![]() “A fish bowl” (p. 238) is how one resident describes these neighborhoods, where actions are constantly scrutinized and status challenged by local elites. Not only were they hit hard by the 2008 recession, but they also never fully seem to win their neighbors’ approval, and constantly have to prove their belonging to the middle class. So, has the American dream come true? The Black residents who were able, despite all the obstacles, to settle on these quiet streets lined with single-family homes still have tough lives in many cases. ![]() It was therefore not until after World War II that middle-class Black Americans, fleeing the poverty of Brooklyn and Harlem in large numbers, moved into the still profoundly heterogeneous neighborhoods (pseudonymized in the book) that Orly Clergé chose to study: “Cascades,” in Queens, New York City, which is 77% Black and has a median household income of $70,174 (compared to $50,303 nationally), and “Great Park,” further east in Nassau County, Long Island, which is 29% Black, 32% White, and 32% Latino, with a median household income of $81,315. This did not occur without clashes, and the defense of residential spaces-which, as Clergé explains, form “the social laboratories where the American experience of White supremacy is tested and reaffirmed” (p. 91)-proved fierce. From the interwar period onward, she tells us, Black people from Harlem, many of them artists and intellectuals, were looking for more space in the suburbs and, far from Manhattan, reminders of the atmosphere of the South, where many of them came from. The historical depth of Orly Clergé’s book, which goes back to the forgotten era when slavery also existed in the North, is in this respect precious, as well as being fascinating. The presence of Black populations on Long Island is by no means a recent phenomenon. Yet what Howard Winant (2001) calls the Break-the period of upheaval associated with the political movements of the 1950s through the 1970s-changed the situation definitively, as did the social mobility that Black people began finally to enjoy in the decades following World War II. From contracts designed to prohibit the sale of houses to Black people to physical attacks when these “forbidden neighbors” nevertheless managed to venture in, everything was done to keep them out. The establishment and protection of all-White residential suburbs has been a brutal manifestation of racial segregation since the late 19th century, whether institutionalized or otherwise. The arduous opening-up of the suburbs to Black populations On this basis, she answers the question above in the negative, while demonstrating the extent of the transformations that have occurred in recent decades. This study, undertaken in two areas of the New York suburbs (the first in the borough of Queens, in New York City the second further east in Nassau County, Long Island), enabled Clergé to gather a wealth of material. In the process, she raises an important question: is the existence of a Black middle class that has seemingly achieved the American dream a sign that the “color line” (Du Bois 1903) has truly faded? In devoting a long-term study to the Black suburban middle classes, Orly Clergé shatters another piece of conventional wisdom, that of “suburban Whiteness” (p. 231). For example, one Black mother recalls, with some annoyance, the compliments paid to her by a White neighbor, who was surprised by her involvement in her son’s extracurricular activities-exemplary behavior that this neighbor would not have noticed in a White mother (pp. 172–173). It is here, in these residential spaces-the suburbs-that sociologist Orly Clergé has not only lived but also conducted a study with their inhabitants, who were often taken aback to find themselves associated with the usual clichés about Black people, such as the idea that they are irresponsible parents. “Most Black people in the United States now reside in the suburbs,” she writes, and in New York “the suburbs saw a 30% increase in Black families between 19” (p. 12). Orly Clergé’s book The New Noir seeks to challenge the way Black people in the United States are all too often reduced to a single social status-poverty-and a single space-the run-down neighborhoods usually located in the inner cities in North America. One particularly evocative type of place sums up all the stereotypes of African Americans: Black ghettos.
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