Marginalization and Middle-Class Blues: Race, Islam, the Workplace, and the Public Sphere

As a continuation of the previous chapter, this chapter examines experiences of discrimination and marginalization among children of North African immigrants once they become adults—across the domains of religion, the workplace, and the public sphere. It also discusses how respondents framed and made sense of these experiences and how their status as members of the middle class shaped these meaning-making processes. Similar to the work of scholars of the African-American middle class—such as E. Franklin Frazier (1957), Karyn Lacy (2007), and Mary Pattillo (1999)—this chapter shows how middle-class children of North African immigrants similarly move through different spaces rather than only interacting with other individuals of similar ethnic or socioeconomic backgrounds. Their educational and professional successes in adulthood only exacerbate their feelings of occupying multiple worlds.