Hundreds of grassroots protests have taken place across the United States under the banner of #BlackLivesMatter (BLM) movement since 2013. These protests were frequently animated by populist rhetoric that questioned both the performance of elected officials, chided the middle class for leaving the poor behind, and rejected the “respectability politics” that defined earlier movements for racial justice. In short, the core activists of the BLM movement are attempting to invent a new fiction of African American peoplehood that “centers the most marginal” members of the community. This chapter examines the extent to which the rise of the BLM movement has generated fissures in African American public opinion. The main finding is that public opinion on the effectiveness of the BLM movement is segmented by age, gender, and income.

The conclusion revisits several interrelated theoretical questions, including whether our views of what constitutes the Black middle class needs to be redefined, and how traditional notions of family are challenged by the rise of the Love Jones Cohort. The conclusion restates the underlying impetus of the book: to interrogate the unique lifestyle of the Love Jones Cohort, and thereby continuing to understand how their intersecting identities of race, class, gender, and singleness shape their life decisions. The conclusion also argues the notion of a family (of one) or how based on the centrality of friendship networks to those in the Love Jones Cohort we should embrace and institutionalize augmented families, thereby allowing those in the Cohort to establish family units with friends (and themselves) in a legal manner – an approach I term “the SALA Family Plan.” The conclusion discusses the main implications arising from this study.

Chapter 4 argues that marriage as a social institution is changing in the United States. One consequence of this is the rise of Black never-married singles as a demographic and those who are also middle class : the Love Jones Cohort. Through the narratives of the Love Jones Cohort and discussion of the various theoretical assumptions that have been put forward to explain declining marriage rates among Black Americans – especially women – Chapter 4 introduces a framework for understanding how and why the Cohort has begun stepping into the limelight, and what the implications of this might be. This chapter also sets out some of the quantitative and theoretical rationalizations that have been put forward or may be relevant in explaining the rise of Black middle-class SALAs in the U.S., backed up by relevant narratives from interviewed members of the Love Jones Cohort.

This chapter reflects on the future of middle-class AAE and recommends future directions for sociolinguistic research on this topic, both in light of the findings presented in the book, and in the context of the current social, racial, economic, and political climate in the United States.

This chapter traces the transformation of the school from the site for instilling ideas about racial and class-based separate development during the colonial era into the key mechanism for ensuring African political and economic development today. Formal schooling introduced during the colonial era contributed to racial and economic divisions by promoting the idea of separate development and segregation. Missionary and colonial education institutionalized the assumptions about racial difference embedded in the development episteme. Colonial educators faced a conundrum; they sought to “civilize” Africans in Western academic traditions and at the same time to reinforce ideologies of racial difference that undergirded colonialism and the development episteme. This conflict was complicated further as schools became a place for challenging these ideas and generating African nationalist ideas of development. Some postcolonial reforms recentered African epistemologies in the schools. Today institutions and scholars of the global north still claim to be the experts in technology, science, and medicine, the sciences necessary for solving development “problems.” Nonetheless, African institutions and scholars are at the forefront of development innovations designed for their own communities including in the expansion of innovative university practices.