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The African-American upper class consists of African American professionals in fields such as law, medicine, business and entertainment that have incomes that amount to $200,000 or more.〔Lacy, K. (2007). Blue-chip Black: race, class, and status in the new Black middle class. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Pg. 41〕 This class, sometimes referred to as the black upper class, the African-American upper middle class or black elite, represents less than 1 percent of the total black population in the United States.〔Lacy, K. (2007). Blue-chip Black: race, class, and status in the new Black middle class. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Pg. 4〕 This group of African Americans has a history of organizations and activities that distinguish it from other classes within the black community as well as from the white upper class. Many of these traditions, which have persisted for several generations, are discussed in Lawrence Otis Graham’s 2000 book, ''Our Kind of People: Inside America’s Black Upper Class''. Scholarship on this class from a sociological perspective is generally traced to E. Franklin Frazier's ''Black Bourgeoisie'' (first edition in English in 1957 translated from the 1955 French original). ==Historical background== Not long after Africans were brought to the Americas in the 17th and 18th centuries and sold into slavery, nonconsensual sexual relations (i.e. rape) and consensual sexual relations took place between slave owners and enslaved Africans. The biracial offspring, sometimes referred to as mulattoes, were sometimes not enslaved by their white slave-holding fathers and comprised a large part of the free black population in the American South.〔Frazier, E (1997). Black Bourgeoisie. New York, NY: Free Press Paperbacks. Pg. 14〕 In addition to this group, numbers of Africans escaped to freedom during the instability of the American Revolution. Others were manumitted by their enslavers. The free black community in the U.S. had therefore increased considerably by 1800, and although most of these free people were very poor, some were able to acquire farmland or to learn mechanical or artistic trades.〔Frazier, E (1997). Black Bourgeoisie. New York, NY: Free Press Paperbacks. Pg. 14〕 Some runaway slaves served in the Civil War for the Union and at the conclusion of the war, some of those African-American soldiers received and a mule which contributed to land ownership among African Americans following the emancipation of slaves. Other former slaves, often light-skinned former house slaves who shared ancestry with their onetime owners and who had acquired marketable skills such as cooking and tailoring, worked in domestic fields or were able to open small businesses such as restaurants and catering firms. Some free blacks in the North also founded small businesses and even newspapers.〔Frazier, E (1997). Black Bourgeoisie. New York, NY: Free Press Paperbacks. Pg. 33〕 The members of these families were able to get a head-start on those blacks who were essentially still enslaved by their lack of access to wealth accumulation, particularly when it came to owning their own land.〔Frazier, E (1997). Black Bourgeoisie. New York, NY: Free Press Paperbacks. Pg.30〕 As a result of Jim Crow laws that prohibited certain rights if a person was of African heritage, many African-Americans were forced to be enterprising by establishing businesses that served their own people. Some of those businesses included black-owned hotels, insurance agencies, funeral homes and various retail stores. A "Black Wall Street" once existed in Greenwood, Tulsa, Oklahoma; and the Georgetown area of Washington D.C. was known for its affluent African American professionals during segregation. In fact, the level of business ownership among African-Americans was the highest during the era of legal segregation. Owing to integration following the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, many black-owned businesses suffered because of their inability to compete with white-owned establishments that had better access to financing. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「African-American upper class」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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