Moving Up, Moving Out: The Rise of the Black Middle Class in Chicago

In The Truly Disadvantaged (1987) William Julius Wilson posited that Black middle-class abandonment and a corresponding lack of “role models” was, in part, responsible for urban poverty and the proliferation of an African American “underclass.” In Moving Up, Moving Out, Will Cooley forcefully challenges this notion, arguing that attempts to saddle the Black middle class with the blame and responsibility for urban poverty obscures its racial and economic causes, feeds “white hopes for racial peace-on-the-cheap,” and renders invisible the racially distinctive, protracted struggles the Black middle class waged and the obstacles they overcame to “move up” (p. 3). Cooley suggests instead that the progress made by Chicago's middle class, despite being repeatedly marginalized and positioned as compradors by whites, kept the city from collapsing under the weight of structural racism, deindustrialization, neglect, austerity, and neoliberalism during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Focused largely on the collective and...