In his 2010 book, Robinson, a staff writer for The Washington Post examines how although "black America" is still discussed as though it is a unified group, it actually comprises four distinct segments of society, each of which has different agendas than the others. He labels these four groups the transcendents, or the people like President Obama and Oprah, who represent wealth and power of the highest order, the mainstream, or the increasingly college-educated middle-and-upper-middle class whose focus is no longer on bootstrapping out of poverty but on maintaining a quality of life once ascribed to whites, the abandoned, the lower-income increasingly single-parented, high-school or lower-educated community, and the emergent, the immigrants from Africa who often still have claim identities of their home countries, but whose children increasingly are known simply as African American rather than Nigerian American or Ethiopian American, etc.
This book is particularly useful to my work as it discusses many socioeconomic and racial shifts within various segments of D.C., with a particular focus on the race riots of 1968. Much of Robinson's argument is that during Jim Crow segregation, there was racial segregation and socioeconomic integration in Washington D.C. communities, with areas like U Street being meccas for black citizens of all socioeconomic levels. In the wake of the destruction of the race riots, new settling patterns in D.C. have moved far more along economic lines than racial ones, so that mainstream and transcendent black populations live alongside comparably economically situated whites. This could have profound impact on language practice, especially in the gentrifying neighborhoods which I wish to study
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