Discover the powerful connections that bring people together! Explore how Black middle-class adults navigate solo living. Through an engaging discussion of race, gender, class, and collective energy, this talk invites us to rethink friendship, belonging, and the ways we connect with one another.

Drawing from stratification economics, intersectionality, and respectability politics, The Love Jones Cohort centers the voices and lifestyles of Black middle-class adults who are single and living alone (SALA). This first book offers a nuanced understanding of how race, gender, and class, coupled with social structures, shape their lives, including how they define family and friends. Its follow-up, Solo at the Show, examines how solo concertgoers navigate concert space and build connections with strangers. Engaging Du Bois’s account of what would later be termed collective effervescence, it critically interrogates energy—the emotional and social adhesive linking concertgoers to one another and to the crowd—as a concept that speaks to what holds friendships, communities, and institutions together. Solo at the Show provides a framework for understanding both what constitutes energy and what constitutes a friend.