Stuck in the Middle

The Rollercoaster of Status

Trouble at Home

Downwardly Mobile

Be Careful What You Wish For

Roberta is a fourth-generation middle-class African American woman from New England. She grew up in a racially-mixed but decidedly comfortable community, attending private school and going on to an Ivy League college. She dated lots of guys from her own group, many of them light-skinned, but was never really happy. Then, Roberta met Ben, a self-made young man from a rural African American hamlet in North Carolina. They fell hard for each other. But when Roberta brought Ben home to dinner for the first time, he was the butt of good-natured, but somewhat snide remarks about his "country" ways and his dark complexion. Conversely, when Ben brought Roberta home, his less generous relatives not so subtly questioned whether he had become "uppity like his girlfriend" and openly suggested that maybe Ben now thought he was better than his family. Married now, with a family and living in a different city, neither Ben nor Roberta relish those increasingly infrequent visits home.