Does society have different expectation for the economic achievement of middle class and lower class African American girls?  If you are talking about the United States with its long struggle with racial divisions, you will probably get different answers depending on where you are and with whom you are speaking.  If you happen to get into a conversation with a New York taxi driver or deliberately seek out a professor of sociological studies at an Ivy League university, you will undoubtedly hear a big difference of opinion.  That also goes for talking to a liberal Southerner or a conservative Southerner. 

If you were to engage in interviews with different people residing in the European Union, India, or South Africa, you would again hear many different views on whether society has different expectations for the economic achievements of the lower and middle class African American girl.

In “Blue-Chip Black” by Karyn R. Lacy, she states that there is a “stark dividing line” between the black lower and middle classes.  The middle class blacks separate themselves from the lower class by moving away from poor neighborhoods.  They may choose to move into a black neighborhood, or a predominantly white neighborhood.  They generally make their choices first based on where they want to live, before considering race, as long as it is not in the lower income black neighborhood.

There appears to be a formula for the black middle class that includes good neighborhoods, property ownership, saving habits, marriage, health care and strong school expectations, according to Blackdemographs.com. It also comments that with the progression of civil rights, “By the 1990s middle class Black America was well established as a separate community and was no longer forced to live with lower income.”

The societal problems of teen pregnancy and substance abuse crosses class lines.  But the picture you get from watching television dramas and movies, is that society cares less for the lower classes-all races-and expects less because they are less interested in them.  African American middle class families consist of parents who have worked hard to achieve a comfortable life style, acquiring education, and owning property.  It is a staple of human sociology that parents bring their children up according to their own beliefs and values.  In the lower class black family the father is often gone and the children are raised by their grandmother.  They are often trapped in a crumbling neighborhood where illegal drugs are prevalent, and financial success and attaining a good education are ideals they hear about in school, but fade into the unattainable once they come home from school.

Meanwhile, the African American middle and upper middle class girl not only has the ideal of attending a university and having a career held up to her at school, but when she comes home from school she is not allowed to let go of that dream.  Her parents have worked hard to achieve and they are going to be determined to see that she follows them.  Piano, ballet lessons, shopping trips to buy the latest styles, and pressure to do her homework and do well at school are a part of her life.

People form their views from what they see around them, what the media presents, what is taught in the schools, the opinions of their friends, relatives and those whose opinions they respect.  People are society.  Society is the collective beliefs, ideas and ideals of its different groups and classes.  A young girl of any class or racial, ethnic group is forming her identity based on what examples she sees and the information she has to make her decisions.  If she feels like she is not expected to achieve the same status as a girl who comes from a family with more money and who is provided with the special teen things like concert tickets, vacations away from town, transportation in an expensive car, she is likely to feel like she cannot achieve more and not even try.

The idea that society expects less or more from an African American girl because of her class may not be a reality at all.  Society sees the girls from their exteriors, within their environments, which gives rise to differing expectations about them. These expectations are often based on misperceptions because an exterior view is only a partial view.  To form realistic expectations about the economic success of African American girls within the lower and middle classes, society has to take into account not only the exterior environment but the interior self when forming expectations regarding their economic achievement.