Henry Louis Gates Jr., the W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities at Harvard, is a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant for his work in African-American culture. His awards include the American Book Award and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award.
Everyone knows there are two nations in this country, white and black, right? That's what the Kerner Commission Report said in 1968, and that's what the title of Andrew Hacker's best selling sequel to that report says today. And for good reason. Track the statistics for public health, educational attainment and income, and they all seem to point to the same thing: that African Americans are the ultimate unassimilables of the American mix, the pebble in the ethnic soup.
Peer a little closer, though, and this familiar image splits again. Even as the ranks of the underclass expand, a second nation-within-a nation has formed. The fact is, Afro-America's affluent elite is larger than it has ever been - a legacy of the post-civil-rights era and just the kind of corporate and governmental programs of intervention that have fallen into such disfavor of late.
Now, most of the black communities' leaders, self-appointed or otherwise, are loath to acknowledge the existence of this class. They take it as part of their role to publicize the dire condition afflicting so much of black America. Why distract from the real problem? But here's the rub. Opponents of these post-civil-rights era programs can then flatly declare that they have failed. How to explain the complicated truth: that for black America, these are the worst of times ... and the best of times?
Today many black Americans enjoy a measure of economic security beyond any we have known in the history of black America. But they remain in a nasty blue funk, it’s because their very existence seems an affront to the swelling ranks of the poor. Nor have black intellectuals ever quite made peace with the concept of the black bourgeoisie, a group that typically seen as devoid of cultural authenticity doomed to mimicry and pallid assimilation. I once gave a talk before an audience of black academics and educators, in the course of which I referred to black middle-class culture. Afterward, one of the academics in the audience deeply affronted, had a question for me. “Professor Gates," he asked rhetorically, dripping with sarcasm, "what is black middle-class culture?" I suggested that if he really wanted to know, he need only look around the room. But perhaps I should just have handed him a mirror: for just as nothing is more American than anti-Americanism, nothing is more characteristic of the black bourgeoisie than the sense of shame and denial that the identity inspires. What did we do to be so black and blue? You may well ask.
The truth is that black America has been uncomfortable with the fact of its divisions, and none more so than the members of the elite themselves. Here's W.E.B. Du Bois, black America's greatest intellectual, writing in 1903:
Can the masses of Negro people be in any possible way more quickly raised than by the effort and example of (their own] aristocracy of talent and character? Was there ever a nation on God's fair earth civilized from the bottom upward? Never; it is, ever was and ever will be from the top downward that culture filters. The Talented Tenth rises and pulls all that are worth the saving up to their vantage ground. This is the history of human progress; and the two heroic mistakes which have hindered that progress were the thinking first that no more could ever rise save the few already risen; or second, that it would better the unrisen to pull the risen down.
So many things have changed since then, of course. That was a colored world then, back in 1903 when W.E.B. Du Bois wrote his famous essay, "The Talented Tenth." It was a world that in some sense has shaped and nurtured many of us, a world in which both our purpose and our enemies were clear. We were to get just as much education as we possibly could, to stay the enemies of racism, segregation, discrimination. If we heard it once, we heard it a thousand times: Get as much education as you can, boy; nobody can take your education away from you. It was a world in which comporting ourselves with dignity and grace, striving to "know and test the cabalistic letters" (as Du Bois put it) of the white elite and acknowledging and honoring those of us who had achieved were central to being a colored person in America.
We, too, were a people of the Book. When Du Bois was the editor of The Crisis magazine published the portraits of black college graduates, lawyers and doctors on its cover and in its pages. Being an athlete or an entertainer was fine and good, for Du Bois, but these were other serious occupations. Law and medicine, education and scholarship - these were the pinnacles of achievement, these the province of the Talented Tenth.
I don't claim that we ever lived up to the idealized image. But at least these were the images, the ideals, that were presented to us. Only racism and segregation stood between our people and the fullness of American citizenship. If only we could secure our legal rights, the argument went, if only we could use the courts to strike down segregation; if only de jure segregation could be banished -then all else would follow, as day upon night. The world was simple then; our enemy an easy target.
And then the obvious obstacles tumbled and fell. De jure segregation was killed in the American judicial system. Brown v. Board of Education is such a great triumph of decades of legal scholarship, under the leadership of such stellar jurists as Charles Hamilton Houston, Thurgood Marshall, Constance Baker Motley - the list is long and noble - that its anniversary has resonance in black America. So much went into the preparation of that brief before the Court - a rare collaboration between our legal practitioners and our scholars, between politicians and political activists, between whites and blacks, Jews and Gentiles, working together, in an interracial compact that few of us can even remember, let alone imagine happening again. There can be little doubt that the period between 1954 and the passage of Voting Rights Act of 1965 was the decade when the Negro felt more optimism than would be justified in any other decade in our century.
To be sure, the three years between 1965 and 1968 were bloody and turbulent ones – we could think of these years as framed by the assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King or by the riots in Watts in 1965 and the riots are about everywhere in 1968, especially those surrounding the Democratic Convention in Chicago. And yet despite all this and the grandchildren of the Talented Tenth - those of us who have been trained to succeed, geared to prosper, adequately prepared by family and teachers to "cross over" into the white world once the walls of segregation come tumbling down - plunged headlong and joyously into the abyss of integration.
How have we fared since 1965? In so many ways, as I insist, our progress is astonishing, something we may need to be reminded of even in the wake of the Rodney Kings riots and the stark statistics that measure the gap within our community between the haves and the have-nots. The “black" community, as we knew it before 1965, simply does not exist any longer. And we do great harm to the truth when we pretend that the problems confronting the black underclass are identical to those confronting the black middle class. For a new crop of black youth, whose only experience has been of our affluent suburbs, Matty Rich's grim film of life in the projects, "Straight Out of Brooklyn," would have to be retitled "Straight Out of Brookline." And who would ever have thought that any of us growing up would have considered enrolling our kids in "Jack and Jill"- not to advance them socially (as many of our parents hoped), but so that they would be with other black kids and learn about their ethnic heritage?
This is where we are in 1992, we members of the black upper middle class, the heirs of the Talented Tenth. We are isolated from the black underclass and yet still humiliatingly vulnerable to racism, in the form of random police harassment, individual racial insults from waitresses and attendants in stores, the unwillingness of taxi drivers to pick us up, systematic discrimination by banks and bank loan officers, wage discrimination in the workplace, and our perception of a "glass ceiling" in the corporate world. The questions that greeted our arrival at white colleges in the late Sixties and Seventies” - Do you play basketball, football or baseball?" (translated: "Which sport got you to Yale?") - have been supplanted by more subtle forms of questioning about our right and ability to hold the positions for which we have worked so diligently. Far too often, white colleagues at school, in our mostly white neighborhoods and in the workplace, see blackness as a sign of inferiority, our meal ticket into the middle class as an Affirmative Action quota. The most pernicious forms of racism - the stereotyping of an individual by the color of her skin - still pervade white America. And caught in this no-man's land of alienation and fragmentation is the black middle class.
What do we do about this? What do we not do? First of all, it's time for the black middle class to stop feeling guilty about its own success while fellow blacks languish in the inner city of despair. Black prosperity does not derive from black poverty: Those who succeed are those whose community, whose families, prepared them to be successful. As Stanley Crouch and others remind us, the familiar exhortation in those days was to "get all the education that you can"- and we did. When I left home for Yale, virtually my whole hometown celebrated. "The community," as we put it, however sentimentally, wished us to succeed. Talking black, walking black, wearing kente cloth, listening to black music and filling our walls with black art - as desirable as these things can be in and of themselves-are not essential to "being black." You can love Mozart, Picasso and ice hockey and still be as black as the ace of spades.
Second, we don't have to fail in order to be black. As crazy as this sounds, recent surveys of young black kids reveal a distressing pattern. Far too many say that succeeding is "white," education is “white," aspiring and dreaming are "white," believing that you can make it is "white." Had any of us said this sort of thing when we were growing up, our families and friends would have checked us into a mental institution. We need more success individually and collectively, not less.
Third, we don't have to pretend any longer that 30 million people can ever possibly be members of the same social class. After all, the entire population of Canada is 26 million. Canadians are not all members of one economic class. Nor do they speak with one single voice of one single leader. We have never been members of a single social or economic class, and never will be.
How do we "fight the power" in a post-civil rights world in which Bull Connors and George Wallace are no longer the easy targets that white racists used to be? A world in which the rhetoric of the civil-rights era sounds tired and empty? (If George Bush, Ross Perot or anyone else had turned up at the march on Washington in April, and handed over a check of $500 billion to heal the ills of the inner city, I wonder if anyone there would have known what to do with it.)
The time has come for honesty within the black community. The causes of poverty within the black community are both structural and behavioral, as scholars as diverse as philosopher Cornel West at Princeton and sociologist William Julius Wilson at Chicago have insisted, and as most polemicists still shy from acknowledging. A generation of well-meaning social scientists has made the notion of "the culture of poverty" taboo, correctly observing that the concept, as originally introduced, ignored the economic and structural dimensions of the problem. But having acknowledged those dimensions, it's time to concede that, yes, this is a culture of poverty. How could there not be? How could you think that culture matters and deny its relation to economic success? In general, a household made up of a 16-year-old mother, a 32-year-old grandmother and a 48 year old great-grandmother is not a site for hope and optimism. It's also true that not everyone in any society wants to work, that not all people are equally motivated.
There! Was that so hard to say?
Our task, it seems to me, is to lobby for those social programs that have been demonstrated to make a difference for those sufficiently motivated to seize these expanded opportunities. More important, we have to demand a structural change in this country. We have to take people off welfare and train them for occupations relevant to a 21st-century economy. And while I’m sympathetic to such incentives as tax breaks to generate new investment in inner cities, youth apprenticeships with corporations, expanded tax credits for earned income and tenant ownership of inner-city property, I believe we will have to face a reality. The reality is that our inner cities are not going to become oases of economic prosperity and corporate investment, and we should probably think about moving black inner city workers to the jobs rather than wait for new factories to resettle in the inner city.
To continue to repeat the same old stale formulas - to blame, in exactly the same ways, "the man" for oppressing us all, to scapegoat Koreans, Jews or even Haitians for seizing local entrepreneurial opportunities that have, for whatever reason, eluded us - is to fail to accept moral leadership. Not to demand that each member of the black community accept individual responsibility for their behavior- whether that behavior assumes the form of gang violence, unprotected sexual activity, you name it - is another way of selling out a beleaguered community. It is to surrender to the temptation to act as ethnic cheerleaders "selling woof tickets"- engaging in hollow rhetoric – from the suburbs instead of speaking the hard truths that may be unpopular with our fellows. Du Bois dared to speak an uncomfortable truth when he addressed the responsibilities of the black elite. For them, the challenge awaits of healing the rift within black America, and the larger nation as well.
No comments:
Post a Comment