Much of the scholarship on poor Black urban communities focuses on social disorganization at the neighborhood level and how Blacks experience various institutional inequalities that impact their access to quality education and housing, jobs, and equitable public transportation. But Black social life is not a monolith of chaos, subjugation, and inequalities, nor is it confined to stationary neighborhoods. Black urban life is in fact vibrant, celebratory, and communal. Using two years of ethnographic observations on Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) buses and trains, we highlight the sociality of Black mobile experiences within Black spaces. Specifically, we examine how Blacks, while traveling into and through majority Black communities, form positive intraracial relationships that we refer to as Black transit affinities, which are a type of actively developed, temporal, meaningful interactions that take place on mobile systems. These transit affinities move beyond linked fate and solidarity but are actively formed and have four distinctive features, they are: 1) personal; 2) mutually engaged; 3) actively maintained although interrupted by stops on the bus or train; and, 4) particular to majority-minority areas of the city. These transit affinities are intraracial and were not observed, as defined, interracially or in majority White areas of the city. We do not argue that they are exclusive to Blacks but that they took place among Blacks in Black spaces that have often been ascribed a narrative of disorganization, violence, and social fragmentation.

大部分关于贫困黑人城市社区的奖学金都侧重于社区层面的社会解体，以及黑人如何经历影响他们获得优质教育和住房、工作和公平公共交通的各种制度不平等。但黑人的社会生活不是混乱、征服和不平等的巨石，也不局限于固定的社区。黑人城市生活实际上是充满活力、喜庆和公共的。使用两年对芝加哥交通局 (CTA) 公共汽车和火车的人种学观察，我们强调了黑人空间内黑人移动体验的社会性。具体来说，我们研究了黑人在进入和穿过大多数黑人社区时如何形成积极的种族内关系，我们称之为黑人过境亲和力，这是一种发生在移动系统上的积极发展的、时间性的、有意义的交互。这些过境亲缘超越了联系的命运和团结，而是积极形成并具有四个鲜明的特征，它们是：1）个人的；2) 相互参与；3）积极维护，尽管被公共汽车或火车的停靠站中断；并且，4) 特别是城市的多数少数地区。这些交通亲缘关系是种族内的，按照定义，种族之间或城市的大多数白人地区都没有观察到。我们并不认为它们是黑人独有的，而是它们发生在黑人空间中的黑人之间，这些空间经常被归咎于混乱、暴力和社会分裂的叙事。