FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

“Black on the Block is an outstanding look at the workings of race and class in urban politics. In highlighting the role that middle-class blacks play in transforming poor African American neighborhoods, Mary Pattillo brilliantly captures the divergent class interest, class conflicts, and lifestyle fractures within the black community. This book will be widely read and discussed.”
William Julius Wilson, author of There Goes the Neighborhood

“There has been much made of the revitalization of American cities in the last decade. Conventional wisdom holds that poverty is declining and gentrification has shorn up the urban middle class. Black on the Block puts this social transformation in perspective. The book is beautifully written and carefully researched. Pattillo is our generation’s leading sociologist, taking up the mantle of Dubois, Frazier, and Wilson to show how race and class play themselves out in the 21st century.”
Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh, author of Off the Books

Black on the Block
The Politics of Race and Class in the City

Mary Pattillo

Mary Pattillo is a Newsweek Woman of the 21st Century because of her critically acclaimed last book, Black Picket Fences, which changed forever the way many of us think about the black middleclass in America today. In Black on the Block, Pattillo returns to the South Side of Chicago to explore how class conflicts within the black community are dramatically changing the shape and terms of racial solidarity. Her focus is the work that more affluent members of the black community are doing to lift historically impoverished and dilapidated neighborhoods out of abject poverty—and the tensions that arise between poorer and middleclass blacks when they do so. Black on the Block explores the often heated battles between haves and have-nots, home owners and apartment dwellers, and newcomers and old timers as they clash over the political implications of gentrification and reaching out to white economic power bases. Ultimately, Pattillo argues that while these fissures have come to define black communities in cities across the country, the reality is that more and more blacks are rightly choosing participation over abdication and involvement over withdrawal. Incisive and heartfelt, Black on the Block will forever change the way we think about the politics of race and class in the city today.

Mary Pattillo is professor of sociology and African American studies at Northwestern University. She is the author of Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril among the Black Middle Class, also published by the University of Chicago Press, and coeditor of Imprisoning America: The Social Effects of Mass Incarceration

 

Mary Pattillo is available for interviews. For more information, please contact Mark Heineke at (773) 702-3714 or mheineke@uchicago.edu