Disintegration (23 page)

But there is a difference for Emergents. No matter how completely and unambiguously I feel a part of the American system, I know that this system despised my parents, and their parents, and the rest of my ancestors stretching back nearly four hundred years. This knowledge isn’t oppressive or even particularly intrusive; I don’t really think about it, and it certainly doesn’t affect the way I go about my day. But it’s there, and I don’t think I could help feeling differently if I were from an immigrant family whose history was written thousands of miles away.

And biracial Americans? Obama’s insight was valuable:
How is it possible to hold a class of people in contempt—even historical contempt—if your grandmother and grandfather are among them? A generalization such as “white people want to keep black people down” has no meaning if a white mother or father, white aunts and uncles, white grandparents and perhaps white great-grandparents bounced you on their knees.

If current trends hold, most biracial black-and-white Americans will continue to self-identify as African American. But a sense of being somehow divorced, or at least estranged, from the larger society cannot possibly come easily to them. This is a good thing—less racial tension is a goal that we all should be able to agree on. And as the numbers of the Emergent grow, the posture of black America toward the rest of America will evolve—while the once-bright line between black America and the rest of America becomes fuzzy and hard to pin down.

“Funny, he doesn’t look Jewish” may be joined by a new observation: “Funny, he doesn’t seem black.”

E
very year, the National Urban League issues
The State of Black America Report
. Big enough to serve as a doorstop, the document (referred to as SOBA) is a voluminous, meticulously researched assessment of where African Americans stand compared to the larger society. There are narrative sections that seek to establish context. “The response to the devastation caused by near-record high unemployment for African Americans that threatens to push an already struggling community deeper into poverty and despair must be urgent,” said the Executive Summary of SOBA 2010. “Jobs with living wages and good benefits must be the primary goal for 2010 and ahead.” But the main focus was, as always, a number: 71.8.
¹

Urban League researchers compile and analyze data from a variety of sources to calculate the Equality Index—a number meant to quantify precisely where black America stands in comparison to white America. Averaging scores in subcategories that include economics, health, education, social justice, and civic engagement, the Urban League reported that African Americans had attained 71.8 percent of parity with white
Americans. This was the first time in four years that the number had shown improvement; for 2009, it had been 71.2.

SOBA is an impressive piece of work, assembled with great care. But what does it really mean? In 2010 did it mean that I, and every other black citizen, should have felt that the turning of the year brought us precisely .6 percent closer to attaining the American dream?

Imagine a household in which half the men are professional basketball players and half are professional jockeys. A State of the Family report would calculate that the men, on average, are five feet eleven inches tall. But that would hardly tell the whole story. In fact, it would tell the wrong story.

There are approximately forty million African Americans
²
—more people than live, for example, in Canada, Argentina, Algeria, or Poland. If we were discussing any of those countries, we wouldn’t hesitate to evaluate the circumstances of different economic, social, and cultural sectors. We would consider the rich and the poor, the working class and the middle class, the native-born and the immigrant. Not doing so would be superficial, like confining ourselves to observing that one country was colored blue on the map and another was colored pink.

Averages and medians can lie. Crude statistics give the impression that the past four decades have seen uneven social progress and only modest economic gains by African Americans. A huge increase in college attendance and graduation rates is partly offset by incongruously high dropout and incarceration rates. The African American poverty rate has fallen, but black family incomes barely seem to have budged at all in comparison to those of whites. The median black household earns about 62 percent of what the median white household earns, roughly the same ratio that was measured four decades
ago. That’s what the numbers seem to say—yet it could hardly be more obvious that African Americans have seen tremendous advancement and unprecedented change. The affluent neighborhoods of Prince George’s County are not a figment of the collective imagination. The election of Barack Obama was not just a dream.

Forty years of disintegration have, in fact, produced a miracle. A thriving black middle class has been created, a group that has not yet reached full parity with white America but has come remarkably close. If you look only at two-parent households, for example, African American families now earn about 85 percent of what white families earn.
³
It is wrong to minimize this lingering disparity and right to insist that we find ways to eliminate it, but it’s nonsensical to ignore the tremendous gains that Mainstream black America has made.

The purchasing power of African Americans was on track to surpass $1 trillion in 2012 before the recession took hold; that milestone may be delayed, but surely not for long. A study conducted for the Magazine Publishers of America found that African Americans are particularly avid consumers. Looking at the habits of young people—who are most coveted by advertisers—the study found that black teens spend more on average than white teens for a number of products, including clothes, video-game hardware, computer software, and casual shoes. Black teens are especially loyal to their favorite brands, and they have greater-than-average influence over household purchases of items from cereal to cell phones.
⁴

Because of desegregation and disintegration, the black middle class is not only bigger and wealthier but also liberated from the separate but unequal nation called black America that existed before the triumph of civil rights. The black
Mainstream is now woven into the fabric of America, not just economically but culturally as well. The Mainstream has a distinct identity—a clear sense of itself as African American—and clings determinedly to its historic institutions, like the historically black churches, universities, fraternities, and sororities that were so vital during the long, dark night of Jim Crow. The Mainstream also has a tendency to cluster together in black-majority enclaves, no longer out of necessity but out of choice. But to the extent that any of this might be portrayed as an unusual clannishness or tendency toward self-segregation, such an assessment would be objectively wrong: It turns out that whites are considerably more likely to live in racially segregated neighborhoods than blacks.

Socially, economically, and culturally, the black Mainstream is part of the American mainstream. Middle-class African Americans buy too much on credit and save too little for the future, they burden their children with high and often unrealistic expectations, they drive automobiles that are excessively large and wasteful, they become emotionally attached to professional sports teams made up of wealthy, spoiled, indifferent athletes—in short, they behave just like other Americans. Even though there is still ground to be made up, it is fair to say that for all intents and purposes, Mainstream African Americans have arrived.

The Abandoned, however, have not. And the question is whether they ever will.

* * *

As the Mainstream have risen, the Abandoned have fallen. To be black, poor, and uneducated in America is, arguably, a
more desperate and intractable predicament today than it was forty or fifty years ago.

I say “arguably” because in terms of material possessions and physical living conditions there has been obvious improvement. Housing is less squalid and overcrowded than it once was for poor black people. The wholesale transfer of manufacturing to China robbed unskilled American workers of jobs, but that phenomenon, plus the rise of discount retailers like Wal-Mart, drove prices so low that former luxuries came within reach of practically everyone—televisions, household appliances, mobile phones, flashy “gold” jewelry made out of nickel or zinc. The poor certainly don’t
look
as poor as they once did.

But in most other ways, the situation and prospects of the Abandoned black poor have worsened. There is no need to list, once again, all the many interlocking problems and crises that afflict impoverished African American urban and rural communities. It suffices to ask one question: How is a teenager living in Abandoned dysfunction today supposed to escape? By following the sage advice of parents and other mentors? The teenager is likely being raised by a single mother, who herself was raised by a single mother. By attending first-class public schools, with constructive academic support at home? We know all about the failings of big-city public education. By landing a blue-collar industrial job with security, benefits, and a middle-class wage? Those jobs can be found in China or Brazil, not in Cincinnati or Boston. The ladder that generations have used to climb out of poverty is missing its rungs.

Somehow opportunity has to be created where it does not now exist. But first, there is another factor to take into account:
personal responsibility. Opening doors only helps those who are ready to walk through.

Not even the most foggy-headed or starry-eyed could deny that wrong choices play a huge role in keeping the Abandoned mired in their plight—and that no policies or programs can possibly succeed unless individuals make better choices. This was the basic message of
Come On, People
, the book by Bill Cosby and Alvin Poussaint that stridently lectured poor African Americans on the need to change their ways. The authors didn’t deserve all the criticism they got—for the most part they were just stating, or screaming, the obvious. They pointed out that there is an alarming crisis among black men in this country, and urged young men to do better—to stay in school, cut out the violence, stop fathering children out of wedlock, and generally behave like “real men” instead of caricatures. They advised black women to “hang in there” and provide support that might help change black men’s erring ways. They spoke of the need for community and denounced the prohibition, applied with deadly force in some Abandoned neighborhoods, against cooperating with police to help get offenders off the streets. They reminded readers of African Americans’ rich history of struggle and triumph, presenting this legacy as an inspiration. They wrote about parenthood and effective child-raising—the responsibilities, the frustrations, the joys. They wrote about the vital importance of education as a means of uplift and escape. Cosby and Poussaint were accused of blaming the victim, but nothing they said was gratuitous or untrue.

In the end, though,
Come On, People
didn’t have the galvanizing effect that its authors must have hoped for. It wasn’t that they were trying to sell the wrong message but that they failed
to get through to their intended audience. The book became fodder for passionate talk-show debates. But to the extent that it reached African Americans, the book connected with Mainstream readers. They could either agree with the prescriptions that Cosby and Poussaint outlined, or they could complain that these Transcendent authors were letting the larger society, including inattentive elected officials, off the hook. Meanwhile, in the dysfunctional Abandoned communities that the authors were trying to reach,
Come On, People
probably made less of an impression than a particularly entertaining episode of
Judge Judy
.

Increasingly, between the Abandoned and the rest of black America, there is a failure to communicate, much less comprehend.

One place where everyone comes together is black radio, where hosts such as Tom Joyner, Michael Baisden, Steve Harvey, Mo’Nique, and Yolanda Adams aggregate audiences that are economically and socially diverse. In 2006, when a group of African American teenagers in Louisiana—the so-called “Jena Six”—were made to face what seemed to be unfairly tough criminal charges after a school fight against white students, Baisden and other African American hosts were instrumental in organizing large protests that drew national attention to the case. But the case looked like a simple, old-fashioned instance of racial discrimination and unequal justice—the kind of thing all four black Americas see in more or less the same light. Day in and day out, black radio hosts do an admirable job of examining the plight of the Abandoned from every conceivable angle. The truth is, though, that they have little impact on either policy or behavior. The gap is just too wide for their reach.

On Easter Sunday 2010, President Obama and his family went to church at Allen Chapel AME Church in Washington, a lively congregation in one of the Abandoned neighborhoods east of the Anacostia River. The pastor, Reverend Michael Bell, called the presidential visit “a monumental moment for us as a community.” Worshippers had begun lining up before dawn to make it through all the levels of security screening. The Obamas sang, clapped, and rejoiced on the holiest day of the Christian calendar, and then their twenty-two-car motorcade sped back across the Anacostia to the picture-postcard part of town, where the cherry blossoms were gloriously in bloom.

Just a few days earlier, driving past a street corner not many blocks from Allen Chapel, gunmen in a minivan had sprayed bullets into a crowd of people gathered outside a decrepit little apartment building. When all was over, four young black men and women had been killed and five others injured in what was described as the worst mass shooting in Washington in years. The city was stunned, both by the scale and the senselessness of the carnage. Then came outrage and anger at the needless loss of human life and potential; one of those fatally shot was a sixteen-year-old girl, an aspiring chef who by all accounts was full of talent and ambition, but who picked the wrong evening to meet some of her friends at a popular gathering spot. As the story behind the shooting began to emerge, the city’s anger seemed to give way to hopelessness and resignation. The pathology involved was so deep and multilayered that it was hard to know where to begin.