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Compares race relations in two suburban communities in order to show that middle‐class blacks meet with some success when they temporarily exchange their racial identity for a class‐based identity. Collects data through ethnography and individual interview to examine the conditions under which middle‐class blacks construct and assert a sub‐urban identity. States that success varies with the racial composition of the suburban community and the white neighbours’ level of the satisfaction with the community.

Methodological traditions are like any other social phenomena. They are made by people working together, criticizing one another, and borrowing from other traditions. They are living social things, not abstract categories in a single system.– Andrew Abbott (2004, p. 15)

Since ethnographers tend to study poor, urban black communities most often, it is not surprise that the methodological literature contains a wealth of information designed to help scholars do this kind of work. Far less is known about the challenges ethnographers face when “studying up,” that is exploring middle and upper-middle-class communities. Less is know too about the challenges of working in a suburb versus an urban community. This chapter helps to fill that void. By chronicling the challenges I faced in the field while collecting the data for Blue-Chip Black, my book about the identity options of middle and upper-middle-class suburban blacks, I show that the strategies ethnographers of the urban poor employ in their work are not necessarily transferable to studies of the upper classes. I identify a set of methodological tools appropriate for analysis of the upper classes. I then turn to the theoretical contributions of my study as a way of showing the kinds of insights that can be gleaned from a study of those near the top of the class ladder.

Racialized class formation is a process in which both racial formation and class formation shape the experiences of African Americans in the stratification system. This occurs for blacks in differing social classes. However, this chapter focuses on African Americans in the professional middle class. The professional middle class as a whole has grown substantially under postindustrialism. Racialized class formation has been greatly shaped by the nature of state policy regarding citizenship rights and has varied in the transition from the pre-civil rights era to the post-civil rights era. This chapter utilizes historical, interview, and secondary data to analyze experiences of the “first generation” of black professionals to integrate employment in mainstream institutions after the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The focus is on the processes of recruitment, hiring, and promotion, as well as relations with clientele among those black professionals and how their middle class employment experiences are racialized.

Based on ethnographic research in the Paris metropolitan region, I discuss how my identity as a Black American ethnographer was implicated in this urban ethnography. Specifically, I discuss the intersections of researcher identity with that of the “researched” and how I was simultaneously framed as an insider and outsider due to different facets of my own identity. I further argue that these insights were data in and of itself as they revealed how race and racism operate in a society that has long disavowed their existence.