Chapter 8: Class and Race: The New Black Elite Summary and Analysis

Bell discusses how the accounts of the voyages of black explorers who came to the Americas before Columbus were suppressed. Most people, including blacks, have never heard of these travels with the "black" narrative in America beginning with slavery. Many whites coming to the New World, who were portrayed historically as upper-class, were actually working class people, and in some cases indigent. There was a caste system among blacks in the New World in which some had higher statuses than others. Lighter skinned blacks, relatives of white slave owners, were often treated better than darker skinned blacks.

In the forties and fifties, middle-class black, referred to as the black bourgeoisie, took on the role as mediator between the black masses and the white people. By the 1960s...