Abstract
This thesis examines the connections between racial identity and socioeconomic status in the lives of contemporary African Americans. Challenging what I call the “Two Nation/World” model of black America, a model that assumes the existence of two reified, isolated, and mutually exclusive black communities (the “black underclass” and the “black middle-class”), I utilize an ethnographic method to probe the many interactions African Americans have with acquaintances, friends, neighbors, and family members of varying and often unequal class and status positions. With Harlem as my field-site, I show that performance-based, class-coded markers/indicators (such as speech patterns, dress, striding gait, body posture, articulateness, religious affiliation, etc.) are often the modalities through which racial identity and authenticity are contested or achieved in class-stratified contexts. Moreover, I argue for a performative notion of race that sees its connection to class not as a zero-sum game (where either race trumps class or class supersedes race in analyses of black life) but rather as an integrated system of differentiation whereby black Americans shore up the uncertain ends of their own social identities.
