education and occupation from class but acknowledges that being a pizza deliveryman or teacher is distinct from being a physician. Like Mrs. Dixon and the legislator, she says, “it’s not a big deal to be a doctor” making the profession seem achievable and mundane. When interviewees say they value education, it does not broadly include community college or trade school; they are referring to university education, the more prestigious, the better. While Mrs. Wadia deflects discussion about class to focus on education, she is frustrated that her niece, who “from the time she took her PSAT, Harvard has been courting her. You know how they court basketball kids? That’s how they were courting her. She always wanted to go to Princeton, but now she’s saying she don’t want any part of that.” Instead, her niece has decided to attend a HBCU, “because she’s almost craving that experience [of being in a majority-Black environment]. Unfortunately, it’s too late,” Mrs. Wadia laments, “or else I would have forced my sister go to into Jack and Jill.” When asked whether she believed that attending an HBCU might be a disadvantage, she replied,
Yeah. I’ll be honest. Do I want my kids to go to an HBCU? I don’t. Because where you go to school. . . [Interviewer: It matters] It really does. It really does . . . I want them to have more options than I’ve ever had . . . I’ve strived for Princeton, my husband went to Princeton, and my thing is, the more options, the better you are in life.
Aspiration for educational advancement is ostensibly class-neutral, so these social actors can portray themselves as having legitimate moral standards and still draw bright hierarchical boundaries.
In an interview with Mrs. Mitchell, a corporate lawyer with an elementary school-aged son, discursive ambivalence about class is paired with classed lessons in the organization. She told me that her son, Rashaad, had been introduced to the lifestyle of the American elite through his schoolmates. He had been unable to attend what he called a “mansion party,” and when complaining about that to his mother, she expressed frustration with his focus on class. She argued, “I want him to understand that class does not define you, I don’t want him to think that class is defining. Though it is important, I don’t want him to be bound to it.” She hoped that he would understand how hard she and his father worked to maintain their current lifestyle, and develop a work ethic, even at his young age. When asked if he gets lessons about class at home or in Jack and Jill, she replies,
I don’t think he’s learning any significant lessons about class, even though for example, when I’m in my activity, I want all of my activities to be activities where the children are exposed to all aspects of class. So, we had the 5- and 7-year old’s go to a mansion, we wanted them to visit a mansion, we wanted them to see what it’s like. And we had another activity coming up where we have them going to a castle, and we want them to learn about Black queens and kings and also play chess there. So, for me, I want to make sure that the activities I plan [at Jack and Jill] for the children give them exposure to all levels of class. So that they will know how to feel comfortable. I want our children to feel comfortable wherever they go. I want them to be able to sit with the President or not and be able to feel comfortable and feel like I have a place here.
Mrs. Mitchell demonstrates how explicit class discourse is denied and despised—talking explicitly about elite taste, networks, and institutions invites critiques of snobbishness. Instead of class, American elites emphasize morals, values, and choices as actual indicators of worthiness, with an elite habitus characterized by discursive classlessness and cultural omnivorism. Simultaneously, American elites socialize behavioral ease in institutions, cultural venues, and social networks to distinguish themselves from the middle and working classes. Mrs. Mitchell wants to give children “exposure to all levels of class” yet reflexively offers exposure to Black kings and queens, mansions (which she earlier chastised her son for valuing), and the President. She does not offer comparable exposure visiting a recycling facility, a daycare, a fast-food restaurant, or any other implicitly working-class space. Even though mothers avoid explicit class discourse and claim not to teach lessons about class, activities like this one activate subtle, embodied, classed identity. In the same way that racial-cultural ease certifies Jack and Jill members as legitimate Black folks, practiced ease in prestigious spaces certifies them as American elite. An embodied expertise of elite norms may deflect accusations of illegitimate presence in elite spaces. When Black youth have institutional, cultural, and behavioral capital to support their inclusion, “diversity” or “affirmative-action hiring” accusations that undermine their qualifications are harder to support. Mothers in this community nurture ideological norms of class denial while simultaneously cultivating behavioral habits that signal elite belonging. Similarly, children perceive value in specific exposure and skills gained through Jack and Jill. Destiny, a 21-year-old Maryland college student said she learned cultural affinities, skills, and habits in Jack and Jill:
Chapters tend to have different experiences. Because the parents, when you’re under high school age, when you’re under 13, they plan the events. So, you go to the museum, you go to Alvin Ailey. We would even do entrepreneurship workshops where we would learn about banking, we would learn about investing. I think we did like an investment opportunity. We each bought a little stock in McDonald’s. We ran our own silent auction at like 10, 11, whatever, and learned how to set that up.
Occasional visits to the museum or theater for the purpose of cultural education are something experienced by many American schoolchildren. But regular trips, entrepreneur workshops, investing clubs, silent auctions, all under the careful eye of their mothers, together work to cultivate mastery of upper-classed skills and ease in upper-classed places. According to SCOPE Magazine during 2014–2016, chapters were required to facilitate a leadership development curriculum, alongside a financial literacy curriculum developed in collaboration with Merrill Lynch, to satisfy the Education and Development thrusts. While not all children participate in all lessons, the 2014–2016 statement required all children, third grade and older, to participate in these financial lessons.
Developed in the context of play, the embodied skills and social networks developed in entrepreneur workshops, bank visits, and investing clubs are important taste-making and capital-accumulation mechanisms. In fact, because these behaviors are developed in childhood, the cultivated habitus of these Jack and Jill youth will be more integrated, easy, and therefore more effective than if their habits were developed when they were older. Cultural capital (Black art exhibits, theater, and musical performances) and material capital (banking or investment clubs) are often combined in Jack and Jill clubs. As a consequence of their early exposure to elite consumptive and behavioral habits, the children are poised to easily activate such capital as adults.
One last story from Mrs. Tucker about how her daughter, Jasmine, became a primary school teacher shows how class lessons can be powerful even when not explicitly stated:
I do think Jack and Jill is a force, because Black women are awesome, and they take care of business! And there’s the book! I’ve used the book! I’m like oh wait, you’re applying to these schools or these colleges? Let me call up, [pantomiming phone call] “are you interviewing?” It’s a hell of a resource.
I knew the [Executive Director] of the charter school Jasmine is currently working at, and I eventually was going to gear her that way, but she went to Spelman for a semester, a transfer program, and [the Executive Director’s] daughter was there. And, I was like, “hey why don’t you go talk to the daughter?” Jasmine did, and was like “hey, she says her mom is in education,” I’m like [feigning ignorance] “Oh really? I didn’t know that!” And she said, “I should call when I get back,” “ok, here’s the number!” So, it depends upon your exposure and opportunity. That helped Jasmine. And she also has to work hard, but I’m sure it didn’t hurt that the CEO was someone I knew from Jack and Jill.
While Mrs. Tucker’s story does not explicitly teach Jasmine about class through Jack and Jill, it does set the stage for this education. Several mothers emphasized the way their children’s early relationships blossomed into productive ones in young adulthood. Her throwaway statement that “white folks have been doing it for years” indicates how community members see a practical imperative to utilize the tools of the mainstream elite, even as they express a moral desire to dim class differences within Black communities. They often talked about how they expected their children to use their Jack and Jill network social capital to get friendly interviews, desirable internships, and influential mentors in various professional fields. Mrs. Tucker’s book, which lists Jack and Jill graduates’ colleges as well as parents’ educations and professions, is a physical manifestation of the organization’s social capital. As much as mothers want racially safe and affirming spaces for their children, access to such a resource is not simply a byproduct of their participation but the reward for gaining membership. Just as children are developing the embodied habitus of the social elite, the long-term relationships in Jack and Jill facilitate a social wealth where members are incentivized to help each other access desirable institutions and organizations.
These narratives reveal how classed lessons and experiences are always saturated with social knowledge about race. For this community, racial stigma in the context of America means that their participation in elite institutions, occupations, or communities is often met with suspicion by the majority-White elite community. However, elite spaces enable the accumulation of material, cultural, and social capital—key components of social mobility. Behavioral ease indicates legitimate embodied knowledge, which can deter racist attacks. Mothers worry about their children internalizing exclusionary and snobbish attitudes, which may emotionally distance them from a larger, class-diverse Black community, so they emphasize meaningful cross-class interactions (particularly with co-ethnic others) and use “values,” “education,” and “exposure” narratives to talk about privileged behaviors without directly mentioning class difference to socialize a sort of class-blindness in their children. The children of Jack and Jill reflect on their formative lessons on the meaninglessness of class while developing skills and habits that will help them succeed in elite spaces and advance socially.
Conclusion
Drawing on the experiences of mothers and children in Jack and Jill clubs, this study highlights how racial identities, concepts, and strategies are co-created with classed considerations. Mrs. Vallencourt’s responses about Jack and Jill’s role in socialization illustrate this co-creation. When I asked her whether she thought children learn something about race via the organization, she said, “I think that they learn that there’s more middle-class black kids like they are, than maybe they thought.” Later, when I asked whether children learn something about class in Jack and Jill, she similarly replied, “again, I think that they learn that there’s an abundance of middle class and upper-middle class, and wealthy black families.” The reluctance to pull these categorical identities apart illuminates how race and class modify and reinforce one another at the experiential level (Crenshaw 1989, 1991), and also reveals the ideological framework that steers Jack and Jill’s socialization interests. Mothers teach lessons about race as both a social hazard and cultural celebration; such messages are absorbed by their children, who easily explain the racial lessons of their childhood. In contrast, Jack and Jill mothers use morality, etiquette, and an embodied ease to quietly signal rank and sustain reputation, mirroring the mainstream American elite; children have muted class identity and narrative framework. Cohesive class articulation is, therefore, not intergenerationally lost; rather, performative class-ambivalence is the lesson mothers teach their children. Reproductive lessons have social utility. Lessons about racial identity are meant to bring Black people together for emotional and cultural solidarity, while class lessons are meant to help youth confidently enter privileged spaces like schools, careers, social institutions, and private clubs.
This project advances the sociological literature on the Black upper-middle class by showing how concepts, identities, and narratives around race—collectively understood as “racial projects”—are fundamentally, and reciprocally, saturated with class. Through an empirical example of the social reproduction of race and class—how ideologies are conveyed by families and institutions, and ultimately rearticulated by a new generation—we can observe the intricately entwined articulation of these two meaningful categories. This study shows how economically privileged minorities adopt American elite ideologies, strategies, and behaviors. Black upper-middle class mothers turn to Jack and Jill as a space where differences (class and race) between children are minimized, and they can enjoy the ease of homogeneity. Class-homogenous spaces are efficient for social cultivation of class capital, and mothers use private organizations to develop values that fit their intersectional community. Jack and Jill not only advances the cultivation of class norms, but also explicitly works to develop an affinity and appreciation for Black history and culture.
Ultimately, findings in this study contribute to a growing literature on a racially diverse elite class by offering an up-close examination of the lives and experiences of a community of Americans at the intersection of Blackness and socioeconomic privilege—their aspirations, frustrations, and intentions for future generations. The study also invites further inquiry into how the distinct reproductive strategies of social actors at this intersection may both augment tactics of social mobility among Americans of color and simultaneously disrupt conventional modes of social gatekeeping by White American elites.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I acknowledge, with gratitude, Michelle Byng, Linda Garber, Margaret Hunter, Judith Levine, Sharmila Lodhia, Amy Randall, and Matt Wray for their guidance and feedback in developing this work. I am also grateful to the SRE editors and reviewers for their productive comments during this submission process.
