Dilemma of the Black Middle Class

Today, my mind is on the black middle class and how it is downplayed by it's own community.  Some things just die hard.  I grew up on public aid, but we were an impoverished island in the middle of a sea of successful people.  Most of my family was not like us.  A series of bad marriages and poor financial conditions set us up to live off the taxes of others.  I was determined to be better and that was not hard to do.  Like I said, my family has a lot of success in it.  My great grandfather was a wealthy farmer in South Carolina who made sure a good majority of his children went to college.  My grandfather went to the service and emerged a self-taught engineer at General Motors.  My mother was a Licensed Practical Nurse who was seeking her RN when she became too ill to work.  The fact that she married a drug addict with a third grade education meant that there was no way the family would keep it's head above water.  When I went to college, I was determined to live differently.  I attended the state university and achieved my Master's degree there.  I bought a small home and I managed to keep myself from walking, though I would walk before loosing my home.  After my years of attainment, I began to seek opportunities that I enjoyed outside of my prescribed environment.  I attended a predominantly white church with upwardly mobile people and that worked for me.  I did not see much of the African-American community at that time.  A few years later, I immersed myself back into the same culture I left as a child.  What I found was that an overemphasis on the poor created an environment where you were almost afraid to celebrate who you were because it was not accepted.  I have always had this issue with going back to systems that you came from.  When you go back and you have been God enlarged, you must be careful because God may enlarge you to the place where you no longer fit in the place where you were enlarged from.  God enlarged Israel so much that Egypt began to move it's hand against them because of fear that they would take over the city.  Being enlarged by God has left me feeling uncomfortable in my church, at the chicken shack or simply in the beauty salon.  This is why God enlarges you and your territory.  In the Bible, he enlarges you and your territory.  He creates the place to put all the stuff he gives you.  That stuff may be in a another neighborhood, or another church or another city, but he will not have you living in a fishbowl just because all the other fish live in a fishbowl.  In my closing of my thoughts on this, everyone should be in a place where who and what they are can be celebrated.  If it is not, than maybe you are in the wrong place.