Disintegration (13 page)

There’s one more African American fraternity I should mention. It isn’t a campus affiliation but instead can only be joined—invitation only—by grown men: Sigma Pi Phi, known
colloquially as the Boule, from an archaic Greek word meaning “representative assembly.” The Boule (pronounced boo-lay) is for high-achieving black professionals, and its reach is nationwide. Once in Sacramento, which few would think of as a magnet for African Americans, my wife, Avis, and I were invited as guests to a Boule Sunday-afternoon get-together. The venue was the expansive, Spanish-colonial style home of a prominent young developer who was serving a term as head of the local Boule chapter. Present were college professors, former campus radicals, doctors, lawyers, financiers, and the like, along with their equally accomplished spouses. The only items on the agenda were food and fellowship. There was talk about the recession and its impact on the California real estate market. There was a certain amount of networking, I suppose, although these were men and women who had known one another long enough to have already made all the possible connections. The real point of the gathering was to gather—to laugh, commiserate, solve the problems of the world, debate the prospects of the Sacramento Kings, and agree on tee times for the coming week. There was something warm and almost womb-like about the afternoon—easy comfort in a house full of total strangers. There was so much we knew about one another’s lives without even having to ask.

Everyone present was black. This slice of Mainstream black life—like so much of the cake—is for us. Not for anybody else.

* * *

Also, it may not be for long.

The us-against-the-world solidarity of Mainstream black culture is dissipating. On balance, it’s hard to argue that this is
a bad thing. In fact, it’s hard to argue that it’s not tremendously encouraging, given our nation’s history with race. If there’s no longer a bunker mentality, that must mean that those once in the bunker no longer feel themselves under attack. What’s happening is assimilation, which is an odd term to use about a group whose first members landed before the
Mayflower
. It seems wrong to speak of assimilating into a society we literally helped build, counterintuitive to think of learning a culture to which we so lavishly contributed. But that’s where the black Mainstream is headed—not this generation, perhaps, but surely the next.

My generation, like those that came before, was forged in an all-black context amid a hostile society. I went to all-black schools until integration, at which point I became a member of an embattled black clique. In higher education, the nation was reaching a tipping point: Before, most African Americans had attended historically black colleges and universities, but I graduated high school at a moment when white-majority institutions were actively seeking to attract black students. Today, only about 20 percent of black college students are attending historically black colleges and universities
¹¹
—a complete reversal within just a few decades.

My wife and I grew up in black neighborhoods; one result of integration is that our sons did not. Most of the friends they had while growing up were white. But times had changed, and what we once thought of as “proprietary” black culture had spread beyond any narrow racial context. Black became not just acceptable but cool. Both of my sons have had white friends who spoke Ebonics much more fluently than they did. Likewise, young African Americans are acculturated and can easily converse in today’s dialects of Valleyspeak. In black-majority
Mainstream community like Prince George’s or DeKalb, it is not impossible for white kids to be cool and popular. And it is likely that black students, even if they grow up in mostly black or all-black neighborhoods, will eventually find themselves on white-majority college campuses. The lifelong friends they meet in the dorms will be white, Asian, Latino—the law of averages says they’re unlikely to be black. When these Mainstream kids go out with their friends to hear music, it will be in integrated venues—not an all-black nightclub like the Bohemian Caverns of old. My generation had many of these world-expanding college experiences, too. But we had lived through the civil rights movement, the assassination of Dr. King, the riots, the emergence of the Black Panthers … We had the kind of race consciousness that comes from experience, not a history book.

All of which is a long way of saying that race doesn’t matter to our children’s generation in the same way it does to ours. It matters less. Change is good. But even welcome, long-awaited changes aren’t easy.

For example, teenage angst and rebellion are innovations that Mainstream black America has found hard to accept. When there was a single black America, one of its cultural characteristics was respect for elders. It’s not that teenagers or young adults always obeyed their parents—far from it—or that they didn’t argue. But most of the insubordination was surreptitious. You did not sass your parents to their faces, no matter how unreasonable the command or how unjust the punishment you were being forced to endure. Once out of the house, of course, you did what you pleased. But you didn’t provoke a confrontation. And if a direct confrontation did take place, you knew that even if you were absolutely right on the merits,
you were still in the wrong for having forced the issue instead of finding some other way of making your point. You also did not sulk, mope, or whine like the sulky, mopey, whiny white teenagers you saw on television. From what we could tell, it seemed as if black juvenile delinquents were more respectful to their parents than white honor students were to theirs.

Now, Mainstream parents are often confronted with the kind of sassing, sulking, whining, and moping that their own parents never would have tolerated. Perhaps this is an inevitable step in the assimilation process, analogous to young Indian Americans who refuse to go along with arranged marriages, or young Korean Americans who balk at joining the family business. It is a less profound form of rebellion than those other examples. But it frustrates parents and sometimes strains family bonds in a way that many African Americans find alien and distressing.

Another adjustment for Mainstream parents is that the girlfriends and boyfriends their children bring home from high school or college may not be African American. This sets up a conflict between two strongly held Mainstream values—on one side an absolute belief in Dr. King’s dream that all be judged solely by the content of their character, on the other a fierce determination that African American history and culture be not only revered but also perpetuated.

Mainstream black America, then, seems in many ways a paradoxical place. We demanded and won the right to live wherever we want, but many of us decide to live together in clumps. We complain, with justification, that the nation seems not to know or acknowledge that middle-class black Americans even exist, but we conduct much of middle-class black
American life out of the larger society’s field of vision. We marched, studied, and worked our way to the point where we are assimilating, but we have reservations about assimilation if it means giving up our separate identity.

For the Mainstream, race shouldn’t matter. But it does.

I
’ve seen the Reverend Jesse Jackson rendered speechless exactly twice. The second time was the night Barack Obama was elected president, and Jackson stood among the multitudes in Chicago’s Grant Park, silent tears of joy streaming down his face.

The first time was three years earlier, in drowned, desperate New Orleans.

I had decided that I couldn’t watch the unfolding Hurricane Katrina catastrophe on television any longer. I had to see it for myself, and I had to write about it. So I caught a flight to Baton Rouge, rented a minivan—I wanted an SUV, but for obvious reasons they were in great demand—and headed off down the interstate toward a city I’d last seen when I was in college and a bunch of us had decided to see what Mardi Gras was all about. I knew that the first post-flood evacuation flights out of the submerged city were supposed to leave that day, so I found my way to Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport. As I neared the terminal, it was as if I had suddenly been transported to some other country.

With more than a quarter of a mile to go, I drove past the end of a long line of people who looked like third world refugees. They bristled at that description, I later learned. They were citizens of what we insist is the greatest country on earth, they were beneficiaries in good standing of vaunted American exceptionalism, and the greatest country on earth would not allow any force, natural or man-made, to reduce its citizens to the helpless, pathetic status of refugees. The greatest country on earth would not countenance the scene I saw that day: thousands of people, virtually all of them black, carrying everything they owned on their backs or in battered suitcases, shuffling forward inch by inch in a sad, silent queue to be put on military aircraft that would take them somewhere, anywhere, as far as possible from the hellhole into which fate had plunged them. It wasn’t something that anyone would ever see in America. Yet here we were.

I parked near the long, crescent-shaped terminal and rapped on the first door I came to; like all the rest, it was guarded by uniformed personnel wielding automatic weapons. My press pass got me inside, and immediately I had second thoughts. The smell was overpowering: waste, decay, death. The terminal was dim, still mostly without power, and it took awhile for my eyes to adjust. What was normally a soaring atrium, meant to be evocative of glorious flight, had been converted into a field hospital—a MASH unit, like on the old television show but without the gallows humor. There were rows of cots occupied by patients. All that I could see were black, all were elderly, and some appeared to be in extremis. I buttonholed a doctor, and he gave me a status report: A few overwhelmed physicians and nurses were trying to care for hundreds of very
sick people. They had no medical histories to guide them. In the many cases involving some degree of dementia, they couldn’t even be sure of the patient’s name. They weren’t able to diagnose, only guess; and whether they guessed right or wrong, there wasn’t much they could do except make the patient as comfortable as possible. Even basic medicines were lacking, including insulin—and the doctor was certain that many, if not most, of the men and women on those cots were diabetic. A man on a nearby cot was gasping for breath; the doctor asked if someone could please try to find a functioning oxygen tank.

I had to get away from the smell, so I walked through the atrium to the next segment of the long terminal. This was where that wretched line I’d seen on the way into the airport eventually led—past deserted ticket counters and shuttered souvenir shops to a gate and a jetway, somewhere on a far concourse, that led to a flight. Who knew where the plane would be going. At this point, who cared?

Katrina and its aftermath shocked the nation not only because of the fearsome meteorology we witnessed but also because of the shocking demography. That there existed large numbers of African Americans who are not middle class in income or outlook was something the nation knew, but for many people this fact had become increasingly abstract—useful as a statistic to cite in arguments about affirmative action, education policy, or national competitiveness, but not necessarily a relevant fact of daily life.

Katrina gave the numbers flesh and bone and blood. And voice:
We’re still here
.

At the airport, I was watching Abandoned black Americans
being uprooted, traumatized, and driven away in what looked almost like a pogrom. I took out a notebook and began interviewing people, and the first words I wrote were “state of shock”—that’s where they all appeared to be. Every family whose privacy I invaded had a harrowing story of escape and survival. One woman told me how the water seemed to rise a foot each minute, how she and her husband ran upstairs and then climbed into the attic, how he used a hammer to make a hole that let them clamber onto the roof, how the two of them escaped the Lower Ninth Ward in a neighbor’s boat, how they paddled and waded and finally walked the miles to the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center downtown, and how they had endured three days there with no food or water except what strangers offered to share. One man said, with emotionless affect, that his family had become separated in the chaotic scramble; he had no idea where the others might be, but was sure they were all right. Another man was carrying one suitcase and his camera bag. He had lost everything else, he said, but he was proud of having saved the camera because he was convinced that the pictures he took during the flood would prove that “they”—he meant officials who were acting on behalf of those citizens who happened to be affluent, powerful, and, not incidentally, white—had deliberately sacrificed poor black neighborhoods like the Lower Ninth by dynamiting certain levees in order to save the famous French Quarter and the wealthy Garden District. The man had shot film, not digital, so he couldn’t show me the photographic evidence. I gave him my card but never heard from him.

A retired teacher named John Mullen III told me of one detail he remembered from the long hours he spent on top
of his house in the Lower Ninth Ward: “There were redfish in the water, and they were coming up to eat the cockroaches at the water line.” It wasn’t the image that stuck with him but the sound—a little slurp—and he couldn’t get it out of his head.

I made my way slowly toward the front of the line, but after a while I stopped doing interviews. I couldn’t process any more loss, couldn’t bring myself to force any more broken families to talk about the dead and the missing. I needed air, so I ducked out the nearest door—and quite literally bumped into Reverend Jackson, who had arrived in the disaster zone earlier that day. He was standing there, looking at the people in the line, the ambulances still arriving, the heavily armed National Guard troops, the exhaustion on the faces of victims and samaritans alike. A local news crew had spotted him and rushed over, certain he would offer a good sound bite. But one of the great talkers of our time had nothing to say. He and I greeted each other, then stood in silence for a while. There were no words.