Chapter 5 turns to social embeddedness, describes this in terms of two kinds of social identities people have, and explains how a world stratified by social groups produces two kinds of shortfalls in the capability development of people in disadvantaged social groups. First, a microlevel mechanism, social group stigmatization, or social identity stereotyping operates in relational social identity settings, limits stigmatized individuals’ ability to develop their capabilities, and results in what I call capability devaluations. Second, a macro-level process, sorting people over club goods and common pool goods types of social economic locations, produces social group inequalities especially by race/ethnicity and gender, limits lower ranked groups’ capability development, and results in what I call capability deficits. How these two kinds of capability shortfalls combine and reinforce a hierarchical ordering of social groups is explained using a basic complexity theory analysis from Simon. Combatting these two capability shortfalls – motivated by the goal of creating nonhierarchical, democratic societies that promote individuals’ capability development irrespective of social identity – is associated with policies to eliminate social discrimination in the case of capability devaluations and to advance social group reparations in the case of capability deficits.

African American family income is 63 percent of White family income. African American family wealth is 4–14 percent of White family wealth. African American women and men earn 84 percent and 68 percent, respectively, of the weekly wages earned by White women and men; both ratios are lower than during the mid-1970s. It is a multi-decade truism that the African American unemployment rate is twice the White unemployment rate.

Chapter 7 offers a pathway toward understanding how the Love Jones Cohort navigate wealth-related issues and outcomes, and what the implications of this might be both for themselves and for the Black middle class more generally. Chapter 7 explores previous, current, and future wealth experiences and decisions of the Cohort, and sheds light on the ways in which the members of this demographic group traverse the various stages of their life course without a partner or child. Scholars make compelling arguments for adding wealth as a fourth indicator of middle-class status, and Chapter 7 focuses on how those in the Cohort accumulate wealth, particularly in terms of decision-making related to homeownership and explores the crucial issue of intergenerational mobility and the dissemination of wealth. Chapter 7 interrogates these issues so that we can begin to fully understand the implications of the rise of the Love Jones Cohort for the future of the Black middle class.

Beyond questions of culture, other modes of explanation for the persistence of inequality in Africa have been similarly simplistic, whether they relate to the lack of (human) capital or the presence – indeed abundance and dependence – of natural capital and the resource curse (as this introduction tries to make clear). More systematic and comprehensive explanations need to be developed. Doing so must involve building new foundations, but the question is where to begin: How do we build the conceptual foundations for a new beginning and how can these be defended or reinforced against counter currents? When built, what sorts of arguments can they support? It is these questions that this chapter successively answers in three sections respectively examining the nature of the foundations that can be built for a new beginning, the aims, paradigm, and arguments of the book, and the overall planned structure of the book.