Chapter Eleven

FRANK AND FAIR

IT IS, THEN, THE STRIFE OF ALL HONORABLE MEN OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY TO SEE THAT IN THE FUTURE COM- PETITION OF RACES THE SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST SHALL MEAN THE TRIUMPH OF THE GOOD, THE BEAUTIFUL, AND THE TRUE… . TO BRING THIS HOPE TO FRUITION, WE ARE COMPELLED DAILY TO TURN MORE AND MORE TO A CONSCIENTIOUS STUDY OF THE PHENOMENA OF RACE-CONTACT,—TO A STUDY FRANK AND FAIR, AND NOT FALSIFIED AND COLORED BY OUR WISHES OR OUR FEARS.

—“Of the Sons of Master and Man”

As a first-time history teacher with no professional training, the only way I knew how to teach the eleventh-grade students at a small private school for girls in the suburbs of Boston was by being honest. It was the 1995–1996 academic year, when the Million Man March, the O. J. Simpson trial, and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia unfolded in the news like a culturally explicit, race-charged trilogy of historical nonfiction—ripe material for a twenty-five-year-old with high and righteous ideals, who also happened to be the only black woman on the faculty.

In addition to a junior-year history class, I also taught a freshman English class. With a degree and background in writing and literature, the latter was easier, but the former was more satisfying. The kids were largely from moneyed families, and all but a fistful were white. I was young enough to identify with their popular interests, old enough to command authority, and hip enough to appeal to their sensibilities. We learned history in a backward glance, starting from the day at hand, which meant that I asked them to write papers on the Million Man March, let them watch live coverage of the O.J. trial, and spent a considerable amount of time making sure they understood that the concept of ethnic cleansing was not intrinsic to Bosnia.

Perhaps unlike other teachers of high school American history (certainly all of mine anyway), I didn’t teach the subjects of race and slavery in one condensed section—slaves, not slaves, Jim Crow, Reconstruction, and so forth. I taught slave history and race as a social construct that has evolved and viciously asserted itself at several different and important junctures over the past century, not least of all during the formation of contemporary social politics. The girls grew to appreciate my open, fairly progressive, and unique (to them) style of teaching, and they grew to trust me. It wasn’t until about midyear, when I asked my students to explain the meaning of racism within the context of what we had learned in class thus far, that they began to get nervous.

“What is racism?” I asked the class. Normally a very animated, outspoken, and participatory group, the girls fell silent. I knew I had to be careful, but I also knew that I wasn’t going to get them to think unless I was pointed and unflinching.

“Jane,” I said, calling on one of my less academically and more conversationally inclined students. “Are you a racist?”

Jane looked at me as though I were introducing a new line of soccer cleat, not quite sure she wanted to buy it but, as a star soccer player, knowing she at least needed to consider the product’s viability.

“Um, no,” she said with appropriate hesitation, all the while looking me straight in the eye.

“Then don’t sweat it.”

Jane smiled slowly, then laughed uncomfortably, and, finally, went on to tell me and the rest of the class why she gave the answer she did, why she didn’t think she could ever be a racist, and why understanding racism and the dynamic between black and white Americans was so important to her, and to society at large.

Jane was brave. I was brave. That’s how it’s done.

In his essay “Of the Sons of Master and Man,” Du Bois talks about striving toward a sense of moral fairness for the future—“the strife of all honorable men of the twentieth century to see that in the future competition of races the survival of the fittest shall mean the triumph of the good”—and by “honorable men,” he meant honorable people (as the word men was interchangeable with the word humanity in 1903). Du Bois goes on to suggest that one of the ways by which to achieve such a victory is through means of “a study frank and fair.” No smoke and mirrors, no cushioning the blow, keeping the conversation interesting, but also keeping it real, as we might say today.

In her efforts toward fostering racial and gender equality, Jewell Jackson McCabe, founder and president of the National Coalition of 100 Black Women, is among those who have kept it real. Quoted in the 1989 photography book I Dream a World: Portraits of Black Women Who Changed America , McCabe offered up this simple apothegm as a means of shooting straight amid the ongoing navigation of race relations: “You factor in racism as reality, and you keep moving.” It doesn’t get more frank and fair than that.

Jewell Jackson McCabe

The contradiction that Du Bois or any complex intellectual faces in being prophetic and interpreting oppression is saying one thing and sometimes living another. Not long after The Souls of Black Folk was published, Du Bois wrote a particularly profound essay called “The Damnation of Black Women.” For a man of his century to have had such keen and clear and impassioned feelings about pro-feminism is really quite extraordinary, and I would suggest it was because of the women who surrounded him in his life, both personally and professionally.

Du Bois was adamant about the portrayal of black womanhood, and the treatment of black women. He tried to shun or step away from the contemporary images of beauty, which were cast in the mold of Europeans. Yet, in his actual life, he was very much drawn to and equally compelled to be with women who had what would be considered stereotypically beautiful characteristics. So I think the complexity for Du Bois as a race-conscious, feminist-conscious male leader, the conundrum was that his social politics were not reflected in his personal life. As harsh as that reality maybe—he is still heroic—he analyzed, he critiqued, and, most important, he committed to paper his accounts of early-twentieth-century white misogynistic patriarchy and its practices against the “Negro” woman under siege: the naked hatred, the degradation, the misinterpretation, the cruel treatment, and, as he worded it, “the unendurable paradox of black women.” This is the experience of African American women then and now.

I would speculate that if one is trained in the European form—Elizabethan English, history, and culture—as the scholar and intellectual Du Bois was, one has a disciplined sense of self and a thirst for analytical exploration and critical thinking. If imbued with both Eurocentric sensibility and Afrocentric pride, one faces the conundrum that underscores the Du Bois contradiction. This ambiguous position with regard to a system of values has not changed for most African Americans over the course of the last one hundred years. This is why Du Bois was most profound in saying that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line.” Here we are in the twenty-first century, with no generational plan for the cultural equity and creation of wealth that we are committed to. Even though in Washington, D.C., the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., laid out a blueprint on August 28, 1963, it is as if we are partially deaf and unwilling to comprehend. We only seem to remember or have heard that he had a dream. Shame on us—still no answer or organized means toward achieving social change.

In some respect, we are agents and purveyors of our own degrading messages and images. Anytime our rap artists and producers refer to African American women as their “gangsta bitches,” I would suggest we have astonishing confusion within the race, in addition to what we are projecting to the mainstream community at large. And this is only one example of the mixed signals we allow our children to grapple with under the guise of participating in the system of market-driven free enterprise.

It is still extraordinarily difficult for people to trust and communicate with one another. Psychologists, behavioral scientists, and communication experts have analyzed and broken down verbal communication into three components: language, or the spoken word: 7 percent; attitude: 38 percent; and chemistry: 55 percent. So, while the vocabulary we use is both significant and essential in negotiating race relations—or anything else, for that matter—we communicate primarily through our attitude and our chemistry. However, I would say that by managing attitude, you may affect chemistry. When we experience charisma, we are usually mesmerized by attitude and seduced by the chemistry of “the leader.” Sadly, we have so few charismatic leaders today. However, I am a believer that we come from a strong line with a legacy of greatness and that the pendulum will swing back and we will once again find our voice of moral authority. For now, we have to play the hand we’ve been dealt, and not allow ourselves to get distracted by the inevitability of classism, racism, and sexism.

Du Bois, along with the great thinker, journalist, and activist Ida B. Wells and educator Anna Julia Cooper offers the ultimate example of our intellectual prowess as black people connected to a historic legacy. It’s important to recognize that, because most people, depending upon their generation and geography, have not a clue about our legacy. We must provide historic memory. The reason is simple; it’s not rocket science. With few exceptions, we have a broken and bankrupt educational system at every level. We still live in a country with a patriarchal system.

It wasn’t until the early twentieth century that women got the right to vote, and we still have not been recognized in the Constitution by the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. Technology in the twenty-first century has created the digital divide in America’s continuing schizoid class war. Education, ideology, and wealth are the essential elements for progressive social change. I often say that the least accomplished African American male would be considered a candidate to lead a major African American organization before the most accomplished intellectually expansive, qualified, resourceful African American woman. And yet black women are allowed to lead their own groups to advise presidents, and to lead mainstream institutions.

Take, for example, Ruth Simmons, president of Brown University, the first African American to lead an Ivy League school; Marion Wright Edelman, who founded and heads the Children’s Defense Fund, the premier advocacy group for this country’s more than 60 million children; and Condoleezza Rice, national security adviser to the president of the United States. There is also, of course, Faye Wattleton, who led Planned Parenthood during the turbulent times when the Supreme Court was debating over a woman’s right to choose.

But entrenched sexism and the psychological scar of slavery have resulted in the black community denying itself the benefit of 60 percent of its gray matter by failing to recognize black women as leaders. What’s up with that? And so for a patriarchal system to allow for greater recognition of a figure like Du Bois seems far off the mark, at best.

This is a cynical statement, but it is sort of gratifying to watch Jay Leno when he does his “people on the street” segment, “Jay Walking,” where he stops all types of average Americans, including white elementary schoolteachers who, when shown a photograph of George W. Bush, can’t identify the president of the United States. Yes, there is a dearth of knowledge about current and past events and lack of historical context for the American dream. Significantly, people hear what they want to hear about a racist, classist, sexist society. If you’re saying things that are progressive or perhaps edgy and your vision challenges the status quo, most people are going to reject what you have to say, because they prefer to be in denial, anesthetized by sameness.

One of the realities of a capitalist society—which I endorse, by the way—is that we need to ensure progressive, standardized, intergenerational, multicultural education that allows for gender equity and that chronicles a synergistic history. Currently, this system keeps dumbing down and balkanizing. Take, for example, stereotypic programming for television, with its five hundred–plus channels and all its superstations. The lack of cultural and educational synergy, especially for people who are economically disadvantaged, portends a bleak future. If all the images you have of black people come essentially from Black Entertainment Television (BET), we are in big trouble, and the ancestors are weeping in their graves.

The fact that you can read Du Bois today and it is as contemporary as it was in 1903 should make us rise up and take stock of our role. It shows us that we must be ever vigilant. There are those who have to continue providing breakthrough leadership, those who have to continue monitoring the breakthrough, and then those who have to be relentless and continue reinventing the wheel. How do we change this? Through books like this one and through organizations like mine that commit ideas to print and speak up. As I’ve often said, in my leadership I want to be able to make my agenda, equity—bringing the voice of women of color to the table—a part of the total portfolio of the people.

We African Americans came to these shores in 1619, deemed chattel by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution, defined as three-fifths human, and condemned to statutory punishment by death if educated or taught to read. In 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation gave so-called freedom. Yet we lived under a rule of law that sanctioned separate and “unequal” treatment until Plessy v. Ferguson was overturned in 1954 by the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Topeka Board of Education decision, which legally put an end to the demeaning, destructive, psychological lynching known as “Jim Crow.” It would be yet another decade before the proverbial playing field was leveled by the “children” of the South. We got the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the potent Voting Rights Act in 1965, and during that amazing period we saw a new day dawn in America. We elected a governor, we revisited the Senate, and we elected black mayors to rural cities and thriving urban centers. And let us not forget the historic election of Ron Brown to chair the Democratic National Committee.

Since the sixties, we have seen two generations that have grown up benefiting from the hard-earned victories of the modern day civil rights movement. Today, we do have a few extraordinary entrepreneurs, and captains of industry running Fortune 100 companies. We have made quantum leaps, yet mainstream images of our people are horrific—in some cases more insulting and as damaging as that of “Amos ’n’ Andy,” which the NAACP fought to remove from the airwaves. That’s a fact.

To motivate our children and “generations yet to come,” we need to promote images of success that mirror the total spectrum of our involvement in every discipline in American society. We need to go back to using role models. Every other ethnic segment of American society is judged by its highest level of achievement. Most disturbing, African Americans are characterized by a monolithic block of ignorant stereotypic caricatures. And dangerously, if our youth excel, set high standards of excellence in terms of traditional education, they are often ridiculed by their own as “acting white.”

In many ways, we have reinvented Jim Crow and are enslaving ourselves. The question of how to solve this problem is both simple and complex. America is driven by capitalism, and black people were thwarted from the creation of wealth for over three centuries. It is only in the last generation that we have seen Oprah Winfrey, CEO, Harpo Productions; Stanley O’Neal, CEO, Merrill Lynch; Ken Chenault, CEO, American Express; Dick Parsons, CEO, AOL Time Warner; Ann Fudge, CEO, Young & Rubicam. These figures are among the first African Americans to earn salaries commensurate with their white counterparts.

We are just now coming into a new kind of leadership, and that is the answer to the question. We must be smart and exploit these breakthroughs for what they are, create a “back bench” for continuity, and ensure that we, too, are judged by our highest level of achievement. It is a wonderful and thoughtful question, but the question presupposes that people will wake up early and go to bed late in pursuit of excellence, proceeding with unrelenting determination, knowing the ancestors are watching as we do our part in immortalizing the legacy. Let’s keep it real, frank, and make it fair.