Crossing the Color Line: Black Professional Men’s Development of Interracial Social Networks

Sociologists have established that social networks often play an important role in hiring, promotions, and occupational mobility. For black workers, however, social networks can be racialized in ways that work to their disadvantage. In this paper, I consider how black professional men develop and maintain interracial social networks with white men and women. I argue that these networks are shaped by intersections of race and gender and are intentionally constructed in response to black professional men’s perceptions of their positioning within male-dominated occupations. Specifically, this paper examines how black men establish social networks with white men, their perceptions of how diverging levels of social capital shape these networks compared to their white male peers, and their observations of ways that women are less advantaged than they are in constructing social networks.