I googled this but came up against too many false positives such as, "...in the country, blacks..." even adding westside and Chicago didn't do anything but narrow the results to a more manageable two pages of results. ANy one familiar enough with Chicago to know the term?
Came across it in _Our Kind of People_. I was getting so bored by Lawrence Otis Graham's way too labriously detailed account of the black elite, I almost decided to skip reading about specific elite black communities in various cities. I'm glad I forged on, since his discussion of chicago clues me to some information about Graham that is helping me parse this, how to say it?, extremely weird book.
I was telling Doug, off list, that some of it is just creeping me out since he keeps talking about the need for black elite clubs, schools, etc. as a way to ensure that the black children of wealthy black parents don't lose their black identity. As I read, though, I had to ask: _what_ black identity? this is the same stuff that white elites do? and his insistence that the people in these groups are special -- and especially deserving of membership because of their intelligence...
anyway, it's been a weird book to get a handle on. I will try to do it justice when I get out of the depths of the forest. In the meantime, on the Chicago chapter now, I stumble across several quotes from elite Chicagoans who speak of how segregated Chicago was in so far as blacks were largely confined to the south side. But the south side black elite mention blacks who lived on the West side -- which was kind of eeuuuww icky to south siders. West siders are called "country blacks".
In other chapters, words like "coarse" have been used to describe noveau riche blacks, mostly people from sports and entertainment. e.g., Spike Lee, although a member of elite clubs of the old guard, is considered too declasse, only partially acceptable because he went to Morehouse. But in this chapter, no such words are dropped to clue me to what is wrong with west siders and why "country blacks"? Is it because these folks came from the south and never dropped their 'country' ways? That seemed hard to understand since, right now, I'm on the part where he's recounting the work of a Chicago based newspaperman who did much to advertise to black sharecroppers the wonders of moving north to Chicago. And this section is specifically about South siders, so clearly blacks from the south moved into the south side.
On related note, I learned that whites who hang their laundry on the line in back of their summer homes in Sag Harbor are called rednecks. This is hilarious. Multi-millionaire rednecks. He also notes that elite blacks have tended to want to ignore the bigotry of wealthy whites in order to maintain a sense of peaceful relations, relegating racism to a thing of the past. Instead, they attribute bigotry to rednecks and white trash. He calls this racism, which I thought absurd, especially when he seems to find it hard to use the word to talk about black experiences.
http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)