Disintegration (2 page)

How did this breakup happen? It’s overly simplistic to draw a straight line from “We Shall Overcome” to “Get Rich or Die Tryin’,” but that’s the general trajectory.

Forty years ago, after major cities from coast to coast had gone up in flames, black equaled poor. Roughly six in ten black Americans were barely a step ahead of the bill collector, with fully 40 percent of the total living in the abject penury that the Census Bureau officially labels “poverty” and another 20 percent earning a bit more but still basically poor. Over the next three decades—as civil rights laws banned discrimination in education, housing, and employment, and as affirmative action offered life-changing opportunities to those
prepared to take advantage—millions of black households clawed their way into the Mainstream and the black poverty rate fell steadily, year after year. By the mid-’90s, it was down to 25 percent—and then the needle got stuck. Today, roughly one-quarter of black Americans—the Abandoned—remain in poverty.
¹

And the poorest of these poor folks are actually losing ground. In 2000, 14.9 percent of black households reported income of less than $10,000 (in today’s dollars); in 2005, the figure was 17.1 percent.
²
Demographically, the Abandoned constitute the youngest black America; they are also by far the least suburban, living for the most part in core urban neighborhoods and the rural South.

Those who made it into the Mainstream, however, have continued their rise. In 1967, only one black household in ten made $50,000 a year; now three of every ten black families earn at least that much. More strikingly, four decades ago not even
two black households in a hundred
earned the equivalent of more than $100,000 a year. Now almost one black household in ten has crossed that threshold to the upper middle class—joining George and Louise Jefferson in that “dee-luxe apartment in the sky,” perhaps, or living down the street from the Huxtables’ handsomely appointed brownstone. All told, the four black Americas control an estimated $800 billion in purchasing power—roughly the GDP of the thirteenth-richest nation on earth. Most of that money is made and spent by the Mainstream.
³

Here’s another way to look at it: Forty years ago, if you found yourself among a representative all-black crowd, you could assume that nearly half the people around you were poor,
poorly educated, and underemployed. Today, if you found yourself at a representative gathering of black adults, four out of five would be solidly middle class.

And some African Americans have soared far higher. A friend of mine who lives in Chicago once took a flight on the Tribune Company’s corporate jet. Noticing a much larger, newer, fancier private jet parked on the tarmac nearby, he asked his boss whose it was. The answer: “Oprah’s.” The all-powerful Winfrey is one of the African Americans who have soared highest of all, into the realm of the Transcendent. There have long been black millionaires—Madam C. J. Walker, who built an empire on hair-care products in the early twentieth century, is often cited as the first. But never before have African Americans presided as full-fledged Masters of the Universe over some of the biggest firms on Wall Street (Richard Parsons, Kenneth Chenault, Stanley O’Neal). There have been wealthy black athletes since Jack Johnson, but never before have they transformed themselves into such savvy tycoons (Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods). And while African Americans have made billions for the music industry over the years, even pioneers such as Berry Gordy Jr. and Quincy Jones never owned and controlled as big a chunk of the business as today’s hip-hop moguls (Russell Simmons, P. Diddy, Jay-Z).

And the Emergent? They’re the product of two separate phenomena. First, there has been a flood of black immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean. In 1980, the census reported 816,000 foreign-born black people in the United States; by the 2000 census, that figure had more than tripled to 2,815,000.
⁴
You might question my use of the word “flood” for numbers that seem relatively small in absolute terms, but consider these
newcomers’ outsize impact: Half or more of the black students entering elite universities such as Harvard, Princeton, and Duke these days are the sons and daughters of African immigrants.
⁵
This makes sense when you consider that their parents are the best-educated immigrant group in America, with more advanced degrees than the Asians, the Europeans, you name it. (They’re far better educated than native-born Americans, black or white.) But their children’s educational success leads Mainstream and Abandoned black Americans to ask whether affirmative action and other programs designed to foster diversity are reaching the people they were intended to help—the systematically disadvantaged descendants of slaves.

The second Emergent phenomenon is the acceptance of interracial marriage, once a crime and until recently a novelty. A University of Michigan study found that in 1990, nearly one married black man in ten was wed to a white woman—and roughly one married black woman in twenty-five was wed to a white man. These figures, the researchers found, had increased eightfold over the previous four decades.
⁶
Barack Obama, the man who would be president; Adrian Fenty, the mayor of Washington, D.C.; Jordin Sparks, a winner on
American Idol
—all are the product of black-white marriages. And the boomer-echo generation, raised on a diet of diversity, has even fewer hang-ups about race and relationships.

In a sense, though, we’re just headed back to the future. Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. recently produced a public-television series in which he used genealogical research and DNA testing to unearth the heritage of several prominent African Americans. When he sent his own blood off to be tested, Gates discovered to his surprise that more than 50 percent
of his genetic material was European. Wider DNA testing has shown that nearly one-third of all African Americans trace their heritage to a white male ancestor—likely a slave owner.

So forget about whether the mixed-race Emergents are “black enough.” How black am I? How black can any of us claim to be?

* * *

This gradual but relentless fragmentation—economic, geographic, psychological, cultural—is by now undeniable. In 2007, a remarkable study by the Pew Research Center came up with a finding that made my jaw drop: An incredible 37 percent of African Americans agreed with the statement that “blacks today can no longer be thought of as a single race because the black community is so diverse.”
⁷

To someone like me who grew up in the Jim Crow era of separate but unequal, this is profoundly unsettling. I left the South at sixteen to go to college and, like many of my peers, went through a process of interrogating my identity. But that phase ran its course long ago, and I knew without the slightest doubt who I was: a black man in America. Now is there some question about what being “a black man in America” even means? Has a true-false exam suddenly become multiple-choice?

The Pew study found that black Americans whose incomes placed them in the vast, struggling middle—earning between $30,000 and $100,000 a year—were the most likely to believe that black people no longer constituted one race. Black Americans at the top of the scale, with incomes of more than $100,000 a year, were most likely to cling to the more traditional view that “blacks can still be thought of as a single race because they
have so much in common.” Perhaps we should begin to think of racial solidarity as a luxury item.

As a thought experiment, wind the clock back precisely forty years and try to imagine how different that evening at the Jordans’ would have been.

In 1968, it was possible to defend the generalization that black equaled poor—and easy to defend the statement that black certainly did not equal rich. With only 2 percent of black households earning the equivalent of $100,000 a year or more, there simply wouldn’t have been many African American families that could afford to host such a lavish social event, complete with liveried waiters and a well-stocked open bar.

Even in 1968, though, Washington was a magnet for the upwardly mobile black middle class and the tiny black upper crust. The city has been home to a significant black elite since before the days of Frederick Douglass. Of the modest number of black Americans in 1968 wealthy enough to entertain in such grand style, some definitely would have lived in Washington.

They wouldn’t have lived where the Jordans did, though. Chez Jordan is in one of the city’s most expensive, most exclusive neighborhoods, a leafy enclave tucked next to Rock Creek Park. Forty years ago, the area would have been literally exclusive: By unassailable tradition, if not by binding legal covenant (such contracts had already been ruled null and void by the courts), the neighborhood would have been all white. That prohibition wouldn’t have included the suspiciously swarthy foreign diplomat or two who might have occupied one of the official residences in the area; diplomatic immunity brought with it a kind of honorary whiteness. But even a credit-to-their-race Negro couple as educated, successful, and
affluent as the Jordans wouldn’t have lived in a mansion with a swimming pool on Embassy Row.

By 1968, well-to-do African American families had already begun an exodus from their old haunts in the neighborhoods around prestigious, historically black Howard University, perched on the escarpment that defined the original boundary of the city. The cultural and commercial soul of those areas, called Shaw and LeDroit Park, had been immolated in the riots that followed the assassination of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. in April of that year. The small, educated, moneyed black demographic that W. E. B. DuBois called the “Talented Tenth” was now more likely to be found along the graceful, tree-lined streets branching out from upper Sixteenth Street Northwest, the meridian that runs down the middle of the city like an arrow aimed at the portico of the White House. This latter-day Strivers’ Row was and still is called the Gold Coast, although there’s no nearby body of water except tiny Rock Creek. Houses there are spacious and impressive, though somewhat less so than the stately piles you see on Embassy Row.

So forty years ago there could have been a fancy dinner party in Washington hosted by an African American family in a big, elegant house, but the house would have been elsewhere in the city. Beyond this point, our thought experiment begins to break down.

For one thing, while most of the guests at Vernon and Ann Jordan’s house that night were black, there were whites as well—Michael Lynton, the chairman of Sony Pictures, for example, and James A. Johnson, the longtime Democratic Party grandee who ran Fannie Mae before Raines did. While no one would claim that Washington social life is a model of
integration today, four decades ago it was much more segregated. The best way to explain the difference is that in 1968 it would have been noteworthy if a society dinner was racially integrated, even in a token sense. In 2008, it would have been noteworthy if such an affair was not.

As for the political moment, always a relevant variable in assessing a Washington dinner party, there can be no comparison. It goes without saying that in 1968, the first African American had not just been elected president; the new occupant of the White House was one Richard Milhous Nixon.

There could have been no Valerie Jarrett to make her debut as a close friend and adviser to the new president. In fact, forty years ago there could have been no Valerie Jarrett at all—a princess of black Chicago (her grandfather was the first chief of the Chicago Housing Authority, her father a prominent physician, her ex-husband the son of a pioneering black journalist), whose history included stints as a behind-the-scenes operator in city government, a successful real estate developer, and the chair of the Chicago Stock Exchange. Black women of such pedigree were rare; black women with such résumés did not exist.

Nor would most of the other guests have existed. No African American had risen nearly as high in corporate America as Parsons or Raines. No African American ran a television network the way Lee did (or lived, as Lee did, just around the bend from the Jordans). No African American was waiting impatiently for his nomination as attorney general to be announced. As a general rule, only one black journalist at a time was taken seriously as a political pundit—exclusively on issues having to do with race. And black Washingtonians only got bold-faced
treatment in the gossip columns of the
Afro-American
and other black newspapers, never in the mass-circulation
Washington Post
or
Evening Star
.

That lovely evening at the Jordans’ never could have taken place without the disintegration of the black America we once knew. Some other aspects of disintegration, however, are much less salutary.

Two months later, when Obama was inaugurated, the band from Paul Laurence Dunbar High School marched in his parade. It was an occasion of great local pride, and not just because the school is located only a couple of miles from the Capitol: Dunbar, founded in 1870 as the Preparatory High School for Colored Youth, was the first public high school for African Americans in the nation.

It is hard to overstate what Dunbar High School meant to black America in the first half of the twentieth century. It was an elite institution, the place where the best and brightest young African Americans were taught that it wasn’t enough to be as focused, determined, and accomplished as their white counterparts—they had to be better. Graduates included Dr. Charles R. Drew, the inventor of the modern blood bank; Charles Hamilton Houston, the legal scholar best known for his association with one of the young lawyers he mentored, Thurgood Marshall; the eminent poet Sterling Brown; and scores of other black pioneers. The faculty included the likes of Carter G. Woodson, the second African American to receive a PhD from Harvard (after W. E. B. DuBois) and the father of black history as a recognized academic discipline; and a music teacher named Henry Lee Grant, who found time to give after-hours lessons in the art and science of harmony to a promising young pianist named Edward Kennedy “Duke”
Ellington. Ambitious black parents would pick up and move to Washington so their children could attend Dunbar High.