Black Picket Fences Rhetorical Analysis

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In Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril Among Middle Class Blacks, Mary Patillo McCoy investigates the black-middle class experience with a focus on youth in the neighborhood context in a country seemingly obsessed with race where policy makers and citizens alike go about as if race is a thing of the past. The success of many African Americans emerging into the middle class have created a false idea or belief that race is not the obstacle preventing progress. McCoy argues from a perceptive account, shining light on a different reality, one in which the middle classes of black and whites remain separate and unequal.
McCoy begins by stating that scientists have assumed that the black middle class is secure so she can argue in the contrary. …show more content…

She would agree that the growth of the black middle-class has been impressive, however she urges people to look deeper from a comparative perspective. The black middle class continues to lag behind it’s white counterparts as evidenced by a large earning gap among workers in the same field as well as the ratio of people unemployed in the different ethnic groups. Home foreclosures resulted causing an abundance of boarded up homes. McCoy pushes for continued affirmative action, access to higher education, a plan to create real family-wage jobs, and alleviation of residential segregation to support gains already made by the black middle class …show more content…

She states that social ties across class lines, lifestyles, and the law exist partly because of the assignment of most African Americans to the “black side of town” (80). Blacks, living so close to the poor, struggle to overcome the crime, dilapidated housing, and social disorder in the deteriorating poor neighborhoods that are steadily expanding towards them. Most middle-class whites do not face this kind of problem (103). Neighborhood youth has easy access to two different paths growing up in the “in-between” neighborhood. One side is the path of gang violence and crime while the other leads to an education and a career. McCoy says that this peculiar limbo explains the disparate outcomes of otherwise similar young people in Groveland (132). The temptation for crime is always present, as is the opportunity for success when there is a such diverse group of role models in one community

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