ABSTRACT
Vernacular and social scientific understandings of "the city" are haunted by attempts to understand notions of authentic citizenship and belonging through the prism of racialist reasoning. Urban ethnography can be particularly adept at unpacking why and how race travels idiosyncratically as well as systematically around local cityscapes before it ever crosses any national borders. This chapter examines what class-based intra-racial distinctions meant for everyday performances of racial solidarity. It also examines what class looks like to blacks living all along the socioeconomic spectrum. Class-based marginalization has long combined with America's racialized social logics to create a toxic incarnation of urban abjection sometimes so disempowering and intense that it can feel as though its victims are fundamentally removed from the collective body politic altogether. Urban ethnography, has been about seeing the sidewalks of big cities as ripe for research on the Western anthropologist's most "primitive" subject, the racialized other.
