Black Bourgeois

Reviewed by: Black Bourgeois: Class & Sex in the Flesh by Candice M. Jenkins Roberta Wolfson Candice M. Jenkins. Black Bourgeois: Class & Sex in the Flesh. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2019. 280 pp. $108.00 cloth/ $27.00 paper. On June 14, 2005, Oprah Winfrey was denied entry into the Hermès boutique in Paris during closing time. On July 16, 2009, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. was arrested for allegedly breaking and entering into what turned out to be his own home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. On April 12, 2018, two Black real estate agents waiting in a Philadelphia Starbucks for a business meeting with a white associate were arrested after the store manager demanded they leave because they had not made a purchase before requesting to use the restroom. In none of these incidents were the material wealth, professional status, and social capital enjoyed by these Black individuals sufficient to protect them from being racially profiled, snubbed, or criminalized. Each of these situations is discussed in Candice M. Jenkins's insightful and readable book Black Bourgeois: Class & Sex in the Flesh as critical examples of how the Black body continues to be viewed in the contemporary period as inherently out of place in middle-class spaces that are racially marked as white. These examples reflect the existential paradox of the Black bourgeois subject, who is privileged by class but rendered vulnerable by race, a paradox that forms the central focus of Black Bourgeois. Jenkins calls this phenomenon "the black and bourgeois dilemma" (6), a conundrum that defines the lived experiences of the middle-class Black subject who enjoys the protection of material wealth while simultaneously enduring the precarity of blackness. At the heart of Jenkins's book lies a central question: "Does material privilege offer any real protection from the operation of black vulnerability?" (7). The answer, as Jenkins demonstrates, is complex: On the one hand, class privilege has been historically associated with whiteness but on the other hand, material wealth confers undeniable protections for Black people. In exploring the dimensions of this conundrum, Black Bourgeois offers a timely contribution to our understanding of how race, class, and gender intersect in the contemporary era and how these categories are complexly performed and complicated by the Black (materially privileged) body. Jenkins grounds her analysis of the Black and bourgeois dilemma within theoretical frameworks from cultural studies, sociology, and Black studies. Drawing upon the work of cultural theorists Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts, Jenkins takes as a basic premise the claim that class is lived through race, that class is always and already racialized. This claim, coupled with sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's notion of habitus (the idea that we are taught how to perform our membership in a social category), forms the foundation of Jenkins's assessment of why the Black body does not seem to appropriately "perform" [End Page 178] middle-class status or, conversely, why attaining middle-class privilege can threaten the authenticity of an individual's claim to blackness. Jenkins also draws upon the work of Afropessimist scholars such as Hortense Spillers, Jared Sexton, Frank Wilderson III, and Alexander Weheliye, who demand renewed attention to how white supremacist structures render Black life precarious. As Jenkins notes, the reference to "flesh" in the very title of Black Bourgeois calls attention to the distinction Spillers makes between the body and the flesh, in which "the body" is marked racially as white and granted civic inclusion, whereas "the flesh" is associated with the abjectness of blackness and defined as a commodity that can be owned and exploited. Drawing upon this dichotomy, Jenkins makes the provocative claim that the Black bourgeois subject is necessarily an ontological impossibility, since the Black body that has acquired middle-class status (and thus a supposed proximity to whiteness) is nevertheless still informed by the historical legacy of Black flesh (and thus branded a commodity that can only participate in market exchange as property). Black Bourgeois is divided into seven chapters, each of which explores one or more works of African American literature that consider the tensions and paradoxes embedded in the contemporary Black bourgeois experience. Nearly all of these

Art history · Bourgeoisie · Middle class · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Gender Studies · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society