Black Bourgeoisie

The author traces the rise of this enigmatic class from the segregated South to the postwar boom in the integrated North, demonstrating how, along the way to what appeared to be prosperity and progress, middle-class blacks lost touch with their traditional black roots while never receiving recognition from the white sector. According to Frazier, the consequence is an odd bourgeois class with no identity, constructed on self-sustaining illusions about black business and society, and discreetly undercut by a collective, crippling inferiority complex.