Hood-Adjacent: Place and Class in Black American Life

It would be wonderful to live in a world without labels or stereotypes. But it is impossible to analyse complex widescale social trends without thinking in terms of broad categories like race and class. Many people believe that those two concepts are in tension with one another, that one of the dyad has far more explanatory power than the other and that to focus on the wrong one will bring about moral and political confusion.

I have recently argued in USA Today that class is a more important factor than race in the challenges facing black Americans today. My article received a lot of criticism, especially from academics who believe that by emphasising the importance of class, I am undermining efforts to achieve greater equity for black Americans. I disagree with these critics—but I understand their viewpoint, since, for black Americans, race and class are intricately interconnected. That has certainly been the case in my own life.

I am 36 years old, the son of an African American mother and a white father. I have lived in inner-city Los Angeles for almost the whole of my adult life, in what you might consider the outskirts of the hood, where South L.A. extends into Los Angeles County, bordering on Inglewood to the west and Hawthorne to the south. The area is currently being aggressively gentrified. The restoration of old and construction of new sporting and performance venues has brought an enormous influx of new investment to the city of Inglewood. The return of the NFL team the Rams; the building of a new stadium for the basketball team, the L.A. Clippers; and the appearances of everyone from John Mayer to Jordan Peterson at the new Forum and YouTube theatres have together led to the appearance of freshly paved roads, bike lanes and the previously unfamiliar sight of young white women jogging down my street in yoga pants in the early morning hours.

The area is becoming safer for those of us who live here—those, at least, who can afford to stay, as rents rise. It hasn’t always been like this, though. Over the years, I have lost two young neighbours to gang violence and have often been wakened by the sound of gunfire right outside my window, followed by the wailing of sirens coming to clean up the carnage. When I moved in, there were bullet holes in my side gate. My previous neighbour had been mugged at gunpoint as he visited our mailbox. Incidents like these no longer define the black experience in modern America, but they have been an integral part of so many black people’s experience for so long that it is forgivable to believe that this is still the status quo.

My stepbrother, who is about four years older than I am, lives in the unit behind my duplex. When I first met his friends, they seemed like a tough group of brothers, with their brash voices, tattoos and bulging muscles visible through tank tops and white T-shirts. One was working out at a weight bench; another was playing grand theft auto. Weed smoke wafted through the air. It was everyone’s day off, and they were making the most of it.

But the conversation that unfolded revealed some interesting contradictions. One of them was joking about his time in prison—but also sharing some stories about college. Another boasted of his gambling prowess, but it quickly became clear that he gambled only in his time off from his full-time job at the Department of Defense.

Finally, I asked a question that I knew would get everyone’s attention.

“Yo, where y’all brothers from?”

The talk stopped dead. They looked at each other and then back at me.

“Where you from?” one of them responded, with more defiance than curiosity.

“Well,” I told him, “I was born in Inglewood. And I’ve lived here in South Los Angeles for pretty much 15 years. But I grew up in Culver City, and I graduated high school in Woodland Hills.”

The tension quickly eased.

“Carson,” said the brother standing by the TV.

“Hawthorne,” said the fierce-looking man on the weight bench.

“Torrance,” answered the guy on the couch.

A knowing look passed between us—and suddenly, we all laughed.

There is a huge difference between growing up in the hood and growing up in the suburbs, as these guys did—even if you are black. It is overwhelmingly young black men from the inner cities who populate our prisons, succumb to drug addiction, live lives of poverty and die by violence. In the Los Angeles area, this means people from South L.A., Inglewood, Compton and Watts. It is the culture of these communities that has shaped the larger culture of black masculinity. There is status in being able to claim that you come from the hood, and which hood you name can also indicate your street affiliation, your gang, your alignments: i.e., who your allies and enemies are. The momentary tension that followed my question as to where the boys were from stems from that fact: when two people tell each other where they are from, they can discover that they are on opposite sides of a deadly conflict.

That wasn’t going to happen in our case, though, since Hawthorne, Torrance, Woodland Hills and Culver City and, to a lesser extent, Carson are all relatively comfortable, even well-to-do, middle class, suburban neighbourhoods. Despite their ink, their street lingo and their bravado, my stepbrother’s friends were all educated, well-travelled men with respectable careers. We have chosen to live in the hood—and that makes all the difference. We’ve had opportunities that people who grew up here didn’t have. Class matters. Even though we are black, we have had dramatically different life outcomes from our peers who grew up in the heart of America’s urban underclass. And yet, being hood-adjacent has important consequences. Our lives are very different and more challenging from those of most of our white classmates and colleagues.

Economist William “Sandy” Darity has argued that those who suggest that class is a greater factor in American inequality than race have to explain why blacks underperform compared to whites in every important metric, even when they are from the same income bracket. Darity is right: even middle- and upper-class black Americans are more likely to be incarcerated, more likely to face violence, less likely to go to college and more likely to descend into poverty than their white counterparts. Black middle-class experience, then, is meaningfully different—more dangerous—than white middle-class experience, on average.

Proximity to a large pool of black poverty makes even the upwardly mobile black experience more challenging. A significant percentage of black people who are middle class in terms of their income levels nevertheless live in high-poverty black communities. Their children attend—or are surrounded by kids who attend—the same underperforming schools. Their kids live near or on the same dangerous streets and are more susceptible to the same dangerous influences that plague poorer black youth in our inner cities.

None of my stepbrother’s friends grew up in an impoverished neighbourhood. But our social, familial and cultural bonds to such communities have had real impacts on our lives. Although my stepbrother grew up in Carson, he had cousins in South L.A. who were affiliated with gangs, and he spent time on the streets with them growing up. He has witnessed violence from up close, grabbed a gun in confrontational situations that could easily have turned deadly, and became used to the idea that drug addicts, Bloods, Crips and cops are all equally dangerous. One of his friends has done time. We’ve all experienced the streets; we’ve all been in proximity to violence and could easily have become perpetrators or victims of it.

Race and class, then, are both significant factors affecting the life outcomes of young black men. It would be myopic to focus on one to the exclusion of the other. The truth is far more complex.