ABSTRACT
Stratification economics provides a powerful bridge across critical discourse in its post-colonial studies, subaltern studies, and critical race theory modes to quantitative social science inquiry. Frequently, both economists and sociologists use income cut-offs for identifying who is located in the middle class. Under the feudal mode of production, the middle class would consist of persons who were neither lord nor serf in emerging villages or towns set apart from the lord’s demesne. As E. Franklin Frazier suggested himself, we can read Frazier’s text as an examination of particular case of a subaltern native middle class – the black middle class in the United States. If black Americans are construed as an internal colony in the United States, then the black middle class can be seen as a native middle class – facing all the attendant issues and inclined toward all the general tendencies.
