According to this Post story on demographics in Prince George’s County, black middle class people like living with other black middle class people!

“They enjoy interacting with other blacks,” Karyn Lacy, a sociologist at the University of Michigan, wrote in her book “Blue-Chip Black,” for which she interviewed dozens of parents in Prince George’s. “Scholars have focused so much on the burden of blackness that they have devoted scant attention to the possibility that there is something enjoyable about being black and participating in a community of blacks.”

Residential integration is not a goal, particularly for younger black professionals born after the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s, said Bart Landry, a sociologist at the University of Maryland who has returned to Prince George’s for an update to his 1987 book, “The New Black Middle Class.” He said many residents find comfort, after spending the day in a predominantly white workplace, in returning to a home where all their neighbors are other African American professionals.

“They’re where they want to be,” Landry said. “They’re not thinking about integration. It’s not on their radar screen. . . . Their goal is to live in a community of like-minded, like-valued people, and these are other middle-class blacks.”

Whoa, black people are just like other people. Anyway, the only real issue I had with the story is that it seemed to paint too rosy a picture. It was a good study of the black upper-middle class, but had only one mention of the downsides of living in “Ward 9″—-bad public schools—-and no interviews with the poor folks living in the county.

Photo by ElvertBarnes via Flickr/Creative Commons Attribution Generic 2.0 License