Raising the Race

RICHÉ J. DANIEL BARNES is an affiliate professor of anthropology and the dean of Pierson College at Yale University in Connecticut. Her research has appeared in numerous scholarly journals and essay collections, including The Changing Landscape of Work and Family in the American Middle Class and The Gender, Culture, and Power Reader.

• PrefaceIntroduction: Black Career Women and Strategic MotheringChapter 1 The Role of Black Women in Black Family Survival StrategiesChapter 2 Black Professional Women, Careers, and Family “Choice”Chapter 3 “Just in Case He Acts Crazy”: Strategic Mothering and the Collective Memory of Black Marriage and FamilyChapter 4 Enculturating the Black Professional ClassChapter 5 Black Career Women, the Black Community, and the Neo-Politics of RespectabilityConclusionEpilogue: Whatever Happened To . . .AppendixNotesReferencesIndex

"Raising the Race is a fascinating and original study of the lives of professional black women that contributes significantly to theorizing about women’s negotiation of family and career. Barnes expands sociological approaches to class mobility and feminist approaches to marriage, motherhood, and work by revealing how race profoundly affects the domestic strategies of these women despite their upward social mobility."  - Dorothy Roberts (author of Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty) "Rich in narrative power and in theoretical complexity, this important book defines the terrain for a new generation in work-family studies that moves beyond the past focus on white women."- Joan Williams (author of Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What to Do About It) "Barnes draws on interviews of 23 married professional mothers obtained through a snowball sample of women in the Atlanta area ... The method allows the author to fill a gap in the literature on black women’s work and family life and to challenge prevailing ideas about women’s strategies for addressing the work-family conflict ... Recommended. Upper-division undergraduate collections and above." (CHOICE) "Barnes's thoughtful analysis is timely and relevant for today's Black professional women and will benefit readers from a variety of levels and backgrounds" (PsycCRITIQUES) "In focusing specifically on black professional women who are also wives and mothers, Barnes makes a major contribution towards broadening sociological understandings of black families and the impacts of race across social class lines ... As a first-of-its-kind interrogation of important and timely issues, Raising the Race significantly advances our understandings of these complex social dynamics." (Sociology of Race and Ethnicity) "An excellent, well-written work for scholars and laypersons desirous of either introductory or updated information about the lifestyles of educated and wealthy African American women." (Journal of African American History) "Raising the Race makes several strong contributions to work–family scholarship and should serve as a call to action, encouraging us to broaden our conversations about work and family to ensure that they reflect the diverse experiences of people across race, class, and gender. Building on her work, we can ask new questions, eschew simplistic understandings of work and family, and uncover the challenges faced by people based on race, class, gender, and other social statuses." (Journal of Family Theory and Review) Left of Black with RichÉ Barnes, interview with host Dr. Mark Anthony Neal (Left of Black)