Blue-Chip Black Bruce Haynes 3 Blue-Chip Black: Race, Class and Status in the New Black Middle-Class. Karyn R. Lacy. University of California Press, 2007. As Barak Obama campaigns to be Commander and Chief of the United States, the U.S. media has once again focused the spotlight on the state of African Americans. On CNN and You Tube we hear the voices of mid- dle-class African Americans from across the nation, their hopes, dreams, and fears with regard to Hilary, Obama, and the GOP. The presumably homogeneous black middle class seems split in its allegiance; gender, income, education, and even age appear to be factors in people’s choices. As the United States begins to explore the complex cultural and political lives in which black Americans live, the public seems to yearn for more than sound bites by and about black Americans. Karyn R. Lacy’s Blue Chip Black: Race, Class, and Status in the New Black Middle Class might just be the answer. A timely return to the study of the new black middle class within the context of sprawling U.S. suburbs, the book promises to reveal the contours of social identity and the inner psychological strategies of contemporary middle-class African Americans. Interest in the status of the black middle class has been sparked by both the presidential candidacy of Barak Obama and by two recent academic debates. The first debate attempts to measure black economic progress by assessing the state of the middle class (the Frazier-Landry debate). The second debates the link between middle-class spatial mobility and increases in black urban poverty during the 1980s (the Wilson-Massey debates). Blue-Chip Black is a timely contribution to these debates. In addition, the study complements other recent ethnographies of black middle-class communities, such as Stephen Gregory’s Black Corona: Race and the Politics of Place in an Urban Community (1999) and Mary Patillo’s Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril Among the Black Middle Class (1999). In particular, the book is a natural complement to Bruce Haynes’s Red Lines, Black Spaces: The Politics of Race and Space in a Black Middle-Class Suburb (2001), an historically focused case study of black middle-class suburbanization in Yonkers, New York. In fact, Lacy’s work picks up where Red Lines leaves off, examining contemporary social 3 1282 Social Sciences & Humanities, University of California, Davis, One Shields Avenue, Davis, California 95616; e-mail: bdhaynes @ ucdavis.edu. Blue-Chip Black 867