Abstract
In Jay Z’s freestyle, “Young, Gifted and Black,” the rapper draws a strong distinction between his life as a Black man from the inner city of Brooklyn and the lives of his suburban and often privileged listeners. He explains the difficulties of his upbringing and how escaping ghettoized conditions marked his arguably unparalleled rise. While Jay Z, in his expression of being young, gifted, and Black, highlights the differences between the economically privileged and marginalized, Camille Z. Charles, Rory Kramer, Douglas S. Massey, and Kimberly C. Torres, in their book Young, Gifted and Diverse: Origins of the New Black Elite, share stories of Black people who occupy the margins of both privilege and oppression. Popular phrases such as “Black is not a monolith” reveal how the Black community is heterogeneous with varied experiences, origin stories, and approaches to similar social problems. While many people may understand this notion, research on Black life in the United States appears to present a “one size fits all” approach to racial problems or experiences (Esie and Bates 2023; Richardson 2022). Charles et al. address the limiting intersectional approaches to understanding Black life by extracting the often-overlooked identities that add dynamism to Black students at elite institutions. Using a mixed-methods approach and analyzing data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Freshmen (NLSF) from 1999, this study examined students from 16 private universities, seven private liberal arts colleges, four public universities, and one historically Black institution, totaling 3,924 interviews, with a Black subsample of 1,039 students. This investigation explores diversity within the Black elite sub-class, specifically surveying the dimensions of race, gender, identification, immigration, skin tone, parentage, social class, and segregation. With these data, the authors take a step toward the goal of research that eliminates the sole use of race as a master status.
A nod to the Nina Simone and Weldon Irvine classic, “To Be Young Gifted and Black,” Camille and colleagues’ book Young, Gifted and Diverse opens with an historical and statistical account of the rise of the Black middle and elite classes in the United States. The authors make a case for an in-depth look at the Black elite and its influence on the future of U.S. society. Chapter 2 introduces readers to the inner workings of diversity among Black NLSF respondents. A key component of understanding Black diversity among students is exploring students’ relationship to segregation. Chapter 3 informs readers that while some students lived in neighborhoods and attended schools that were predominately utilized by minority, other students lived and were educated in predominately White settings. Still, other students grew up in a hybrid of minority and white locations. These differing coming-of-age contexts led to varied reports of exposure to disorder and violence with students from segregated surroundings experiencing levels of shock upon entering predominately White institutions. Chapter 5 continues to explore the world of these Black NLSF students prior to entering the higher education space. This section uses gender to highlight parental child-rearing practices, school choices, coursework, and their direct or indirect influence on college choice. The authors discuss human, social, and cultural capital to explain the assorted parenting styles and educational experiences between Black subgroups.
Chapters 4 and 8 explore identities and the ways college students understand their connection to Blackness and the stereotypes associated with their racial group using Multidimensional Inventory of Black Identity (MIBI) of Sellers et al. (1997). Employing the concept of linked fate, the authors found that most respondents saw the importance of maintaining a Black and American identity. However, proximity to Whiteness in neighborhood, educational settings, and place of origin influenced students’ commitment to Black identity and perception of White people as discriminatory.
Chapters 6, 7, and 9 examine the experiences of students on elite campuses and explore the ways race, class, and other social identities impact their friendship circles, networks, romantic relationships, and organizational membership. Racism, intraracial conflict, stress, and debt are the price students must pay for a spot in the ivory tower and a place near the top of the social hierarchy. Students may leave college because of debt, lack of interest and effort, poor grades, and a negative racial campus climate. Chapter 10 provides suggestions for solutions to previously mentioned issues, with a focus on solving the macro-level social problems by eliminating racial stratification in the criminal justice system and residential segregation. Micro-level solutions include increasing the use of other social identities in race research and college admissions considering other diversity factors beyond race alone.
Overall, Charles et al. are effective in providing readers with a much more intersectional and nuanced view of Black students in elite educational spaces. The attention on additional social identities apart from race problematizes the attempt to racialize solutions to social problems on college campuses without considering other distinct characteristics such as gender, nativity, social class, and skin tone. The mixed method approach and the detailed explanation of the various combinations of intersectional identities (seen in Chapter 10) provides one of the more comprehensive analyses on this subset of the Black community. A key takeaway from this text is its ability to explain the Black elite as both a privileged group whose access to the “ivory tower” provides a buffer from some of the stressors found in the larger society, as well as a faction of people who must juggle multiple social pressures amid the white gaze of academia for the sake of social mobility and “success.” These approaches and findings will help college program directors, recruiters, presidents, and legislators create college cohorts reflect the majority of Black people in the United States.
While the extensive dialog on social identities that decenter race and explores other characteristics of self refines the conversation of Black students in education, at times, the discussion appears too detailed and repetitive. Some aspects of the dialog around identity could have been condensed to fewer themes. Findings that were to be expected and unsurprising could have been shortened or left out. One example was the finding that financial support is largely important to the decisions made by Black students with the most disadvantages, particularly respondents with identifications related to class disadvantage (lower parental education, lower class status, first generation student, and so on). Shortening or removing typical claims such as this one could provide space for explaining the more unique elements of the analysis. It can keep the readers’ attention and help the flow of the argument. Overall, this text can be used in undergraduate- and graduate-level courses in sociology, education, research methods, statistics, and race. Any lectures that emphasize the need for intersectional studies can employ this book as a guide. The findings can be used to help support programmatic change in diversity departments across colleges and universities that look to create a much more inclusive and progressive student body.
