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I read Our Kind of People two summers ago. Most of the information was not new to me.
I am kind of straddling the fence on this issue. My family is upper middle class, but my parents never bought into the whole "elite" idea. They both declined invitations to the Boule and the Links. They were always unimpressed with the so-called elite. My father is actually quite contemptuous of some of them. He feels that a lot of people who are the elite now benefitted from the Civil Rights Movement but did not give back or help out other people once they made it to where they wanted to be.
As children, my sisters and I were exposed to the finer things in life and benefitted from my parents hard work. But, they also emphasized the fact that we weren't better than anyone else and that despite their paychecks we were still black. I went to an expensive all-white private elementary school during the week, but on Friday afternoon my mother picked us up and took us back to the neighborhood that she grew up in. She always kept us aware of who we were and where we came from.
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