The Cosby Cohort: Blessings and Burdens of Growing Up Black Middle Class

Harris offers an interesting insight into the life experiences of ‘second generation middle class blacks.’ Based on interviews with adult African American men and women who had grown up during the 1980s and 1990s with parents who were the first to achieve middle-class status, the book explores the ways in which this precarious status influenced child-rearing strategies and socialization. She dubbed her informants the ‘Cosby Cohort’ because of both the era in which they were raised and the fact that The Cosby Show represented the same group she was interested in interviewing. Many informants compared the lessons transmitted in The Cosby Show to their own experiences growing up, where educational achievement and speaking standard English, among other things, were highly emphasized. Harris poses the question of what was gained and what was lost. Though everyone she studied had achieved professional success, many had struggled against the claim that they were ‘acting white’ and thus felt isolated from both the black and white communities; they were culturally and socially adrift. Harris’s book offers insights into the complexities of living in this cultural and racial space. Summing Up: Recommended. All levels/libraries.

The strength of this book lies in Harris’s elegant description of the heterogeneity of the black experience in America. . . . the Cosby Cohort can be utilized in a myriad of courses ranging from black studies and racial identity to social conditions and class inequality.

Through captivating interview excerpts and a sophisticated analysis that shows great depth and sensitivity, Harris sheds new light on the often overlooked complexities of growing up in the black middle class. The Cosby Cohort is groundbreaking and is essential reading for anyone interested in the growing heterogeneity of the African American community and the implications of the increasing class diversity for intra-racial relations, group cohesion, and black identity development. This book will no doubt become an instant classic.

While the Cosby kids on television always seemed happy and well-adjusted, the cohort of middle-class black youth across the country that was watching the Cosby family were having a harder time of it. Harris offers the voices of African Americans who look back at their childhoods and see their aspirations for greater success, their alienation from blackness, and the difficulties of navigating the two pressures. The Cosby Cohort powerfully discredits the myth of a monolithic black experience and raises the continuing uncertainties around black sociopolitical unity in the context of increasing racial residential integration and uneven socioeconomic success. It is a revealing and moving account of forging new black identities.