Young, Gifted and Diverse: Origins of the New Black Elite

Traditionally and anachronistically seen as a monolith of sameness and indistinctness, the lives of Black people in the U.S. have all too often been under-analyzed and disregarded en masse as stories of poverty, lack of education, and crime. As claimed in this book, the life trajectories of an astronomical number of people have been cancelled by blurring their edges together and combining them all into a single mono-dimensional set of highly stereotyped and caste-friendly labels. Charles’s (Taming the River) book aims to topple the paradigm and shed renewed light on the experience of Black people and all their unique traits of origins, status, immigration history, parental involvement, generational trauma and exposure to white culture. The result is an astoundingly thorough deep dive, which the reader is eased into with the help of easily digestible surveys, charts and graphs, interview excerpts and a very comprehensive reference section.