America Behind the Color Line (16 page)

Racism still exists, but it’s more quiet. It’s kept behind closed doors. In Summit I saw instances, sometimes subtle, sometimes not, particularly at the school. Because I’m so fair-skinned, people sometimes think I’m white, and they’ll say things and I’ll say, excuse me, I’m African American too. And all of a sudden their face gets red.

They don’t say the “n” word, but one time someone said to me, oh, that black person, they don’t know what they’re doing. And I said, excuse me? Or they’ll think that the way I’m doing something is inferior to what they’re doing and that I can’t do a job like they do. I happened to be working as someone’s partner in a club at one time, handling the organizing of something, and you have to let them know right away that you can take the lead just as well as they can.

We had a dinner club for residents of Hobart Avenue, and I was the only African American. They welcomed me very nicely, but it’s questionable whether people realized at first that I’m black. In fact, shortly after moving to Summit, Walt and I heard someone say, well, there’s an interracial couple on Hobart Avenue. And we said, really? Where? A taxi service that our friends the Irvins use told Milton about an interracial couple on Hobart Avenue, and he was scratching his head trying to figure out who it was. It’s funny. A lot of them thought we’re an interracial couple. I say, we come in all colors, shapes, and sizes.

When we first moved to Summit, all the neighbors were welcoming except for one. The property needed a lot of work. We had no grass in the backyard, so we cut down trees because we wanted to grow grass and make it friendly for the kids. I went over and said, hi, I’m your new neighbor; I want to introduce myself. And she said, you cut down trees, and you’re going to destroy this property. Not long after, my husband, Walt, and I heard she’d said that some people moved in next door and the property value had gone down.

We renovated for close to four years in our home there. It was nonstop. I like interior decorating; it’s my hobby. So we said the property value was going to go up, because we were doing things to make it nice. Every time we did something, we got the unfriendly neighbor standing there watching us. But every other neighbor, I must say, was very nice.

Our daughter Taylor, who is eight, had a difficult situation at school. A friend of hers told her she couldn’t be in a club she was starting because it was just for white people. This was someone Taylor was having play dates with, so I was a little confused. I called the girl’s mom and told her what happened, and her mom said, I think something’s wrong, because Grace likes to play with Taylor. So I had a discussion with Taylor. I told her that sometimes kids say things and they’re mean about African-American children. I told her how beautiful she is. Her skin color is so pretty.

In pre-K, I found out, they had all these clubs. The girl’s mom called me back and said, Grace doesn’t remember saying that, and she enjoys playing with Taylor. Then she invited Taylor over for a play date. Walt’s response was to tell Taylor to start her own club.

I think we’re losing a generation, because there’s such a disparity between the black underclass and then people like our children in the black middle class. We have to do something to educate the children. Otherwise, I think there are going to be two classes of African Americans permanently. The problem has grown. It’s more visible now than it has been in the past. I hear all the time about grandmothers in their early thirties, and it’s scary. Walt’s involved in an organization that’s turning young kids into entrepreneurs. He works with really young kids, in the seventh, eighth, and ninth grades, who come from neighborhoods where they thought they were going to be dead at nineteen. It’s just amazing the minds of these children nowadays.

Some people assume that black people aren’t educated because of the hiphop and their appearance. I think some of the kids are just learning that these are very educated people who come from good schools, like Princeton, Yale, and Harvard. They’re showing their creativity through their hip-hop. They’re educated people, and that’s key. The kids need to understand that better. Everyone out there is not just singing these songs. They’re not gangsters. You have to be smart also.

Some of the hip-hop is fine for my kids to listen to. Not the ones with all the curses in them, but some of it, yes. My older daughter loves music and wants to know all about the hip-hop artists. She said, one day I’m going to win an Oscar.

If my daughter brought home a white boyfriend, it wouldn’t put me through major changes, but I would have a talk with her and see how serious this was. I would prefer she marry an African American, but I love my children, and whatever makes them happy is okay. And I have a saying: If you go back across the years, probably everybody has a little bit of a story to tell.

Taylor Pearson

When I was in pre-K, something happened with me and my friend. My friend was making a club and I wanted to be in it and she said no, it’s only for white people, and that made me sad.

I cried. And I wanted to go home, and then I wanted to tell my mom and dad, and they said they were going to call her parents and discuss it with her parents. She didn’t ask me to be in the club after that either.

And that’s what I wanted to say.

LENORA FULANI
Résumé Stories

I grew up in Chester, Pennsylvania, a poor suburb of Philadelphia. It was very much a working-class town. Many people who live in Chester came up from down South and settled there because it had a lot of industry at one time. My father worked as a baggage carrier for the Pennsylvania Railroad. My grandfather used to work in the steel mill. My uncles worked for a linoleum company and for the Scott Paper Company. Chester was predominantly black and poor, and still is.

My father died when I was twelve, and my mother kept us going. She was my principal role model, which is interesting because she was working class and pretty much uneducated until she became a nurse. I think people don’t see themselves as possible role models, but my mother was quite something. She’s one of my heroes. Having worked as a domestic until she was around thirty-five years old, she decided to become a licensed practical nurse and did that until she retired. She had to drop out of school in the sixth grade, and she was always very ashamed of that because she couldn’t spell. She would write me letters and apologize for her spelling in the midst of them. But she was a real go-getter.

I knew that my nephews and nieces were poor even when I was little. One of my sister’s kids used to come to our house and eat nonstop. All the things that happen to people in poor families happened in mine. But I wasn’t particularly self-conscious about our circumstances. I didn’t walk around thinking, I am poor. Being the youngest in my family, I got everything they had to offer. My closest sister was eight years older than me. It was almost like being an only child.

I was aware that I had privileges my siblings didn’t have, and I spent part of my childhood trying to be giving to people. That was always very important to me. I used to play the piano for youth choir in our church, from the time I was twelve until I left to attend undergraduate school. My mother had bought me a piano. She rented it for a year, and when she realized I was going to keep playing it, she began to pay for it. She used to do things that were pretty huge for us.

One of the reasons I feel so close to black communities and black kids is I think it was a miracle that I got out of Chester as a young woman not pregnant. I watched what happened to my sisters and cousins and I was scared to death. I was like, I don’t want this to happen to me. But that wasn’t because I was brilliant. Circumstances impacted me; I learned from things I saw. It was almost a miracle. People always say to me, there’s something about you that made you different. I think a lot of what made me different was outside of my control, such as being the last kid of five. Many circumstances go into the choices people make.

By the time I left high school, I knew things were not going well for many of those around me. I made a list of all the people I was going to go back to Chester and save after I got my degree. When I really discovered that I too was poor, I was in therapy. I was in my late twenties and had separated from my husband. I was in graduate school, studying psychology. My husband and I broke up when my kids were five years old and two and a half. Because he tied his fatherhood to our marriage, I think he just disappeared when he recognized that I had really left the marriage.

I had my two kids. My mother used to always tell us that we should have a savings account. So every time I got paid, I would put money in the savings account. But by the end of the month, I would have to take it out to spend it, and I thought there was something wrong with me because I didn’t have a savings account. I finally raised it as an issue in therapy, and my therapist said to me, do you know that you’re poor? And I felt two things almost simultaneously: totally humiliated and extremely relieved. I felt like, I don’t have enough money to have a savings account; this is not a character flaw. It was magnificent; it was liberating. I was working with a white Jewish therapist whom I’d also worked with politically. His name is Dr. Fred Newman. He’s been a mentor, and we’ve worked together now in the All Stars Project for more than twenty years.

I was not raised to think I could become anything I wanted to be, or that I would end up with a Ph.D. My family was almost completely nonacademic. I’m the first person in my immediate family who went to college. I don’t know if I ever saw my father read a book. I assume my mother read some, because she had to pass tests to become an LPN. My parents bought me
The World Book Encyclopedia,
with the red covers. I think that if I had just completed high school, it would have been fine with them. In some ways, what I’ve done with my life is incomprehensible to my family.

Two of my sisters work—one is a nurse, and another works for the post office. A third sister died when I was fifteen. My brother worked for the Ford Motor Company in Chester and followed the job when the company moved to Mahwah, New Jersey. He finished his career and retired, and lives in New Jersey now.

Kids in the inner city today are just as poor as those of us were who grew up poor in small towns in the 1950s. In some ways, they’re poorer. Inner-city poverty has a particular look to it. It’s become so chronic that the poor accept it as a way of life, as do people who aren’t so poor. We grew up during the Civil Rights Movement. There was a sense of having someplace to go. Growth was possible. The
Brown
v.
Board of Education
ruling, in 1954, paved the way for increased opportunity for us. More funding became available to state colleges. Individuals were bringing cases against state schools saying they had to admit black students because the colleges were paid for by tax dollars. In the 1950s and 1960s, Historically Black Colleges and Universities were supporting black kids who got into college by offering them the secondary-level preparation they had missed because the schools they attended were so inadequate. All this had a huge impact on me and on many others who grew up at that time. And the HBCU became even more important in the 1970s and 1980s, with the tremendous increase in the number of blacks attending college in those years.

Unless they have huge fantasies about being the next P. Diddy or Michael Jordan, a lot of kids living in poverty today think their kids are going to be poor and their grandkids are going to be poor. Kids in the inner city lead blind and uneventful lives. They’re filled with all the rage and anger and nondevelopmental displays that go on in poor communities. People fight and scream and turn to sex at thirteen or fourteen because that’s what there is to do. One of the reasons I got out of Chester is I remember sitting on my porch and looking at the three cars that went down my street every other hour. Being bored is so overwhelming. To me, it was one of the worst experiences of my life.

The growing economic gap between the rich and the poor has real consequences in our community. Many of our people haven’t gotten richer and more economically stable since the 1960s, even though we’ve produced a black middle class. I don’t know if the class divide in the black community is permanent, but I would like for us to acknowledge it more. I have a strong reaction to affluent black people commenting on this country’s current economic conditions as if they themselves are impacted in the same ways that the black poor are. When they say things like we’re all a paycheck away from being poor, it’s not true. It’s a way of denying both the benefits of the Civil Rights Movement and the fact that there is a big grouping of black people who are dirt-poor. We’re not all the same, and saying we’re all just a paycheck away from poverty only masks the differences.

Legal freedom from racism has had a true impact. The Civil Rights Movement has raised new challenges and new responsibilities, choices like do I go to class, do I do my homework, do I not get pregnant, do I not do drugs? That sort of choice in some ways is a very personal decision, and in other ways it’s not. The poverty in our communities today is chronic in part because young people do not have the sense of possibility we had in the 1960s. What’s not working for the black community and poor blacks today is more subtle than it was then, when people were fighting to change the world for us and there was a sense that all of this poverty wasn’t our fault. Today there is more of an effort to blame the victim. It’s almost like kids who are poor and failing are told, you have all of this available; how can you not take advantage of it? But in many ways they don’t have all of it available. They don’t have access. I think the educational institutions in our cities are failing. They have failed the kids for a host of reasons, and the kids are bewildered.

Since the 1960s, too much emphasis has been placed on economic deprivation and not enough on recognizing that we live in a country where it’s about superiority and inferiority. The white experience is seen as superior, the black experience as inferior, and most American institutions were developed for the superior people. Even things that have nothing to do with racial issues are seen in black and white. There is a sense in our communities that there is black behavior and there is white behavior. You can rant and rave about that and say down with the system, which I understand. But in a way that misses the point. That’s how things are. The schools were not created for all the kids who go there. I think they were created for white kids in the 1890s, different sets of white kids who could function in particular ways. And one consequence of creating a pedagogy for white people, for the superior people, is that it doesn’t work with the people who have been labeled inferior. White kids have a very different view of the world and a very different life experience than young black and Latino kids. White kids are insiders. They view themselves as insiders; they’re connected to the American mainstream. The approach in poor communities is remedial. The statement and posture are that there’s something wrong with you; you have to catch up. Our kids feel like outsiders because they are, and you have to deal with that.

When I think of who it is that has to take some responsibility for the failure in our community, I think of the black establishment, the people who have benefited from the Civil Rights Movement. Many activists in the movements of the 1960s and 1970s recognized this hierarchical arrangement in our society, in our schools, in our institutions. The problem is that they were nationalists; they used identity politics. I think they looked at black culture, poor black culture, and defended it on face value. They talked about it as being economically deprived but culturally rich, and I think that was a mistake. I understand what they tried to do. But I think we made a major mistake in saying that we were culturally different as opposed to culturally deprived, because being culturally different covered over the fact that we were culturally deprived.

In 1968 there was a fight in the Ocean Hill–Brownsville section of Brooklyn over local control of the schools. The mission of the coalition that led the fight was to educate our kids. But my God, at that point in 1968, the young people in the black community were two grades down in terms of reading scores, and they lived in mostly segregated communities. Nearly thirty-five years later, they’re in segregated communities, almost overwhelmingly, and I think there was a test that showed black kids in eighth-grade English performing at 24 percent of their grade requirement compared to 57 percent for whites.

We have to deal with this, but we also have to take responsibility for it, because while the mission was to educate our kids, that movement failed. The failure has to do in part with an economic situation that hasn’t changed dramatically. But some of it has to do with the fact that a lot of the activists and militants who participated in Ocean Hill–Brownsville got absorbed in the bureaucracies of the Democratic Party. They either lost a sense of the mission or they didn’t have the political or conceptual tools to produce quality education. I think their efforts to solve the problem of undereducation in our communities, or miseducation, with nationalist identity politics devastated our community and miseducated us.

In the 1960s, our political movements were geared toward establishing equality in the sharing of power across all aspects of American life, and that made sense to me. But the shift in our communities toward black cultural nationalism did our community a disservice and does black people a disservice. As a people, we played a role in the shift toward that ideology. The idea that we are all the same is in part one of its aftereffects. It’s probably also a result of our experiences in slavery and with the Jim Crow racism of the South. In some ways, you come together to survive. Even if you don’t do so literally, you do conceptually, and I understand that.

I wasn’t political as an eighteen-year-old. But I also didn’t want to participate in documenting failure in black communities. In the mid-1960s I had read
Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power
. Around the time of Ocean Hill–Brownsville, I had decided I wasn’t interested in discovering any more crap about black people. Then as a graduate student in psychology, I reread
Dark Ghetto
and understood it better. One of the things Kenneth Clark talked about in that book was cultural deprivation. I think our communities were culturally deprived then and still are today. Lowering standards or artificially creating a sense of self-importance in black kids by throwing black identity at them or records of black achievement will not cover over that failure.