High culture,black culture: Strategic assimilation and cultural steering in museum philanthropy

Introduction

In September 2015, entrepreneur Robert F. Smith graced the cover of Forbes annual issue on the 400 richest Americans. A feature on the magazine’s online site introduced Smith with the headline “Meet the African-American Billionaire Businessman Who’s Richer Than Michael Jordan” (Fisher, 2015). The following year, Smith and Jordan would use their wealth to support the newly founded Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) in Washington, D.C. Smith’s $20,000,000 gift and Jordan’s $5,000,000 gift were part of the over $400,000,000 raised from the private sector. Although research on the arts participation of middle- and upper-class blacks is growing (Banks, 2010a; Banks, 2010b; Fleming and Roses, 2007; Grams, 2010; Halle, 1993), high-dollar cultural philanthropy like that of Smith and Jordan remains theoretically and empirically under-examined.

This article uses the case of big-gift cultural patronage at the Smithsonian Institution to develop a more layered model of black middle- and upper-class consumption of black culture. Drawing on a unique database of million-dollar gifts to Smithsonian museums, I find that the rate of donation by black middle-class individuals and organizations to one museum – the NMAAHC – is substantially higher than others. I use ethnographic data and archival texts related to patronage at African American museums to uncover the mechanisms involved in producing this outcome. The explanation that I theoretically and conceptually elaborate brings together developments in the scholarship on the black middle- and upper-class (Lacy, 2007; Lareau, 2003; Neckerman et al., 1999; Pattillo-McCoy, 1999b) with those in the literature on cultural markets (Bourdieu, 1993; Childress, 2017; Khaire, 2017; Maguire and Matthews, 2014).

Consistent with strategic assimilation theory (Lacy, 2004) which posits that middle-class blacks seek to stay connected to the black community, I find that some black donors’ gifts to the NMAAHC can be partly explained by strategic acculturation, or an impulse to articulate and nurture black identity through consuming black culture. However, this distinct pattern of patronage was also influenced by market intermediaries’ cultural steering. Black donors were identified and cultivated via a robust fundraising infrastructure where market research cast them as key constituents of the NMAAHC and taste-making strategies that constructed the museum as worthy reinforced their attraction to the museum.

By conceptually and empirically elaborating cultural steering, this analysis offers a more complete model of black middle- and upper-class consumption of black culture. In particular, it highlights how various elements of cultural steering including intermediaries’ identification of and outreach to black middle- and upper-class consumers, as well as their construction of the value of black cultural goods, shapes the consumption of this group. This article also offers insight on segregated inclusion in the cultural sector (Accominotti, Khan and Storer, 2018). By elaborating how a racialized pattern of segregated inclusion prevails in cultural patronage, this analysis supports the view that cultural consumption contributes to elite ethclass formation (Banks, 2017). ¹ To gain a richer understanding of the demand side of patronage, it is useful to review the scholarship on culture and black middle- and upper-class identity.

Strategic assimilation and the black middle- and upper-class

An enduring question surrounding the black middle- and upper-class is “To what degree is race significant in their lives?” (Lacy, 2007; Neckerman et al., 1999; Pattillo-McCoy, 1999a, 1999b; Pattillo, 2007; Willie, 1989, 2003; Wilson, 1980). Like segmented assimilation theory which posits that one path of incorporation for immigrants is to become socioeconomically successful and maintain ethnic ties and culture (Portes and Zhou, 1993), strategic assimilation theory posits that for blacks, a move up the class hierarchy does not mean the abandonment of racial distinction. As Karyn Lacy (2004) asserts, middle-class blacks self-consciously nurture black identities for themselves and their children. She writes,

Like immigrants associated with the third path of segmented assimilation, many middle-class blacks with access to majority white colleges, workplaces, and neighbourhoods continue to consciously retain their connections to the black world as well; through their interactions in these black spaces, middle-class blacks construct and maintain black racial identities. (p. 909)

This body of scholarship explains black middle- and upper-class consumption of black culture through consumer demand. Or, strategic acculturation posits that middle- and upper-class blacks choose to consume black culture as part of their broader personal and collective projects to nurture black identity. However, I suggest that another force is also at work – cultural steering by intermediaries. Below, I elaborate a model of black middle- and upper-class cultural consumption that considers the role of intermediaries in shaping markets.

Cultural steering and strategic acculturation in cultural markets

A more robust model of black middle- and upper-class consumption of black culture should consider a fuller range of actors in the markets. Markets are not only composed of consumers but also producers and intermediaries (Childress, 2017; Khaire, 2017; Maguire and Matthews, 2014). Though consumers acquire cultural goods and producers make them, intermediaries are the third party that stands in between them. Intermediaries not only physically bring together producers and consumers but they also play the role of matchmaker by producing the symbolic value of cultural goods. Since the symbolic value of cultural goods is greater than their material value, an especially important role of intermediaries in the creative economy is legitimating goods or framing them as objects worthy of consumption (Childress, 2017; Currid, 2007; Khaire, 2017; Maguire and Matthews, 2014; Mears, 2011). As Pierre Bourdieu (1993) describes, intermediaries in cultural fields are charged with the “production of belief.” Here, I emphasize the role of intermediaries in bridging the spheres of cultural production and consumption via cultural steering.

I define cultural steering as the identification and recruitment of a specific segment of consumers to acquire a particular category of a product or service. In this approach, intermediaries such as marketers, fundraisers, and publicists work on behalf of cultural producers to find and convince consumers to “purchase” their products. This includes in-house teams who are directly employed by producers as well as independent contractors and firms who hire their services out on the market. In the for-profit marketplace, intermediaries typically find and urge consumers to exchange money in return for a cultural service or good. In the non-profit cultural marketplace, the exchanges that intermediaries are brokering between producers and consumers are those where the cultural good or service on offer is often more diffuse. Cultural consumers give a gift to the producer – usually money and also in-kind goods or services – in exchange for specific benefits. Browse the support section of any large cultural institution and you will likely find a menu of donation levels and their associated returns such as private previews, curated tours, recognition in annual reports, and subscriptions to print publications. In the case of cultural philanthropy, fundraisers are a key intermediary between donors and institutions. They identify and cultivate individuals who give money in exchange for these types of benefits. With big-gift cultural philanthropy, the benefits are commensurate with the large size of the donations and include perks such as naming rights on buildings and recognition on donor walls.

Although cultural steering is a practice that occurs by intermediaries across all sectors of cultural markets, in some cases, it is racialized. Or, intermediaries recruit consumers from a particular racial or ethnic group to purchase a specific subset of cultural products or services. For example, there are Hispanic marketing agencies that specialize in cultivating Hispanic consumers and black agencies that specialize in the African American market (Dávila, 2001; Lamont and Molnár, 2001). ³ Michèle Lamont and Virág Molnár (2001) elaborate how black marketing agencies define African Americans as consumers who seek to establish their worth via high-status consumption and consumption that emphasizes their cultural distinction. I argue that in the case of the black middle- and upper-class, intermediaries steer them toward cultural products and services that are symbolically linked to the African Diaspora. Furthermore, even though it is certainly the case that intermediaries labor to convince members of the black middle- and upper-class that the “black” cultural products that they are advocating for are worthy, they also target this consumer group based on beliefs that they have a taste for black culture. These beliefs can be based on racial stereotypes. However, they can also be rooted in more formal knowledge. As part of their work, intermediaries engage in market research where they conduct surveys, focus groups, and interviews with individuals who could become consumers for the cultural products that they represent. This research provides them with a profile of the types of people for whom the cultural product or service is most likely to have the greatest appeal. It also provides them with a blue-print for how to best frame cultural products so that they find them attractive. Thus, intermediaries become aware of the preference that middle- and upper-middle class blacks have for consuming black culture through market research. Based on this knowledge, they reach out to recruit them to consume black cultural products. ⁴

To summarize, I argue that black middle- and upper-class consumption of black culture cannot be accounted for by strategic acculturation alone. Instead, cultural steering involving intermediaries’ identification of middle- and upper-class blacks as a potentially fruitful market segment, intermediaries’ outreach to them, and intermediaries’ construction of black cultural goods as worthy, also shapes black middle- and upper-class consumption. Below, I describe how the processes of strategic acculturation and cultural steering can help to shed light on million-dollar gifts to the NMAAHC by wealthy blacks.

Methods

To understand big-gift cultural philanthropy at the Smithsonian Institution by blacks, I rely on a database of million-dollar gifts at the cultural complex, as well as archival and ethnographic data on philanthropy at African American museums. I analyze gifts by black individuals, black families, and black middle-class social organizations such as the Links, Incorporated and Greek-Letter organizations. ⁵ To estimate the black rate of giving to the NMAAHC and the other Smithsonian museums, I use reports of Leadership Gifts in Smithsonian annual reports. Leadership Gifts are listed in a separate section of each report and document the source of the gift, its amount, and its purpose. All gifts in this section are for $1 million or more. As the first Leadership Gift for the NMAAHC is listed in 2005 and the museum opened in 2016, I analyze annual reports that cover these years.

Using information listed in the annual reports, I created a database of donors who have given major gifts. ⁶ The database also includes information about demographic characteristics of donors such as their race and profession. Biographies and photos of donors were obtained from various databases, websites, and guides such as Who’s Who in America and The Foundation Center; media sources, such as The New York Times and New York Social Diary; professional and personal sources, such as profiles on company and family foundation websites; and museum sources, such as annual reports and press releases. To racially and ethnically classify donors, I follow the approach used in other research on elite philanthropy (Abzug and Simonoff, 2004; Banks, 2017). Donors are classified as black based on self-identification or identification by others in any of the sources listed above, membership in black organizations (such as social and professional organizations), physical appearance, and/or information garnered in the course of my ethnographic research on African American museum philanthropy. ⁷

To understand the meanings and motivations underlying donors’ gifts and cultural steering, I rely on archival and ethnographic research on philanthropy at African American museums. This project draws on in-depth interviews collected by the author with over 80 supporters of African American museums in 11 cities, participant observation at museum events, interviews with museum staff and other stakeholders, archival museum documents and other texts, and photographs of museums, to cast light on why patrons give to African American museums. This ethnographic and archival database includes a confidential portion where patrons and museums are given pseudonyms and a public portion where real individual and institutional identities are used. In the case of the latter, data were gathered from publicly available sources such as the Smithsonian Institution Archives in Washington, D.C. Though the full set of data offers general insight, analysis in this article relies on information from the non-confidential portion of this trove of data. ⁸

To gain insight on the meanings and motivations underlying Smithsonian gifts, I draw on personal statements from donors in sources such as Smithsonian annual reports, Smithsonian campaign documents, and media articles and videos. These texts were content analyzed using inductively identified codes. ⁹ To understand cultural steering, I draw on documents from the Smithsonian Archives in Washington, D.C. (such as fundraising reports), documents from the Smithsonian web archive (such as Advancement Committee minutes notes), fieldwork at public fundraising events (such as a panel with the NMAAHC fundraising team at the 2017 Association of African American Museums meeting), media texts on Smithsonian fundraising, as well as books, articles, and webinars on diversity and fundraising more broadly.

Giving to the Smithsonian

The Smithsonian Institution is the largest museum complex in the nation. Most Smithsonian museums are not racially and ethnically specific but some, such as the NMAAHC, center on the culture of particular groups. The NMAAHC is not the first Smithsonian museum to center on the history and culture of people from the African Diaspora. When it was founded in 1967, the Anacostia Community Museum (ACM; then the Anacostia Neighborhood Museum) was designed to be a Smithsonian outpost that would serve the predominantly African American residents of the Anacostia community. As it evolved, ACM became distinguished for its focus on engaging local residents and documenting and interpreting the history of Anacostia. Over the ensuing decades, its focus evolved to center more on African American history at large. Its name was changed to the Anacostia Museum and Center for African American History and Culture in 1995. After the legislation for the NMAAHC was signed in 2003, it returned to a more local focus. The museum was given a new name in 2006, the Anacostia Community Museum, to reflect this less national focus (Smithsonian Institution Archives, 2019).

The other Smithsonian museum with a focus on the African Diaspora is the National Museum of African Art (NMAfA). It was founded in 1964 in the former home of Frederick Douglas. The NMAfA became a part of the Smithsonian complex in 1981 and it moved to a new building on the National mall in 1987 (National Museum of African Art, 2017). Traditional, modern, and contemporary African art are featured at the NMAfA. Although the ACM and the NMAfA share with the NMAAHC associations with the African Diaspora, the NMAAHC is distinguished by not only its national focus on African Americans but also its large size. For example, although the NMAAHC has about 163 full-time employees and around 37,000 artifacts, the NMAfA and the ACM, respectively, have about 34 and 18 full-time staff and around 10,000 and 2978 artifacts (Smithsonian Institution, 2015, 2016, 2017).

Although the capital campaign for the NMAAHC began a couple of years after the legislation to establish it was signed in 2003, the Smithsonian launched the quiet-phase of an institution-wide capital campaign in 2010 (Smithsonian Institution, 2014). With a goal of raising $1.5 billion dollars, it was the most ambitious and first campus-wide fundraising effort in the institution’s history. The campaign continued through January 2018. The specific fundraising targets for each museum vary. At $270,000,000, the goal for the NMAAHC (which it surpassed) was the largest. Like the NMAAHC, fundraising aims for the National Museum of American History, the National Museum of Natural History, and the National Air and Space Museum were in the hundreds of millions. In contrast, museums such as the NMAfA and the ACM had more modest objectives to raise $15,000,000 and $1,700,000, respectively (Smithsonian Campaign, 2014).

During the period of study, black donors to the Smithsonian gave generously to the NMAAHC (Table 1). All of the three dozen black individuals, families, and black middle-class social organizations listed in the annual reports as giving Leadership Gifts gave to the museum. Most gifts to the NMAAHC were at the million-dollar level for which patrons received recognition on a donor wall made of glass on the museum’s main floor. Larger gifts, like those of entertainment mogul Oprah Winfrey and basketball star Michael Jordan, were acknowledged with naming rights in special sections of the museum. For example, Winfrey who gave $21,000,000 is acknowledged on the museum’s first below ground floor. There, her name is emblazoned in gold at the entrance to the “Oprah Winfrey Theater” (Figure 1). With his $5,000,000 gift Jordan is recognized in a section of the museum focused on sports – “The Michael Jordan Hall” (Figure 2). In addition to giving to the NMAAHC, one family also gave a seven-figure donation to the NMAfA. Black Leadership Gift donors are not listed as giving to any other Smithsonian museums or centers during this period. ¹⁰ Why was the NMAAHC so favored by these donors? Below, I will suggest that both strategic acculturation and cultural steering played a role.

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Figure 1.

Oprah Winfrey Theater, NMAAHC (author photo).

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Figure 2.

The Michael Jordan Hall, NMAAHC (author photo).

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Table 1.

Rates of giving to Smithsonian museums among black million-dollar donors (N = 36). ^a

National Museum of African American History and Culture	36	100.00%
National Museum of African Art	1	2.78%
Other museums and centers	0	0.00%

a

Author’s analysis of Leadership Gifts gifts listed in the Smithsonian Institution annual reports from 2005 to 2016.

Constructing identity

Actor and producer Samuel L. Jackson, along with his daughter and wife LaTanya and Zoe, gave a million-dollar donation to the NMAAHC. For Jackson, part of the museum’s appeal is that it highlights the role of African Americans in the broader development of the United States. “It’s wonderful to see it come to fruition,” he says. In his eyes, the museum makes visible “… what my people’s contribution has been to the development and growth of this country – where we came from, how we got here, and what we did once we got here, and how we overcame. And, it’s a wonderful and moving and amazing, amazing story” (LIVEKellyandRyan, 2016).

The million-dollar gift from the foundation of The Links, Incorporated, a black middle- and upper-class women’s social organization, was also motivated by an interest to preserve the historical narratives of blacks. “This museum will allow our rich African-American story to be told and displayed for all to see,” said Margot James Copeland, the organization’s national president. “The contributions of our people, from the past and present, will be showcased, and will provide hope and inspiration to continue building on our great legacy” (The Links, Incorporated, 2014).

Jackson’s and Copeland’s comments articulate not only a concern with African American identity at large but also specific aspects of racial identity. Research on black upper middle-class identity construction via art collecting demonstrates how varying facets of racial identity are constructed through cultural consumption (Banks, 2010a). Among these facets are history and worth. Or, cultural consumption is a vehicle through which middle- and upper-class blacks connect with and preserve narratives of the past that define the black experience in the United States. It is also a practice through which they nurture racial pride and establish collective worth. For these donors, the NMAAHC functions as a cultural institution that taps into both of these dimensions of black identity. By publicly presenting narratives of black history, the NMAAHC makes visible the distinct role that African Americans have played in building the nation. In this way, these donors see its role in preserving black history and nurturing the honor of African Americans as inextricably linked.

Entrepreneur Earl Stafford and his wife Amanda are also among the major black donors to the NMAAHC. Concern with racial pride and history also motivated their $2,000,000 gift to support a center for media arts at the museum (Figure 3). Earl Stafford recalls how he didn’t learn about the Tuskegee Airmen, a group of black military pilots, until he was out of school and serving in the military himself. “It took this white sergeant from Georgia to tell me about the Tuskegee Airmen,” he remembers. “I swore I would never let that happen again. We should know about our history” (Gilgore, 2016).

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Figure 3.

Sign for the Earl W. and Amanda Stafford Center for African American Media Arts, NMAAHC (author photo).

A desire for their grandchildren to not experience this void in historical knowledge also motivated their gift. Stafford comments that he and his wife want their progeny to “know about their history, be proud of their legacy and then know their responsibility to contribute to this American story” (Gilgore, 2016). In this way, their patronage also demonstrates a concern with nurturing black identity intergenerationally. It is hoped that the NMAAHC will be a vehicle through which they are able to nurture pride in the accomplishments of African Americans across each generation of their family. Another facet of black identity that underlies the Stafford’s gift is racial solidarity. “Being a part of it is an inherent responsibility that we have particularly as African Americans,” Earl Stafford says about the donation:

This museum isn’t only for African Americans. It’s for all people to recognize the contributions that African Americans have made. As an African American, I just felt that I have a responsibility, and so do others, to further tell this story – to be a part of this story, and to be a part of the telling of this story. (Washington Business Journal, 2016)

Stafford’s comments are reminiscent of upper-middle class black art collectors who purchase works by African American artists to help address racial inequities in the art market (Banks, 2010c; Grams, 2010). ¹¹ They are also consistent with a broader ethos of black uplift. Among the black middle- and upper-class, the ethos of black uplift is a racialized version of noblesse oblige. The latter ideology dictates that those who are privileged have a responsibility to help those with fewer resources and the former asserts that privileged blacks have a specific responsibility to spur the advancement of the race (Du Bois, [1903] 1996).

Tech entrepreneur Robert L. Smith’s multimillion dollar donation to the NMAAHC was also motivated by a concern for black uplift. Talking with Lonnie Bunch, the NMAAHC’s director, Smith describes what compels him to “give back”:

… I always think about the Niagara Movement and how that ultimately led to what W.E.B. Du Bois was writing about. Those are the stories that impacted me and resonated in my life about… “What is my duty as I move forward in life to make sure that there are more on-ramps and opportunities for African Americans in this country?” So, not only am I a student of history, I realize the importance… that you constantly give back and lift all that you can along the way. (NMAAHC, 2016)

Also consistent with donors like the Staffords, history and pride are also undercurrents motivating Smith’s gift. His millions support The Robert Frederick Smith Explore Your Family History Center in the museum (Figure 4). Aligned with Smith’s background in technology, the center features electronic resources, such as digitized records from the Freedmen’s Bureau Project, that allow African Americans to discover their ancestral roots. Describing his interest in the initiative, Smith says,

… [W]e had stories in my family that we passed down from generation to generation and gave me great pride in who we were and what we stood for, and how we moved forward and how we advanced in our country… I think part of what this will do is start to really bring forward the values of who we were as African Americans and there are beautiful values. I think sometimes they get lost in the noise of what I call the media flood today. But what I think part of what this will do… is remind us who we are – what noble people we are and what it is we have accomplished and can accomplish in this country and in the world… I think that’s one of the things that is going to be an outgrowth of this that is going to be spectacular. I think this younger generation is going to say, “Wow, I didn’t realize that we did all of these things and my family has done all of these things,” because they get flooded with the day-to-day of it. (NMAAHC, 2016)

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Figure 4.

The Robert Frederick Smith Explore Your Family History Center, NMAAHC (author photo).

For Smith, the NMAAHC is not only significant as an institution that will narrate the collective experiences of African Americans but also one that will allow individuals to discover and develop pride in their personal family histories. Smith hopes that the family center will help to unearth the ancestral legacies of African American families across the United States. He also envisions that the pride which is engendered through learning about the past will spur African Americans to more fully develop their potentialities and talents. Or, by learning about past contributions, African Americans will be set on a path of future achievement. Winfrey and Jordan share similar sentiments when they describe the role of the museum for African American self-actualization. Winfrey says (Davis, 2016),

Everybody will get to hear how there’s a shared story we, as African Americans, all have. And we’ll get to see ourselves rooted in that story in such a way that it can do nothing but lift us to be better and to do better. That is my hope for the museum.

Commenting on his gift, Jordan predicts that “[i]t’s [the NMAAHC] going to be a special place, one where African Americans can take pride in our heritage, kids can learn about our history, and where we can find hope and inspiration” (Smithsonian Campaign, 2016).

To summarize, these comments suggest that one reason that the NMAAHC was attractive to black donors is that they viewed it as closely tied to their racial identity. ¹² By giving to this museum, they were actualizing values of black uplift and nurturing black history and pride. For donors with a concern with black identity, there was no other museum at the Smithsonian that tapped into this aspect of the self in such a monumental and exhaustive fashion. However, as I will elaborate below, the popularity of the NMAAHC among this group should not only be understood as arising from its appeal as a vehicle of black identity construction but also from cultural steering by fundraisers.

Conclusion

This article casts light on cultural consumption among the black middle- and upper-class through examining big-gift cultural philanthropy at the Smithsonian. I develop the concept of cultural steering to help explain why black donors to the Smithsonian favored the NMAAHC over other museums in the complex. I suggest that this case, as well as the broader consumption of black culture by the black middle- and upper-class, can be partly explained by cultural steering. Though middle- and upper-class blacks may be attracted to black culture as a practice of black identity construction, they are also steered toward it by intermediaries. To conclude, I discuss the contributions of this study for the scholarship on the black middle- and upper-class and the literature on class and culture.

First, this article offers fresh insight on why race continues to be salient for middle- and upper-class blacks (Pattillo-McCoy, 1999a). Previous literature emphasizes that the salience of race in the cultural lives of middle- and upper-class blacks is a function of choice. In particular, it highlights how they self-consciously demand black culture. This is consistent with strategic assimilation theory. However, this article suggests that market forces also have a role to play in the black middle- and upper-class’ consumption of black culture. Through cultural steering where intermediaries identify and reach out to black middle- and upper-class consumers and they construct black cultural goods as valuable, they also influence this group’s consumption.

The analysis also deepens the understanding of segregated inclusion in the cultural sphere. In their research on patronage at the New York Philharmonic during the Gilded Age, (Accominotti, Khan and Storer, 2018) develop the concept of segregated inclusion. Contrary to the monopolization thesis which suggests that cultural purification contributed to elite formation via exclusion of non-elites from high culture, they find that cultural purification was actually accompanied by integration of non-elites in the world of high art. Despite a degree of class integration in the symphony hall, elites maintained their distinction by sitting in separate areas. This is an example of segregated inclusion or a form of inclusion in which new types of boundaries emerge between previously separate groups (Accominotti, Khan and Storer, 2018). In this article, I illustrate a special pattern of segregated inclusion in the cultural sphere – racialized segregated inclusion. Even though wealthy blacks have become major philanthropists at the Smithsonian, they are clustered at one museum – a museum that specializes in African American culture. This finding supports other research showing how cultural patronage contributes to ethclass formation (Banks, 2010c). In his research on ethnicity, Milton Gordon (1964) describes how horizontally segregated ethnic groups are further separated vertically into class groups. Thus, despite sharing the same class status, Gordon argues that members of the black and white middle-and upper-class are concentrated in different organizational spaces. This article elaborates how cultural consumption functions as a form of ethclass formation by bringing together members of the black upper-class in a specifically black segment of the cultural world.

When Bart Landry’s book The New Black Middle Class was published in 1987, he noted that the paltry number of extremely wealthy blacks was too small to constitute a true black upper-class. In the ensuing years, the fortunes of blacks at the top of the class structure have improved by some measures (Bayer and Charles, 2016; Lacy, 2007). The growing wealth of this group made the realization of a national African American museum possible. It was the million-dollar gifts of blacks like Winfrey and Smith who helped to pay the bill for this monumental museum. As the black class structure shifts to include a greater proportion of high net-worth individuals, it is critical to examine their patterns of cultural consumption. How they consume has important consequences for racial and class formation and the vitality of the black cultural sector. This article suggests that due to strategic acculturation and cultural steering, their patterns of cultural consumption will not mirror those of the white upper-class. Instead, if these practices continue, upper-class blacks will have cultural lives that are distinguished by higher engagement with forms of culture symbolically linked to blackness.