My research looks at the Black American elite, a class more visible than ever, and somehow less understood.

For years I've studied how this group actually lives: how it raises children, makes choices, and passes down what it has — a quiet, inherited sense of how things are done, what sociologists call habitus.

Up close, this world runs on a particular logic I call selective permeability — the careful management of the boundary between social worlds, a constant deciding of what to let in and what to keep out. Black elites carry a demand that white elites simply don't: they have to be legible in two worlds at once — culturally Black enough for Black communities, mainstream-elite enough for white institutions — and they must do it fluently, daily, and across generations.

The point isn't to uplift a rarefied few, or to treat them as an anomaly. It's what their lives make visible: how power and culture are handed down, and what belonging costs even those who seem to have everything — the quiet precarity of holding two worlds in tension.

This began as my doctoral work at Brown — several years of fieldwork inside the homes, schools, and gatherings where these families live. Both selective permeability and the idea of a distinct Black elite habitus came out of that long, close attention: the slow work of finding language for what I was seeing as both an insider and a researcher. I'm now turning it into a book.