The Cosby Cohort by Harris Cherise A.;

Author:Harris, Cherise A.; [Harris, Cherise A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2013-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter FIVE

Losing the Race? Attachment, Ambivalence, and Retreat

Many of us 80s babies came from parents with pasts full of struggle. Our parents fought twice as hard to get the opportunities that were readily available to us, their children, and they pushed us to grab as much of it as we could. Unfortunately, too often, the concept of charity got trampled in the race to the top. It was the 80s: the middle class was rapidly growing. For many families, struggling became a thing of past. People just wanted to wear Jeri curls, listen to Kool and the Gang and Celebrate good times, come on. Forget the Evans family and the Sanfords; we wanted to be the Jeffersons and the Cosbys. And in our haste to be the best and the brightest and have the biggest and the shiniest—our less fortunate brothers and sisters were forgotten. (Donaldson 2010, 154)

In the above quote from her book tracing the complexities of the Black middle-class experience and the tensions between middle-class and low-income Blacks, blogger and media creator Jam Donaldson well encapsulates the struggle for mobility and identity among second-generation middle-class Blacks. While beginning their climb to upward mobility—one fraught with extraordinary challenges—connections to Black culture and Black people were often compromised. Given their socialization into the culture of mobility and their lives spent in White social spaces, it comes as no great surprise that many continue to grapple with issues of race and class. It is a struggle that Beverly Daniel Tatum perhaps predicted in her ethnography Assimilation Blues about the experience of Black middle-class parents raising their children in the White California suburb she referred to as “Sun Beach.” Prophetically, she opined,

Surely when it comes to evaluating their lives in Sun Beach, the bottom line for most, if not all, of these [Black middle class] parents is providing a better life for their children. Materially speaking, there is no question that they have been able to do that. The question is, ‘At what cost?’ Has there been something lost in the process, perhaps a sense of family, a sense of history, that sense of ‘Blackness,’ of which some of the parents speak? And, if so, of what long-term significance will it be in the lives of their children? (Tatum 1999, 108)

Essentially, what Tatum was asking was, does raising children in mostly White environments impact one’s sense of connection to other Blacks and their sense of Blackness as an individual identity over the life course? In many ways, the very lifestyle and worldview of the Cosby Cohort predisposed them to becoming distant from Black culture and Black people in adulthood. Is this what actually happens to these children? Do some have stronger attachments to Black culture and people than we might imagine? What accounts for the difference in who has stronger attachments and who has weaker ones? In sum, as Tatum wondered twenty-five years ago, what actually happens to second-generation Black middle-class children who spent most of their time in White spaces and

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