In memory of
Glen DeChabert (1949–1994)
and
Armstead Robinson (1947–1995)
There is an historical circumstance, known to few, that connects the children of the Puritans with these Africans of Virginia in a very singular way. They are our brethren, as being lineal descendants from the Mayflower, the fated womb of which, in her first voyage, sent forth a brood of Pilgrims on Plymouth Rock, and, in a subsequent one, spawned slaves upon the Southern soil,—a monstrous birth, but with which we have an instinctive sense of kindred, and are so stirred by an irresistible impulse to attempt their rescue, even at the cost of blood and ruin. The character of our sacred ship, I fear, may suffer a little by this revelation; but we must let her white progeny offset her dark one,—and two such portents never sprang from an identical source before.
—NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
There are so many privileges and immunities denied us as citizens, which we are entitled to enjoy equally with others, that we would be discouraged at the prospect of the long fight we have before us to secure them, if we did not stop to reflect that, by our history as well as the history of others, they only succeed who refuse to fail and who fight all the time for theirs whatever the obstacles. I feel that way about it now at the age of seventy-five as I did at the age of twenty-one. I want all the young and the old people of the race to feel about it in the same way.
—T. THOMAS FORTUNE
The temptation therefore, to read the Negro out of the human family is exceedingly strong, and may account somewhat for the repeated attempts on the part of Southern pretenders to science, to cast a doubt over the Scriptural account of the origin of mankind. If the origin and motives of most works, opposing the doctrine of the unity of the human race, could be ascertained, it may be doubted whether one such work could boast an honest parentage. Pride and selfishness, combined with mental power, never want for a theory to justify them—and when men oppress their fellow-men, the oppressor ever finds, in the character of the oppressed, a full justification for his oppression. Ignorance and depravity, and the inability to rise from degradation to civilization and respectability, are the most usual allegations against the oppressed. The evils most fostered by slavery and oppression, are precisely those which slaveholders and oppressors would transfer from their system to the inherent character of their victims. Thus the very crimes of slavery become slavery’s best defence. By making the enslaved a character fit only for slavery, they excuse themselves for refusing to make the slave a freeman.
—FREDERICK DOUGLASS
TWENTY-FIVE years ago, I left West Virginia for Yale University, to join the blackest class in the history of that ivy-draped institution. I drove up on my own, without my parents. They were never comfortable in that island of leaded glass and Gothic spires, although you might say they spent much of their lives making sure I arrived there. My father worked two jobs—loading trucks at a paper mill, plus a night shift as a janitor for the phone company—to keep us well fed and well clothed, and to pay the premiums on “college insurance policies,” a thousand dollars when we reached eighteen. It never occurred to me that we might be poor until much later a sociologist told me so, pinpointing “the Gateses” in a mass of metallic-tasting demographics that left me numb with the neatness of it all.
I suppose that Yale represented both a betrayal and a fulfillment of their dreams. Blacks are wedded to narratives of ascent, to borrow a phrase from literary critic Robert Stepto, and we have made the compounded preposition “up from” our own: up from slavery, up from Piedmont, up from the Bronx, always up. But narratives of ascent, whether or not we like to admit it, are also narratives of alienation, of loss. Usually the ascent is experienced not as a gradual progression but as a leap, and for so many of my generation that leap was the one that took us from our black homes and neighborhoods into the white universities that had adopted newly vigorous programs of minority recruitment. It should be said that the adjustment was a two-way street: we were as strange to the institutions in which we found ourselves as those institutions were to us. In short, we were part of a grand social experiment—a blind date, of sorts. We weren’t a tenth, of course; and whatever talent we had wasn’t necessarily greater than our compeers who were passed over, or who opted out; but we were here. You might call us the crossover generation.
To speak in strictly chronological terms, we are among the late-boomers who now occupy the White House and the Congress—an age grade that includes Bill Clinton and Robert Reich and William Kristol. But the sense of generational affinity is intensified within the race: ours was the first generation to attend integrated schools in the wake of Brown v. Board; to have watched, as children, the dismantling of Jim Crow and to wonder where the process might end; to be given the chance, through affirmative action, to compete against white boys and girls; to enter and integrate the elite institutions just as the most expansive notions of radical democracy made an entrance.
I picked Yale almost out of a hat. After a year at a junior college near my home, a place where “nigger” was hung on me so many times that I thought it was my name, I decided to head north, armed with a scholarship and a first edition of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style.
By day—and it was still light when I first arrived in New Haven—the university is a tangible, mortar-and-stone manifestation of an Oxonian ideal of Gothic perfection. By night, the sense of enchantment increased: the mammoth structures, strangely out of keeping with the surrounding town, guarded their streets with bearded shadows made by the half-light of the lampposts. At Yale, battle hymns were Congregational, with delicate changes of key. The building that just had to be the college cathedral turned out to be Sterling Library. Every feature of the place was alarming and exhilarating. Welcome to Never-Never Land, I told myself. This is your world, the world you’ve longed for and dreamed of. This was where the goods and entitlements of the American century were stored and distributed. It was the grown-up version of the world of Captain Midnight Decoders; the repository of all those box tops I used to ship off to Kellogg’s in fair exchange for laser guns. If college was a warehouse for what we’ve modishly learned to call “cultural capital,” the question wasn’t how to get it but what to do with it.
Many of the black kids at Yale were the first in their families to attend college, and they congregated in the pre-med and pre-law tracks, searching for a secure place in the newly integrated arenas of the nation’s elite. Others were scions of old “colored money.” Most of us took at least one course in the new program in Afro-American Studies, probably in part out of a sense of team spirit, partly out of a yearning to tap our cultural unconscious. I took several such courses, and at least three times found myself assigned to read Du Bois’s essay “The Talented Tenth.” (Only Harold Cruse’s The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual was assigned more often.) Du Bois’s essay was read and critiqued, almost defensively, for its vanguardism; but its vision of the educated bourgeoisie as the truly revolutionary class—Marx stood on its head, you might say—exerted an unmistakable sway on us.
AND THEN there was the talented tenth of the Talented Tenth: la crème de la crème brûlée. As far as I was concerned, they numbered exactly two: Glen DeChabert and Armstead Robinson. I first met them in the pages of the Yale Alumni Magazine the summer before I set foot on campus. In it was an article about a conference held at Yale on the prospective shape of Afro-American Studies in the academy—a conference, bringing together illustrious scholars and prominent activists, that had been orchestrated by these two Yale sophomores. (That conference, and the book that came out of it, would profoundly influence the institutionalization of the field; and indeed, the program in Afro-American Studies came to Yale the same year I did.) I studied their photographs. DeChabert seemed to have a cappuccino complexion, an aquiline nose, an impressive crown of hair, and a compellingly regal bearing: I was half convinced he was descended from African royalty. Robinson’s customary attire was more in keeping with countercultural dishabille; he had wavy, unkempt hair in quantity and wore the black rectangular glasses that were then standard issue for young black activist-intellectuals.
Soon after my arrival, I attended my first meeting of the Black Student Alliance at Yale, at which Glen DeChabert—or DeCh, as he was called—presided in his capacity as “moderator.” He was every bit as charismatic as I’d imagined, and I hung back like a supplicant. Besides, there was a lot to take in. I could only marvel when students complained that there weren’t enough “brothers” on campus; looking around at the two hundred or so students in attendance, I felt as if I were in Africa, or Harlem, anyway. Outside of a few camp revival meetings in Moorefield, I’d never seen so many black people my age. I’d grown up in colored Piedmont; here I would truly learn how to be Black. If my arrival was a narrative of ascent, it was at the time one of immersion. Then it came up that they needed a new secretary. This was my cue. After the meeting, summoning my nerve, I pushed through a crowd of DeCh’s admirers and volunteered my services. I felt anointed when he accepted. From then on, I took notes during meeting after meeting, participating through the sedulous act of recording. It’s a role that I return to now with some trepidation, but I have no other way of explaining what is, in part, the story of my generation.
If DeChabert—with his impeccable attire and his lordly way with a cigarette—struck me as the perfect embodiment of black leadership, Armstead Robinson was an equally commanding picture of black intellection. Thin and ascetic in his unpressed dashiki and uncombed Afro, Robinson—Robby—was the first black “Scholar of the House,” part of a competitive senior-year program in which a major scholarly project was pursued instead of regular course work. Robby, we knew, would change the way we understood our past and our present, by dint of his extraordinary and well-stocked mind. He was the son of a Memphis minister, and his verbal facility was displayed to equal advantage in the high-flown language of the humanities and in the revolutionary lingo of the streets. Once I gained his friendship, I’d go over to his room at Morse College and sit on the floor cross-legged as he typed away. “I won’t bother you,” I’d tell him. “I just want to watch you work.” The truth is that I was starstruck: I’d never met a black scholar before, and in some almost mystical way I wanted to witness the act of creation, hoping that the magic would rub off.
They respected each other, Robby and DeCh did, each ceding the other his turf. I remember when a number of representatives of the SDS came to campus and we were supposed to hold a “meeting with the white boys.” DeCh couldn’t go, and asked me to attend in his place, to report back. “I just want to know one thing,” he’d said when I caught up with him afterward, lighting up a cigarette impatiently. “Was Robby there?”
Best of all, DeChabert was a man with a plan. A very practical-sounding plan. What black America needed, he often said, was economic development, and the only way that was going to happen was if we did it ourselves. Economies grew: that was what they did. And we were a nation of millions, more populous than Canada. Black capitalism was the answer, and he was going to be its Johnny Appleseed, lending out start-up capital for black entrepreneurship and reinvesting the proceeds until the relative deprivation of black America was a distant memory—and until it truly was a force to be reckoned with. Of course, he did recognize there was a long way to go.
IN THE YEAR I was born, 1950, 5 percent of employed blacks held professional or managerial jobs; another 5 percent held clerical or sales jobs. So, depending on the elasticity of your definition, maybe a tenth would have qualified as “middle-class.” To spell out the obverse: Among even those blacks who held jobs, 90 percent failed, by conventional standards, to qualify as middle-class. If educational attainment was your measure, the situation looked bleaker; even ten years later, only 3 percent of blacks had a college degree. And more than half of blacks fell below the poverty line. In the year I graduated from high school, almost half of black households took in less than fifteen thousand dollars a year, in today’s dollars; less than 6 percent took in more than fifty thousand.
Given such figures, the persistent strain of antipathy toward the black middle class might seem a phenomenon analogous to the curious strain of anti-Semitism in present-day Japan: a prejudice undeterred by the fact that, empirically speaking, its target is scarcely to be seen. “Aunt Jemima and Uncle Tom are dead,” James Baldwin wrote, slyly, in 1955, “their places taken by a group of amazingly well-adjusted young men and women, almost as dark, but ferociously literate, well-dressed and scrubbed, who are never laughed at, who are not likely ever to set foot in a cotton or tobacco field or in any but the most modern of kitchens.” Three years after Brown, in his classic 1957 study, Black Bourgeoisie, E. Franklin Frazier described his subject in the most withering terms, depicting them as deluded turncoats. With even more polemical zeal if less analytic precision, Nathan Hare’s popular book The Black Anglo-Saxons (1965) presented the black bourgeoisie as servile, inauthentic, self-loathing, and generally contemptible. Where Du Bois saw saviors, a new generation saw only sellouts. Thus was the rhetorical template established, and you could feel its impress for years to come. Martin Luther King, Jr., charged that “many middle-class Negroes have forgotten their roots,” and are “untouched by the agonies and struggles of their underprivileged brothers.” Harold Cruse would later denounce “an empty class that has flowered into social prominence without a clearly defined social mission.”1 And of course the Black Arts generation, those merry pranksters, added their own flourishes. The folkloric figure Junebug Jabbo Jones was often quoted saying, “Yale done spoilt more good Negroes than whiskey.” Self-loathing was held to be a trait of the black bourgeoisie; it did not occur to these authors that their own work might itself be evidence of it.
But if the full-fledged rise of black-bourgeois-bashing preceded the full-fledged rise of the black bourgeoisie, time soon rectified the imbalance. For however paltry the middle class was in absolute terms, these critics wrote in a period when the socioeconomic structure of black America was undergoing a dramatic transformation: during the forties, fifties, and sixties, the black middle class experienced what was then the most rapid growth in its history. Postwar prosperity was the wind at our back. Between 1940 and 1970, for example, the annual earnings of white men doubled; but those of black men actually tripled.
So it was a period when the belief in progress seemed more than wishful thinking. Certainly my parents never allowed my brother or me to doubt that we could become whatever we chose. Nor did they let us doubt that the world would yield its secrets if only we turned our attention to it. They were not surprised by their children’s attainments. I do not know if they loved America, but they shared the hopeful vision of America that the Princeton political scientist Jennifer Hochschild has analyzed in an invaluable 1995 study as the ideology of the “American dream.”2 That is, they believed in the possibility of upward mobility, of racial betterment, of collective progress. They believed that America was in part malign, but that it was not entirely malign. They believed that the agency of black folk was circumscribed by circumstance, but that black folk had agency all the same. They knew that white folk had the power; but they believed that power was a shifting, fluid thing, like mercury, and that some of it was always seeping away, puddling up before somebody else. They knew that black folk had gone through bad times, but they also let themselves believe, or at least half-believe, that times they were a-changin’.
The vision of the world they shared was one 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, and discrimination. (If we heard it once, we heard it a thousand times: education is the one thing nobody can take away from you.) By my first year of school, at the Davis Free School in Piedmont, West Virginia—which had integrated just one year before I entered—I understood in some deep part of me that all that was being asked of me was to pay attention. We never once were allowed to doubt that we were special. And only sometimes did we allow ourselves to wonder why.
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—but also acknowledging and honoring those of us who had achieved—was central to being a colored person in America: so we were given to understand. And indeed, back when Du Bois was the editor of The Crisis magazine, he published the portraits of black college graduates, lawyers and doctors, on its cover and in its pages. 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 this idealized image. But at least these were the images, the ideals, that were presented to us. Once upon a time, our communal values and aspirations were intact. 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 from the land once and for all—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 off in the American judicial system. Brown v. Board was a triumph of decades of legal scholarship, under the leadership of such accomplished jurists as Charles Hamilton Houston, Thurgood Marshall, Constance Baker Motley—the list is long and noble. (How 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.) Certainly the decade between Brown and the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 was a time when the Negro felt more optimism than would have been justified in any other single decade in our century.
To be sure, the three years that followed were bloody and turbulent ones (you 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 just about everywhere else in 1968, especially those surrounding the Democratic Convention in Chicago). And yet despite all this, the grand-children of the Talented Tenth—those who had been trained to succeed, geared to prosper, prepared by family and teachers to “cross over” into the white world once the walls of segregation came tumbling down—plunged headlong into the abyss of integration. In the years between my graduation from high school and my graduation from college, the poorest fifth percentile of blacks experienced a 13 percent gain in income, about the same as the top fifth percentile. Here, at last, was the proverbial “rising tide” that lifts all boats, one that buoyed a sense of possibility shared by militants and assimilationists alike. How could we have known that we were never to see its like again?
THE SORT of institutions through which elites sustain themselves always seemed to inhabit an arcadia of their own, and yet somehow, in my mind, they always loomed like the clanking, infernal machinery of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. I should say that Yale wasn’t my first encounter with one. I was in tenth grade when Exeter came about; a friend at a church summer camp told me about the place. Going to Exeter, you understand, was not something people in Piedmont knew about, not the way people at Yale “know” about Exeter. What I knew was that it was a place with a big library which offered a lot of courses. And in the main, that’s what it was for me. An interview with the young Jay Rockefeller, an easy entrance exam, and a full scholarship later, I said bye-bye to Piedmont and drove with my uncle to the New Hampshire woods. My parents said their good-byes in Piedmont, as if there were a boundary they preferred not to trespass.
As quickly as Exeter came into my life, however, Exeter left; or rather, I left Exeter. Sometime in my first semester, I “up and decided” that it was past time for me to go back home. Dean Kessler checked my records what seemed to be a hundred times—my test scores were perfect, I had straight A’s. There was no reason, he said. “Who gave you authority to leave?” he wanted to know. That’s what settled it for me. I thought the knock on the door was just my classmate Joel Motley, whose room was next to mine. It was the dean, red-faced, angry, and a bit disappointed. I think he thought if he yelled at me, somehow I would cower my way back to French I-A. I gave up Exeter at that moment, staring blankly into his crimson, pockmarked face. “Think of our people,” Joel, the soul of black insouciance, said that night. “Think of yourself. Where is Piedmont, anyway?” “I’ll be back,” I told him, and somehow knew I would, though I didn’t mean Exeter, exactly. That was the first airplane trip I ever took. I still don’t know for sure why I felt I had to leave; I think that Piedmont was just too far to fall back into, so I decided not to have to fall at all. Homesick for Piedmont, I went back, and soon became homesick for Exeter.
But I stayed at Yale; DeChabert and Robinson were my polestars, and would keep me from ever getting lost. I stayed and I graduated, as a number of my friends did not, and I did so not as a matter of course but as a matter of will. I still remember that crucial first month, with daily sessions in the Linnonia and Brothers reading room, working out inorganic chemistry problems by the light of the low-wattage table lamps. I had convinced myself that at Yale I would be average; a C+ was what I was aiming for. Learning to speak out in class, always my forte before, now came slowly and painfully. But it was History 31 that made the difference, in Burrell Billingslea’s discussion group. Never have I put so much work and expectation, fear and care, into the preparation of a five-page paper. Had the returned grade been a Pass, or just a High Pass, the tenor of my years at Yale would probably have been as gray as a New Haven winter. But there it was, in unforgettable bright red letters: “Honors. Nice Paper.” Fifteen students—eight seniors, four juniors, and a handful of others—and one Honors. I remember deciding that very night to go to Africa the next year as a “Five-Year B.A.,” and one day to be a Scholar of the House, just like Robby.
It soon became apparent, once the anxiety of “making it” was allayed, and once the sheer joy at being black (with about two hundred other black folks!) was tempered, that the fundamental challenge of my years at Yale would be whether or not to allow blackness to rob me of what I wistfully and portentously called “my humanity.” This problem went beyond, I think, that peculiar brand of “Mau-Mauing” we so avidly practiced during the late 1960s. You see, as long as I identified the angst of youth with discovering and then shouting for all to hear just how the white man had subjugated the black man, then the matter of being a human being was not a problem at all. (Try it sometime.)
But it was only when you put aside the hulking specter of Bull Connors, arms folded before the passageway, that you would be made to confront all those inconvenient matters. So if you were no longer sure about who you were, it was awfully convenient to have a Bull Connors for distraction. Maybe that explained part of the strange spectacle we presented at Yale, preoccupying ourselves with the minute examination of the metaphysical nature of the “Pig.” We wanted to dissect his brain, to explicate his soul, each of us determined at all costs to unlink the Great Chain of Being that had enslaved us since 1619. How better to serve our people, then, than as students at an elite institution? “Changing the system by knowing just what the system is”—that was our rationale, a rationale that was recited so rotely and smugly that the white kids stopped asking us the sort of questions that might prompt it—questions like whether we “felt guilty about just being here.” That was the sort of question we would not even have answered in private, among ourselves behind closed doors or alone; we certainly would not have been frank with the white boys. So it was another device by which to mystify them, and mask our own fears.
Not everything was fantasy and posture; in 1970, certainly, the issues of the day were real enough. There was Bobby Seale in a New Haven prison, tried each day in a courthouse just a half-block from Calhoun College; there was Eldridge Cleaver, unjustly exiled in Algiers; there was John Huggins, whose mother would sometimes let our fines slide over at the Sterling Library, murdered by cultural nationalists out in L.A.; there were the atrocities of the Cambodian “side-show.” None of these issues was conjured up for the occasion; our growing conviction was that such were the evils against which only a moral elite of the young could prevail. Yet throughout all our strikes and protests and steering committees, I tried to shrug off a vague sense that had these things not been there, in the world, we would have invented them; or at least a sense that these things were doing double-duty for us.
My grandfather was colored, my father is Negro, and I am black—so I wrote in my college application essay. Those appellations, of course, did not contain who I was, or even serve to limit who I thought I could be. Yet each successive generation of black folks living in this country has shared certain peculiar psychic and social concerns that come as regularly as dusk in a society where being black was from the start a restrictive covenant that one could run from or live with, but that one could not escape. It was always a fact of Negro life that one’s membership could be taken for granted, could be assumed in much the same way one could assume that back home those Saturday sessions at Combie’s barbershop would be rife with Combie’s “boo-shit” and with the good-hearted lies that provoked it. As my understanding grew of just what all the post-1966 Black Power rhetoric meant, of just how ideology could come to bear upon personal, everyday relationships, I came to the painful realization that what “da revolution” implied, what that elusive vanguard was based on, was membership in a club so exclusive that, as one for whom the warmth of a village was sustenance, I couldn’t begin to afford its ideological membership fee.
Not long after I arrived at Yale, some of the brothers who came from private schools in New Orleans held a “bag party.” As a classmate explained it to me, a bag party was a New Orleans custom wherein a brown paper bag was stuck on the door and anyone darker than it was denied entrance. That was one cultural legacy that would be put to rest in a hurry—we all made sure of that. But in a manner of speaking, it was replaced by an opposite test whereby those who were deemed “not black enough,” ideologically, were to be shunned. I was not so sure this was an improvement.
THE YEAR I graduated from college, 1973, marked the beginning of a growing divergence between poor blacks and prosperous ones, such that the well-off became better-off while the poor became poorer; and in the years since, poverty has, in lockstep, kept pace with privilege. First, though, the good news. Today, roughly a third of black families can be counted as middle-class. I’ve mentioned that in 1950, only 5 percent of black workers were professionals or managers; today, the figure is greater than 20 percent. The number of black families earning more than fifty thousand dollars a year has quadrupled since 1967, and doubled in the eighties alone. In 1973, the top one hundred black-owned businesses had sales of $473 million; today, the figure is $11.7 billion. In 1970, only one in ten blacks had attended college; today, one in three has.
The black middle class has never been in better shape—and it has never felt worse about things. Du Bois had conjured up a Talented Tenth that would be a beacon of hope; it is ninety years later, and they are, instead, a sump of gloom. Middle-class messianism has given way to middle-class malaise. Jennifer Hochschild, the political scientist, calls this paradox “succeeding more and enjoying it less.”
Certainly the data she has assembled are striking. Over the past generation, poor and affluent black Americans have switched places with respect to their attitudes toward America and their expectations of economic progress and of the future of race relations; the result is a kind of ideological chiasmus. Professor Hochschild writes:
When asked what is important for getting ahead in life, poor blacks are almost as likely to choose being of the right sex and more likely to choose religious conviction and political connections than to choose being of the right race. Well-off blacks, however, think race matters more than any of those characteristics. Affluent blacks are also more likely to see blacks are economically worse off than whites, and to see discrimination as blacks’ most important problem…. As the African American middle class has become larger, more powerful, and more stable, its members have grown disillusioned with and even embittered about the American dream.3
This represents a dramatic reversal of the situation during the years of my childhood, in the fifties and sixties. In 1964, 70 percent of middle-class blacks surveyed said they thought most whites want to see blacks get a better break; by 1992, only 20 percent thought so. The Talented Tenth has a surprising susceptibility to racial paranoia, too: blacks with a college education are especially likely to seriously entertain claims that AIDS was concocted to infect blacks, or that the government conspired to make drugs available in poor neighborhoods in an effort to harm blacks. Material success has led to the death of trust. In short, even as the numbers of the affluent have swollen, the hopefulness of the affluent has plunged. Antonio Gramsci, famously, recommended pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will; for much of the black elite, pessimism has prevailed on both fronts.
Why should this be? We’re certainly free to speculate. Some critics would probably implicate the oppositional culture of the sixties, as incubated in the very elite institutions that secured us a place among the educated bourgeoisie. It isn’t unknown for an oppositional creed to decay into a kind of routinized cynicism. Then there’s the fact that economic advancement entails greater intimacy with whites, and so greater opportunities for friction. You might even wonder about the effects of stigmatizing black upward mobility; certainly the figure of the inauthentic buppy has passed from the sociological study into popular black films and novels. Culturally speaking, the “street” has been deemed the repository of all that is real, that is “black,” and alternative models of ethnic solidarity have been late in coming. But probably more significant is the matter of dashed hopes: of great expectations, and the mourning after.
HERE, YOU have to contend both with a story of political retrenchment and the very real phenomenon of survivor’s guilt. The story of retrenchment has been told many times, but these are its lineaments. The New Deal cemented a popular coalition that was supportive of the newly institutionalized welfare state: it spoke a universalist language of equal opportunity, fairness, and civic-minded virtue. But, we have been told, the ultimate ascension of that vision contained the seeds of its demise. Return, then, to the sixties. In what would become known as the “Great Society speech,” delivered on May 22, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson spoke of a civilization where “the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community… where the demands of morality, and the needs of the spirit, can be realized in the life of the nation.” And with these lofty words, he launched the most ambitious agenda of social and economic reform since the New Deal.
Of course, the New Deal, which bequeathed us what we know as modern liberalism, was patched together in a time of economic crisis, impelled by desperation. By contrast, Johnson’s vision was buoyed by the prosperity of the time, fueled by a national mood of expansiveness. If America’s capacity for self-improvement was not inexhaustible, our faith in that capacity surely was. That November, Johnson was returned to office by what was the largest popular margin in history. But it is the long shadow and the troubled legacy of the Great Society—not its policy failures so much as its political failure—with which his successors have had to grapple. (Many saw Clinton’s election as signaling a renewal of the old Democratic alliance, the one that the Great Depression put together and the sixties put asunder. The years that followed have not been kind to that hopeful belief.)
The early days of the Great Society witnessed a host of legislative initiatives. There was Medicare for the elderly, Medicaid for the indigent, Head Start for preschoolers. There was the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the Job Corps, the Model Cities program. Of greater political significance was the promulgation and enforcement of sweeping civil rights measures, such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Through five heady years, the Great Society seemed to embody the full and resplendent maturity of liberalism, fending off the forces of reaction and ushering in a bright new day.
In the ensuing decades, it came to look a lot more like liberalism’s supernova: a final, white-hot burst before its dark collapse.
As with the New Deal, some of the programs were poorly conceived and ineffectual. Others are now taken for granted as a part of the political biosphere, programs whose worth neither party would dare contest. But it was the overarching scheme, and dream, that fell into disfavor. Reform was no longer experienced as something performed for the people, but as something performed on the people. In an age of belated racial redress, white America—the rank and file, the lower middle class—felt itself to be under siege. With jolting suddenness, the old alliance fell apart. Liberalism was coded as a philosophy elevating black grievances over white ones, concerned with the welfare of layabouts over that of workers.
The irony was that liberalism, which sought to heal the injuries of class, should itself fall victim to class warfare—to the resentment of the blue-collar and lower-middle classes against those they saw as the professional-class purveyors of paternalism. White Southerners and Northern ethnics, once Democratic stalwarts, increasingly felt like outsiders at the gate. A Great Society? Not if you’d been left off the invitation list. Liberalism lost its political capital when it became perceived as something that taxed the majority to advance “special”—which is to say “minority”—interests. Through an excess of gallantry and zeal, liberalism itself created the alienated “them” that deeded the Republicans the White House.4
The upshot is that the members of the crossover generation—the black boomers—have kept vigil over the increasing marginalization of black America in the political arena. Now Democrats win national office by demonstrating that they are not beholden to black “special interests,” while Republicans have mastered a nimble vocabulary for reassuring white voters that they’re on their side.
WHAT MAKES all this of particular concern is the swelling ranks of the black poor, a category that (like the black middle class) now encompasses about a third of black families. More than half of all black males between twenty-five and thirty-four are jobless or “underemployed.” Other social indices are equally discouraging: In 1993, 2.3 million black men were sent to jail or prison while 23,000 received a college diploma—a ratio of a hundred to one. (The ratio for whites was six to one.) And the plight of the black poor is even more alarming if you look not just at household earnings but at assets. The poorest fifth of whites have a median net worth of ten thousand dollars; the median net worth of their black counterparts is … zero.
On a rational level, of course, we know that black prosperity doesn’t derive from black poverty; on a symbolic level, however, the chronic hardship of a third of black America is a standing reproach to those of us who once dreamed of collective uplift. It makes it hard to invoke the salvific conception of the “Talented Tenth” without bitterness. If your name is Auchincloss, say, you do not worry overmuch about those impoverished Appalachians who share your Scottish descent; few blacks have the luxury of such detachment.
Du Bois once believed that educated Negroes would uplift the race; give or take a few revolutionary flourishes, most of my black classmates at college would have concurred. It sounded different, our creed, but it came to the same thing. So it’s easy to take our collective misfortunes personally. Forty years after Brown v. Board, most black students attend majority black schools; a third attend schools that are 90 to 100 percent black. Everything was supposed to have been different from the way it turned out.
The sixties bequeathed us new and inventive ways of talking about race, thus presenting us with a chimera called the “black community.” And sometimes, to be sure, solidarity was conjured into existence—at least a provisional existence. In 1970, a day before the legendary May Day rally in New Haven, I noticed two Black Panthers leaving my entryway at Calhoun “College,” as the undergraduate dorms are known. Brimming with the spirit of brotherly bonding, I introduced myself to them. Panthers were glamorous creatures, after all—the shock troops of our beleaguered nation. I told them my name and, for their future reference, my room number. They looked at each other uneasily. I understood why a little later that evening, when they knocked on the door, bearing my yellow windbreaker, my copy of Bobby Seale’s Seize the Time, and Karma, the Pharoah Sanders album—all items they had stolen from my room earlier. I hadn’t noticed their absence, and I felt oddly touched by their return. I suppose I didn’t know whether this was a parable of brotherhood or of the limits of brotherhood. It was not an uncommon quandary.
In the event, we lost our grip on things like class, and felt ill equipped to deal with the dilemma of intraracial disparities. Twenty-five years later, we can’t even agree on the causes of black poverty, let alone how best to remedy it. Of course, we do have theories—so many that, as Mr. Dooley says, “you pays your money and you takes your choice.” There is, for example, the “spatial-mismatch hypothesis,” which holds that while manufacturing jobs moved to the suburbs, blacks (in part deterred by residential discrimination and the inadequacies of mass transit) have stayed behind in the central cities.5 (This explanation can be summed up in the expression: the wrong place at the wrong time.) There’s a school of opinion that emphasizes the malign effects of the concentration of poverty that arises from residential segregation. It turns out that, much more than the poor of other backgrounds, the black poor are concentrated in uniformly disadvantaged neighborhoods, and, it’s proposed, such concentration itself has a pernicious impact on life opportunities.6 There are those who stress the deindustrialization of the American economy over the past several decades, and the resultant loss of entry-level blue-collar jobs—the sort of jobs that had provided other groups with an economic stepping-stone.7 Still others dwell on the disintegration of the traditional family structure and the rise of female-headed households (sometimes naming AFDC as an aggravating factor). You can, of course, mix and match these theories, and to varying degrees, most researchers do.
No doubt all these trends have played a role—but how significant a role? With respect to “spatial mismatch,” you might think that if blacks were able to secure good-paying jobs at suburban businesses, they would be able to afford the commute; after all, most blue-collar workers drive to work. As Christopher Jencks, a leading analyst of social policy, argues, “At least for mature men most metropolitan areas constitute a single labor market, not separate urban and suburban markets.”8 One problem with research on the concentration of poverty is how to factor in the presumably positive position enjoyed by those blacks whose departure from the central cities created those vexing concentrations. Skeptics armed with longitudinal studies note that the deindustrialization of American cities is a trend that began early in the century and its progress doesn’t seem to mirror the fluctuating fortunes of the black working class. For that matter, the rate of single motherhood has proven insensitive to changes in welfare policy—that is, the rate has risen when welfare benefits rose; and also risen when benefits were cut back or qualification requirements made more stringent. In any event, there is a chicken-and-egg problem here: the increase in female-headed households may be a consequence of the problems—such as black joblessness—it is supposed to explain. (One factor I haven’t mentioned is the most obvious: contemporary race discrimination per se. Such discrimination persists, needless to say; but there’s little agreement about how large a role it plays. That black women now earn about the same as white women of comparable education, many believe, indicates that skin color alone is not determinative. Plainly the political economy of race and poverty has to be responsive to the lingering effects of historical inequity—which argues for a concept of “racism without racists.”)
In the bluffly empirical sense that the root cause of poverty is a lack of money, however, what ails us isn’t a failure of analysis but a failure of national will. The politics of poverty is more vexed than the economics of it. The sociologist Herbert J. Gans, a veteran of the welfare wars, maintains:
Antipoverty programs have rarely been costed out to determine their benefits, such as what people employed in newly created jobs return to the tax rolls, what job and income grant programs save in spending for controlling and reducing crime and the physical and mental illnesses associated with poverty. If all the externalities, good and bad, associated with spending by and for (or against) the poor were added together, they would show that the country can afford far better antipoverty programs than it now provides.
And the fact that federal welfare expenditures have never amounted to more than a percentage or two of the federal budget lends credibility to his view. Gans notes that the total cost of welfare and food stamps in 1992 was $47 billion, and he cites a Census Bureau finding that with another $37 billion, the incomes of all poor families with children could be raised to the poverty line.9 One reason for the electoral reluctance to pony up is the enduring ideology of the “undeserving poor.” Another is that poverty in this country wears a black face; it is true that most welfare recipients are white, but the disproportionate number of blacks below the poverty line creates the perception. All of which returns us to the story of the decline and fall of the New Deal coalition, and the continuing electoral allergy to race-specific programs.
Faced with these realities, many liberal social scientists have responded by advocating programs that unite black and white in a common purpose, steering clear of race-specific, even need-specific remedies, in favor of universal social policies. Take, for example, provisions for job training, universal health care coverage, access to college loans, apprenticeships for those who aren’t college-bound. These are proposals whose potential beneficiaries, and therefore supporters, aren’t restricted to the poor. Not incidentally, however, they are of particular value to the poor. None of these things looks like a “poverty program.” All would help combat poverty. (It was conservative Chicago School economists like Gary Becker who first hit upon the notion of “human capital,” the notion that education was an investment, like any other capital investment, only more profitable. A recent survey by two Princeton econometricians found that every additional year of education increased income by an average of 16 percent. If so, expanding the availability of education is just a smart investment, and should be promoted as one.) You may have noticed, however, that even proposals designed to have transracial appeal are regularly foiled by partisanship. The Clinton administration’s attempts to implement such programs have met little success; and the Republican majority in Congress has guaranteed that the impasse will continue. Reform designed to promote work, not dependence—involving measures to promote, or at least not to penalize, savings—would cost more than conventional transfer payments, no question. Yet at least in the long run, there’s reason to think that Americans, who are skeptical of handouts, could be persuaded to shell out more if it were spent in ways they approve of.
The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is an example of a redistributive mechanism that, in the normal course of things, flies beneath the ideological radar. It is designed to be immune to the usual conservative worries about wrong-way incentives (the inevitable phaseout dilemmas aside) and about coddling the “undeserving poor”: it rewards the poor for working by “making work pay,” as the shibboleth has it. (The rub, of course, is that you need to find work first.) At the very least, you cannot claim that EITC perpetuates a “cycle of dependency.” As Joel Handler, a law professor at UCLA, notes, the version that was enacted in 1992 would, when fully funded, redirect $7 billion a year, and save about fourteen million working poor families from poverty.10 (Naturally, the program has been targeted for rescission by the Republican Congress.) Meantime, the entitlement spending currently represented by Social Security amounts to $333 billion each year; its beneficiaries include such people as Warren Buffett and David Rockefeller. With the money saved by implementing even an extremely conservative level of means-testing of Social Security recipients, the number of EITC beneficiaries could easily be doubled. In the absence of a political consensus, however, there is little point to playing the “if only” game of distributive justice. As the borscht-belt line has it: if we had bacon, we could have bacon and eggs—if we had eggs.
BUT IN THE absence of a political establishment willing or able to address the crisis facing black America—in the absence, politically speaking, of both bacon and eggs—Du Boisian vanguardism proposes that we turn to our own black leadership to point the way. A recent article in Black Enterprise, for example, extolled the advantages of increased political representation at the municipal level, citing Atlanta, which has widely been viewed as a model of black empowerment. In Atlanta, we’re told, “Mayor Jackson, and later Mayor Andrew Young, made sure African Americans got a fair share of city business. This helped black businesses grow. It also helped African Americans get jobs in law firms and led to the establishment of several black investment firms.”11 In short, a rising tide; lifted boats. But as Gary Orfield and Carole Ashkinaze have shown in a book-length case study of the city, working-class blacks did not share in its economic growth. “If economic expansion and a tight labor market could create equal opportunity without targeted government action, it should have happened in the Atlanta area,” they write.12 In fact, inner-city blacks were shut out of the emerging job market, which was largely to be found in outlying areas, and which drew upon workers from outside their neighborhoods.
But I should be fair. For every fatuous booster, there’s a band of sad-eyed prophets bewailing the so-called leadership crisis in black America. And to judge by recent headlines, their lament has a certain plausibility. The NAACP finds an energetic new director—who soon resigns under a cloud. The freshman congressman Mel Reynolds, a onetime Rhodes scholar who won his Chicago seat in 1992 by defeating the odious incumbent, Gus Savage, is convicted of sexual misconduct. Mike Espy, Clinton’s secretary of agriculture, announces, under pressure, that he will resign. Just as telling as the names of the preterites are those in the ascent. Marion Barry, having been convicted on drug charges, is returned to office as the mayor of Washington. And in Washington, Minister Louis Farrakhan takes center stage, having convened the best-attended black gathering in the nation’s history. The mighty have fallen; the fallen have become mighty.
And so the hand-wringing and the talk about the crisis of leadership. If only we could get that part right—some blacks have started to think—we could start to get a handle on the grassroots problems. The trouble is, no one can agree on what that leadership should look like; no one ever could.
Pollsters have long known of the remarkable gap between the leaders and the led in black America. A 1985 survey found that most blacks favored the death penalty and prayer in public schools while most black leaders opposed these things. Most blacks opposed school busing, while most black leaders favored it. Three times as many blacks opposed abortion rights as their leaders did. Indeed, on many key social issues, blacks are more conservative than whites. If the numbers of black Republicans are on the rise, as these opinion surveys suggest, it would be unwise to dismiss the phenomenon. Given the breach between the black leadership and its putative constituency, we shouldn’t be surprised at the motley company who seek to fill it.
In the early years of this century, black leadership was divided into two supposedly irreconcilable camps, the “integrationists” and the “accommodationists,” with Du Bois and Booker T. Washington serving as exemplars and chief spokesmen for these two schools of thought. Where Du Bois called for an agenda of civil rights to be secured by the political and legal transformation of American society, Washington championed a form of group uplift to be secured by vocational education, with civil rights something to be dealt with down the road. With the coming of the civil rights era, and the partial fulfillment of Du Bois’s agenda, the contending school of accommodationism was replaced by that of black separatism; Marcus Garvey, of the Back-to-Africa movement, and, later, Elijah Muhammad, of the Nation of Islam, squared off against civil rights organizations like the NAACP, CORE, the SCLC, and the National Urban League. Farrakhan’s rhetoric sounds remote enough from Booker T. Washington’s in tone, but they’re cousins with respect to content.
The thornier issue, no doubt, is the matter of who counts as a black leader—and this, of course, depends on who’s doing the counting. For decades now, Ebony magazine—still the only magazine to which many black families subscribe—has presented a list of “The 100 Most Influential Black Americans.” As recently as 1970, Ebony’s list was a remarkably inclusive one. Just as you’d expect, the list that year included elected politicians, such as Senator Edward Brooke, Congress-woman Shirley Chisholm, and Newark mayor Ken Gibson, as well as various presidential appointees and judges. But the list also included radical luminaries, such as Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale, Angela Davis, and Elijah Muhammad. It included poets, such as Imamu Amiri Baraka and Gwendolyn Brooks; athletes, such as John Mackey and Muhammad Ali; entertainers, such as James Brown, Bill Cosby, Duke Ellington, and Dick Gregory; scholars and writers, such as John Hope Franklin and Lerone Bennett; and businessmen, such as Berry Gordy and John Johnson, the publisher of Ebony himself. Then there were the leaders of black fraternal and sorority groups, with the colorful titles typical of such organizations—the Grand Exalted Ruler of the Elks, the Sovereign Grand Commander (South and North) of the Prince Hall Masons, the Grand Polemarch of Kappa Alpha Psi, and the Supreme Basileus of Alpha Kappa Alpha.
But as the Voting Rights Act gradually ushered in an unprecedented number of elected officials, the competition for spaces on the Ebony 100 grew keener, so that in recent years the list has been overrun by elected officials: typically around 40 percent of it is taken up with the names of U.S. representatives. Which is to say that the list has become more like a black version of Washington’s “Blue Book” than the multifarious sampling of black opinion leaders it had once been. To make room for all those beltway types, in 1995 Ebony added a list of thirty-four “Organization Leaders” in which the Grand Basileus and the Grand Polemarch can now easily be found.
It isn’t just in the pages of Ebony that the definition of black leadership has been mired in confusion. In 1994, Ben Chavis organized a controversial series of “leadership conferences,” and it was interesting to note how few of the current Ebony 100 appeared on Chavis’s list of leaders—and how fewer still attended his “leadership summit.” Chavis’s idea of leadership was clearly informed by a certain nostalgia for the sixties and for the intoxicating rhetoric of black nationalism. Hence he eagerly gathered together the aging remnants of a bygone era’s nationalist vanguard, the sort of people the Black Student Alliance at Yale used to invite to campus in my day. He had the poets and activists Haki Madhubuti and Sonia Sanchez, the Black Power theorist and former leader of United Slaves Maulana Karenga, and, representing a somewhat younger generation, CCNY’s professor Leonard Jeffries. Chavis, whose historical point of reference remains the Black Power era, attempted to define the current crisis of the black community along the hoary old assimilationist/separatist divide.
Certainly the rhetoric of defiance, such as Chavis favored, has been shown to conceal a multitude of sins. A several-term black representative told the political scientist Carol Swain: “One of the advantages, and disadvantages, of representing blacks is their shameless loyalty. You can almost get away with raping babies and be forgiven. You don’t have any vigilance about your performance.” No doubt this overstates the case, but it is a lesson that the likes of Adam Clayton Powell knew as well as Al Sharpton or Marion Barry. Such rhetoric is fueled by disenchantment; its only limitation is that it does nothing to remedy the disenchantment.
And yet a politics of solidarity—of unity, of “sacred covenants”—of the sort that both Representative Kweisi Mfume and Ben Chavis conjure in their speeches must inevitably run up against the hard facts of political economy. Hovering over the national conversation on the subject of black leadership is an implicit vision of thirty-five million black Americans as constituting a community of interests. But as we’ve seen, black America isn’t just as fissured as white America; it is more so. And the mounting intraracial disparities mean that the realities of race no longer affect all blacks in the same way. There have been perverse consequences: in part to assuage our sense of survivor’s guilt, we often cloak these differences in a romantic black nationalism—something that has become the veritable socialism of the black bourgeoisie.
But the easy Manichaeanism of the 1960s serves us poorly in the 1990s. In college, we believed that a politics could be buttressed by the idea of “blackness,” an idea that was itself buttressed by an overarching system of social and legal racism; and in those days, that politics could efface a multitude of human differences. But this rhetoric has not kept pace with a changing reality. Although the Voting Rights Act served, in some measure, to ethnicize the notion of black electoral representation, its consequences would undermine the very premises of racial representation: the notion of a transparency of interests between the representative and the represented. Even today, however, the enormous class disparities within the “black community” are discussed only gingerly and awkwardly, and that’s because they undermine the very concept of such a “community” in the first place.
Black cultural nationalism—make no mistake about it—is the figure in the carpet within African-American society. Appeals to nationalism—and, at the extreme fringes, to anti-Semitism, homophobia, and sexism—are drawn upon to mask class differences within the black community. As economic differences increase, the need to maintain the appearance of cultural and ideological conformity also increases. But it is these fake masks of conformity that disguise how very vast black class differentials really are. And no amount of kinte cloth or Kwanzaa celebrations will change this.
The real crisis in black leadership, then, is that the very idea of black leadership is in crisis. On this score, we can’t turn for help to our vested elites—not even to our Grand Polemarches and Supreme Basileuses. For black America needs a politics whose first mission isn’t the reinforcement of the idea of black America; and a discourse of race that isn’t centrally concerned with preserving the idea of race and racial unanimity. We need something we don’t yet have: a way of speaking about black poverty that doesn’t falsify the reality of black advancement; a way of speaking about black advancement that doesn’t distort the enduring realities of black poverty. I’d venture that a lot depends on whether we get it.
WHICH IS not to say you should hold your breath. Literary neo-Marxists like to talk about the way that contradictions within the “social real” are apt to be resolved in the “realm of the aesthetic.” It’s a flossier version of the bad times/good art dialectic: the consolation-prize theory of artistic production. What’s clear is that the influence of black America is less to be found in the electoral arena than in the cultural one. For all that African Americans have been shunted to the margins of national politics, they’ve resurfaced in the cultural mainstream.
There is a sort of logic to this. Disaffection, alienation, opposition: this is the very air that most artists and intellectuals breathe. Yet even to speak of the cultural mainstreaming of black America can be misleading. The point isn’t that there are black artists and intellectuals who matter; it’s that so many of the artists and intellectuals who matter are black. It’s not that the cultural cutting edge has been influenced by black creativity; it’s that black creativity, it so often seems today, is the cultural cutting edge. With choreographers such as Judith Jamison and Bill T. Jones, modern dance has pirouetted to new levels of expressivity. Musicians and composers such as Wynton Marsalis, Anthony Braxton, and Anthony Davis have recharged contemporary “concert” music with a fresh sense of mission—even as hip-hop has gone from being an underground sound to something like the American Bandstand of the 1990s. Novelists such as Nobel laureate Toni Morrison and John Edgar Wideman, and poets such as Rita Dove and Yusef Komunyakaa, both Pulitzer Prize winners, have explored the contours of literary language, while a whole new audience for black fiction has been galvanized by the more accessible company of Terry McMillan and Walter Mosley. Meanwhile, in the fine arts, figures like Martin Puryear, Lorna Simpson, and Carrie Mae Weems have produced an art that isn’t simply “political,” but that doesn’t pretend to be innocent of politics, either. In a more populist vein, the bold vision of filmmakers like Spike Lee, Allen and Albert Hughes, Julie Dash, and John Singleton has arrested the attention of moviegoers—real ones, not just high-minded cineasts. George C. Wolfe’s appointment as director of the New York Public Theater seems only to reinforce the impression that many of the most vibrant contributors to the American stage (among them August Wilson and Anna Deavere Smith) are black.
And the current flowering of black art and culture—with its inherent schisms and tensions—is unfolding against a conflicting socioeconomic backdrop. For despite remarkable gains, a sense of precariousness haunts this new black middle class, and the art that it creates and consumes. Its own economic advancement remains newfound and insecure.13 Hence its peculiar love-hate attitude to the defiant cultural vistas of the inner city—an anxious amalgam of intimacy and enmity. Beneath it all is the black bourgeoisie’s deep-seated fear that they’re only a couple of paychecks away from the fate of the underclass. The nature and size of this new black middle class is significant here because of what it says about patronage and the economics of black art: whereas the Harlem Renaissance writers were almost totally dependent upon the whims of white patrons who marketed their works to a predominantly white readership, the sales of some of the most phenomenally successful black authors (such as Terry McMillan, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker) are being sustained to an unprecedented degree by black readers. The rise of a black middle class, a black reading public, has fueled the new prominence of the black novel. And black novelists—especially the black women novelists—seem to owe a large part of their appeal to their capacity to express the desires and anxieties of this new middle class freely and from the inside. Then there are the institutional factors. For the first time, we have a significant presence of black agents, black editors, black reviewers. Blacks now run and own record labels. They produce films, back concerts. The old black talent/white management pattern has finally started to break down. With the active recruitment of minorities into the mainstream, blacks have an institutional authority without precedent in American cultural history.
Critics date the current efflorescence of black creativity variously, but many trace its genesis to the resurgence of black women’s literature and criticism in the early eighties, especially the works of Ntozake Shange, Michele Wallace, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison. These women, and their successors, were able both to reach the traditional large readership, which is by convention middle-class, white, and female, and a new black female audience that had been largely untapped, and unaddressed. The growth of this community of readers has resulted in an unprecedented number of black women’s novels since 1980, as well as an unprecedentedly large black market for books about every aspect of the African-American experience.
Assigning a date to this upsurge in creativity is an exercise in arbitrariness, but the year 1987 will do as well as any. That was when August Wilson’s Fences premiered on Broadway and Toni Morrison published Beloved. Both would receive Pulitzer Prizes. In that same year, PBS aired Henry Hampton’s Eyes on the Prize, the six-part civil rights era documentary, Cornell scholar Martin Bernal published Black Athena, a controversial, revisionist history of the African origins of classical Greek civilization, and black pride slogans began to appear on T-shirts across the nation. The rap revolution, too, was reaching the heights of popularity it has since continued to enjoy.
Today’s black arts scene is characterized by an awareness of previous black traditions, which these artists echo, imitate, parody, and revise, self-consciously, in acts of “riffing” or “signifying,” or even “sampling.” This concern with the black cultural past, and the self-conscious grounding of a black postmodernism in a black nationalist tradition, are accompanied by a certain nostalgia for the Black Power cultural politics of the sixties and the blaxploitation films of the early seventies. Unlike in that period, however, the current cultural movement has come to define itself by its openness—a cultural glasnost. Hence a zest for parodies and an impatience with sacred cows (as with George C. Wolfe’s play The Colored Museum, or Rusty Cundieff’s movie Fear of a Black Hat, a satire of hip-hop posturing). “What defines this renaissance, unlike the others,” the novelist Jamaica Kincaid says, “is that people like us are just getting started. It is as if someone has removed the hands from over our mouths, and you hear this long, piercing scream.” You hear a lot of other things, too—and some sound a lot like laughter. As the old Marxist saw has it, history repeats itself: the first time is tragedy, the second is farce.
This is an art that thrives on uncertainty, like much of the work of our postmodernist times, but it’s also characterized by its confidence in the legitimacy of black experiences as artistic material. Forty-odd years ago, Richard Wright predicted that if “the Negro merges into the main stream of American life, there might result actually a disappearance of Negro literature—as such.” As a Negro, he continued, he was “a rootless man.” Few black writers today would agree with Wright on either point. Today, black artists seem to have become more conscious of the particularities of their cultural traditions rather than less so. Discarding the anxieties of a bygone era, these artists presume the universality of the black experience.
They also know that the facts of race don’t exhaust anybody’s human complexity. Indeed, much of the fiction being created by black women is coming-of-age tales in which racial politics takes second place to the unfolding of a sensitive, sexualized consciousness. Today, a politicized naturalism is more likely to be found in black film (such as John Singleton’s Boyz ’n the Hood) and, of course, in rap music like Public Enemy’s didactic “It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back.” But some of the most powerful examples of this art, such as Toni Morrison’s masterpiece, Beloved, bring both tendencies together, creating a new modality—a sort of lyrical super-naturalism. And that seems to be the enviable privilege of the new black artists—today’s Post-Mod Squad. In its openness, its variety, its playfulness with forms, its refusal to follow a preordained ideological line, its sustained engagements with the black artistic past, today’s artistic up-welling is nourished by the black cultural milieu but isn’t confined by it. “This is a party for those of us who are comfortable with ambiguity and ambivalence,” Anna Deavere Smith has remarked. “True art tends to live there.”
CERTAINLY it might have been nice to hear a few words about ambiguity and ambivalence when I first learned to be black, back when the blaxploitation flicks were first-run, and the draft boards were quite pleased to take college dropouts. The first time as tragedy; the second time as farce: for me, the first time wasn’t tragedy, quite, but it was as much melodrama as comedy. Still, maybe there are limits even to the ludic. Sometimes the relentless ironicism of contemporary culture feels like a vaccination against earnestness, which is the sort of precaution you take when you’ve been—in a phrase of Baldwin’s—betrayed by too much hoping.
Sometime in my sophomore year, I found myself fighting between becoming the individual I so longingly came to Yale to become and wanting within the deepest part of me to feel black and a vital part of the collective. But wasn’t this a game we had played before, when we had baited the white boy? Always before we had won. The game came down to the matter of name. Ralph Ellison describes its workings as follows:
Tar Baby, that enigmatic figure from Negro folklore, stands for the world. He leans, black and gleaming, against the wall of life utterly noncommittal under our scrutiny, our questioning, starkly unmoving before our naive attempts at intimidation. Then we touch him playfully and before we can say Sonny Liston! we find ourselves stuck. Our playful investigations become a labor, a fearful struggle, an agony. Slowly we perceive that our task is to learn the proper way of freeing ourselves to develop, in other words, technique.
Sensing this, we give him our sharpest attention, we question him carefully, we struggle with more subtlety; while he, in his silent way, holds on, demanding that we perceive the necessity of calling him by his true name as the price of our freedom.
The idea is that we have always had to trick the white man into learning not to take appearances at face value, especially social roles or relationships so tradition-bound as to seem “human” or “natural” or “universal.”
I didn’t know my college dean very well. It was his first year at Calhoun, as it was mine. I remember with some unease those first few months in the college when, walking as nonchalantly through the courtyard as I was able, I happened too frequently for accident (and frequently enough so that for years later I avoided that route) to cross paths with him. “How’s it going,” he’d invariably ask, his brow wrinkling with concern. “Do you find our courses difficult? Are you studying enough?” Until the first time he asked, perhaps well into the third week of school, I had pretty much forgotten that I was supposed to feel anxious; I had forgotten the sociological consequences of being black from Appalachia and “at Yale.” But I’d try to smile and retort coolly the most relaxed “Yeah” I could manage. And yeah, I was studying every night, all night long. He’d just smile, not having broken stride. Even when I visit today, those walkways reverberate with those “conversations” still.
Amid all the racial and political ferment, I’d decided I wanted to spend a year in Africa (yes, it was an attempt to flee, and maybe even to resolve some of the racial perplexities I’d been experiencing). I went to the dean’s office and stated my case as cogently as I could. He smiled benignly, because he understood, then told me how impossible the whole thing was. I think I stopped listening once I heard his tone; for “yes” and “no” are secondary to tone, at least when you find yourself sitting across the desk from some white man whose wallet you’re trying to persuade to him share. He wanted to know my name; and I, a Tar Baby, was an arrogant enough part of Yale by now to treasure secretly the knowledge that my college dean didn’t know my name. “Hustler” was his first guess; to him, I’d venture, I’m still “hustler” to this day.
For me, it was a matter of getting my bearings. I learned to be black in a world where DeCh and Robby ruled—one infused with the banked outrage and the revolutionary temper of the times. Most of all, I counted myself lucky that I saw DeCh address the May Day rally in 1970, speaking out against the wrongs of Viet Nam and Cambodia, the abuses of the FBI and other nefarious government agencies. He was in his fullest glory that day, as he galvanized a crowd of a hundred thousand with his words and with his very presence. He sizzled; he smote. He was mesmerizing, artfully plaiting mordant humor with passion and uplift, defiance and courage and common sense: he was Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., in one. This was DeCh at full strength—a man, as I say, who could lead us into the promised land.
And then? People said he peaked at the May Day rally. Yale was where he’d excelled and Yale was where he would stay, for the longest time. It worried and depressed me that he wouldn’t leave New Haven. Years went by, the rest of us dispersed, and he was still in New Haven, where he got a job working in the financial aid office. I think he had dreams—mad, emancipatory dreams—and he needed to wait for those dreams to die. He did leave, finally. One day, he decided to attend law school at the University of Pennsylvania; and he ended up working at the FCC, though he never seemed quite happy there. Whenever we met, over the years, he’d still be chain-smoking his way through a pack and his eyes would sparkle as he repeated stories from the old days—especially the one about how I volunteered to be secretary of the BSAY. And I would smile, and nod, and remember, and sometimes get misty. I was the one he had deputized as his official stenographer, his Boswell. I had seen him at the height of his magnificence, and not only that, I had taken notes.
And sometimes he asked about Robby. Robby, who founded, funded, and ran, superbly, the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia. Robby, who became actively involved in alumni affairs and—it was one of the proudest moments of his life—was awarded the Yale Medal by President A. Bartlett Giamatti. That was one answer you could give to the question about Robby. But there was another answer, too. Robby, the most brilliant scholar of our set, completed his dissertation with difficulty; and then gave up the ghost. His book? The book, he’d explain, was really two books, he was coming to realize. At least two. He never published the book, though, or anything much at all. Something had more or less stilled his pen for the rest of his professional career. Instead of writing, it seemed, he put on weight.
DeCh died first, less than a year ago. A couple of weeks before, when I learned he was dying of lung cancer, I wrote him a long letter, trying to explain something of what he’d meant to me. Then, a month ago, Robby died: he’d been felled by a stroke, then a heart attack. The weight, the blood pressure, people said—the way middle-aged friends tick off the risk factors, anxious about their own mortality.
Some of the black students I knew at Yale dropped out, or pursued militancy to a point of no return, or went mad: these were still the early days of affirmative action, and this business of recruitment would be considerably refined in the years to come. Jerry was the first to die, stricken, as he was, in the middle of his junior year. Two rumors competed for his epitaph: “overdose,” skeptics said; “hemorrhage,” replied his friends. There was Tommy, gunned down by Gil Rochon—the tall Am. Stud, grad student from New Orleans who had freckles, a conical Afro, and a wife whom Tommy was sleeping with. There was Eddie Jackson, my roommate, who “broke down” not long after, in hot pursuit of his blackness; later he killed himself by plunging a butcher’s knife into his heart.
It is also true that some of the black students I knew at Yale have gone on to serve in Congress, as big-city mayors, as presidents and vice presidents of major conglomerates. This is what members of the crossover generation are supposed to do: cross over. This is what the civil activists and social engineers who recruited us had in mind. It’s how the trope of the “Talented Tenth” was to be retrieved and refashioned for modern times. And yet there’s a sense in which DeChabert and Robinson represented more to me than any of the “success stories”; and their failures of fulfillment (the oldest college story of them all) grieved and rankled me as my own. I didn’t go to their funerals: the truth is, I wasn’t ready for them to be dead, either of them. We were supposed to storm the citadel together, to serve on the Yale Club board of directors together, to summer at Martha’s Vineyard together, to grow old together. They would be on hand to explain to me the difference between selling out and buying in. Our kids were supposed to marry each other; to graduate from schools where we would give the commencement addresses. Ours was to be the generation with cultural accountability, and cultural security: the generation that would tell white folks that we would not be deterred—that, whether they knew it or not, we too were of the elite.
But then they had shown me that playing the name game with white folks was relatively easy. It was when we turned the game upon ourselves that the rules became much more subtle. It is a sticky business when two Tar Babies demand to know each other’s names. For the names changed from moment to moment; as we discarded one—“the Talented Tenth,” say—another would take its place.
The joker, the hole card, was of course that none of us knew our names; we forgot what we called each other when no one else was around. There is something basic to a change of name that is contingent upon illusion, and the very human urge to forget: “negroes” became “Negroes,” who in turn became “New Negroes,” who much, much later decided to become “Black.” Yet through all this, there lurks that marked continuity of social tradition and that sense of the past that informs the imagination. We long to forget, so we change our names: the Talented Tenth?—or a platoon of Uncle Toms? But the discomfort stays the same, and so does the pleasure. As Ralph Ellison said, you gain your invisibility not so much because others refuse to see you but because you refuse to run the gamut of your own humanity. Ultimately, you have no choice; at least I didn’t.
As a new recruit, I framed the issue in precisely this manner, allegorical as all get-out. And it was an issue that preoccupied me for some time, one that caused the end of numerous friendships and rendered others impossible even before they had begun. Seeking the refuge of the group after one has been expelled is so much more urgent than that same attempt would have been had we never been members at all. And that black movement of mind, that urge to forget and to start again, afresh, created schisms, cemented distinctions among men, far more insidiously than did the increased social mobility of the sixties when white America opened its doors, if ever so slightly. No longer could we be said to be the organic community we seemed to be when King had his day at the Lincoln Memorial. Scars heal slowly and only partially: Flesh be not proud. You might think of it as a cultural counterpart to the physiological response known as “hyper-pigmentation”: the medical fact that black skin responds to injury by getting even blacker. Of course, many of our injuries were self-inflicted.
And even as I was defending myself against those black fellows who had forgotten my name, I found myself struggling to keep white people (even at Yale) from changing my name, taking my name from me. “Black, scholarship boy, remarkable verbal potential for one in his demographic group; mediocre performance. C student.” This sort of naming ritual, a self-fulfilling appellative prophecy, they fit interchangeably onto so many of those bright black kids I loved at Yale. So many of us who came to New Haven eager to fulfill that part of ourselves long repressed in ghetto schools and communities far too numerous to name saw our deepest dreams dashed and our deepest fears realized in that sociological naming ritual. If we weren’t crushed in a dialectic over what was “black” and what was “blacker,” then we were crushed by those bored administrators and jaded teachers who could not see the longing and the impatience to learn buried deep behind the particular mask that each of us chose to wear. Perhaps slipshod, perhaps not so holy, yet these were our masks, and the care and the concern and the struggle and joy that went into fashioning and wearing them was all that some of us ever had at Yale and all that some of us have, even now, left of college.
But I was fortunate; I loved the place. I loved the library and the seminars, I loved talking with the professors; I loved “peeping the hole card” in people’s assumptions and turning their logic back upon themselves. I had more chip than shoulder, and through it all I demanded of every person with whom I chanced to interact that they earn the right to learn my name. More often than not, white folks stopped at “hustler.” And I, like Tar Baby, would tell myself I had won. For years, I would listen for news and watch the mail for word of those I knew there, for news of those I loved and those I despised, of those I trusted and those I feared. Only sometimes do I feel guilty that I was among the lucky ones, and only sometimes do I ask myself why.