Disintegration (21 page)

A 2007 paper published in
Social Psychology Quarterly
by researchers at the City University of New York and Stanford University suggests that cultural identification might be a factor. The first generation, this argument goes, self-identifies as Jamaican American or Nigerian American, and is largely immune to “stereotype threat”—the phenomenon in which members of a group that is subjected to negative stereotypes perform less well when those stereotypes are made salient. For example, black students will score lower on a standardized test if they are told beforehand that black students do not do well on standardized tests. The researchers from CUNY and Stanford, who used performance on a standardized test as a measure, found that stereotype threat had little or no effect on first-generation Caribbean immigrant students but that it had significant impact on second-generation students—who were more likely to have dropped their country-of-origin identification and begun to consider themselves “black” or “African American.”
⁴
All of which may prove nothing, except that who we are depends on who we
believe
we are.

The Washington-area Ethiopian community, estimated by local activists to number 150,000,
⁵
has been called the biggest, most affluent, and most important outside of the mother country. Ethiopia’s best-known and most highly acclaimed director, Haile Gerima, lives in Washington and teaches film at Howard University. His 1993 movie,
Sankofa
, is a powerful examination of the horrors of slavery; his newest work,
Teza
,
is about a fictional Ethiopian intellectual who returns to his homeland during the brutal reign of Mengistu Haile Mariam. The community has an English-Amharic bilingual newspaper,
Zethiopia
, which in July 2009 proudly reported that a local Ethiopian American woman—Mehret Ayalew Mandefro, thirty-two, a Harvard-trained doctor from suburban Alexandria, Virginia—had been named a White House Fellow. Since 1992, the nonprofit Ethiopian Community Center has helped immigrants get settled in their new home, offering classes in English, computer literacy, and other needed skills. Now some of the center’s early clients are coming back and asking for help in teaching their Americanized children about the glories of Ethiopian history and culture.

Keeping history alive is important for all early-generation immigrants, but even more important for Ethiopians than most. Ethiopia is believed to have been the birthplace of the human race; some of the very earliest known hominid fossils, dating back 3.2 million years, were found there. More recently, the land once called Abyssinia was one of the great empires of the ancient world, known to the Egyptians, Greeks, Persians, and Romans as an important regional power. Ethiopians were among the leaders in the development of civilization—how we live together, govern ourselves, provide for our basic needs, organize our thinking about life, death, love, family, commerce, community, nation.

Ethiopia also presented humanity with smaller gifts. One of the tasks that Sentayu performed at my gym—before he left for a better-paying job—was to keep the coffee machine in the lounge area functional. When it broke down, which was fairly often, he made coffee at home and brought it to the gym in big thermoses. “Much better,” he said proudly of his home brew.
“You know, coffee is from my country. Ethiopia gave coffee to the world!”

He and the other immigrants know who they are and where they come from. The native-born, with a few exceptions, quite literally don’t. As the immigrants’ numbers and impact grow, I wonder what, if anything, that difference will come to mean.

When our ancestors were brought here, slave owners waged a deliberate, thorough, and successful campaign to erase all traces of our prior cultures. There were, for example, many slaves who left Africa as Muslims; Islam had been established on the continent for centuries by the time the Americas were discovered and the Atlantic slave trade began. Once in the Americas, Muslims were given no leeway to practice their faith. Christianity was the only religious option, and it was all but mandatory.

In some other countries of the western hemisphere, notably Brazil and Cuba, enslaved peoples found ways to hold fast to some of their beliefs and traditions. The Yoruba people, from what is now Nigeria, had partial success. In Cuba and Brazil, they managed to fuse their religious tradition with Roman Catholicism in a way that was Catholic enough to satisfy the slave owners, but Yoruba enough to allow the slaves a sense of connection with their ancestors. These syncretic faiths came to be known as Santeria, candomblé, macumba—there are many names and many distinctions—and they basically involve associating specific Yoruba demigods, called orishas in Cuba and the other Spanish-speaking slave-owning islands, with specific Catholic saints. On the day that Catholics celebrated Saint Barbara, for example, the slaves joined in the acts of veneration—but unbeknownst to the slave owners, the Africans were actually honoring Shango, the Yoruba god of thunder, lightning, and virility.

Along with these beliefs, snippets of language survived. The standard greeting one gives to an Afro Cuban
babalawo
, or priest—
Iboru, iboya, ibocheche
—is said to be a corruption of a name given to a Yoruba deity that means “one who lives both in heaven and earth.” Today officials of the various Afro Cuban and Afro Brazilian faiths hold ecumenical councils with Nigerian religious leaders. A certain continuity of identity was maintained.
⁶

In the United States, nothing of the old religious belief system survived. This was perhaps because Protestantism lacked the Catholic emphasis on the pantheon of saints, which left the slaves no convenient way to practice their faiths surreptitiously. In the barrier islands along the South Carolina coast, a culture called Gullah still exists and is being studied and preserved; the creole that the Gullah people speak is a mash-up of archaic English and various West African tongues, and it is utterly incomprehensible to a nonspeaker. Beyond that one example, however, our ancestors’ history was obliterated. In that sense, we really have no idea who we are.

Advances in genetic science do make it possible for African Americans to send away a DNA sample and get back a report offering some general idea of what region and ethnic group their ancestors came from. But after a lot of initial excitement about the prospect of being able to do
Roots
in a lab, it turns out that the testing might not be as precise as originally thought. To learn that one of your ancestors might have been a member of the Ibo ethnic group, for example, or that an ancestor might have come from the Angola region would be something. But it wouldn’t be much—especially given that different laboratories often come up with different histories.

The African immigrants, by contrast, have family histories
that go back hundreds of years. They are proud of this heritage—and it shows. These are generalizations, but they are true: Native-born African Americans often envy the immigrants their deep historical knowledge and heritage, and immigrants often look down on the native-born for their rootlessness. These deep and seldom-expressed differences over identity, I believe, may underlie the shallower complaints that the two groups voice about each other. The native-born say that the immigrants are arrogant, and the immigrants say that the native-born have no pride in themselves.

In decades past, the process of incorporating immigrants fully into the African American community was natural, inevitable, and quick. Most of the newcomers were from the Caribbean, similarly disconnected from their ancient roots, and in any event they were black in a society that made no fine distinctions between people with dark skin. The formal and informal rules of Jim Crow segregation did not take into account country of national origin; there was no special section in the front of the bus for Jamaicans.

Today, immigrants from Africa can, if they choose, maintain a distinction. Ethiopians and Nigerians are both Africans, but they come from different ethnic groups, separated by the breadth of a continent, and they have radically different histories. They can insist on their individual national and cultural identities or they can feel a sense of common identity in being immigrants; they can stand apart from the native-born, or they can blend into the fabric of Mainstream black America.

The point is that they will have a choice. There can be different shades of black.

T
he other segment of Emergent black America also faces issues of heritage and identity, but they are quite different: What if you knew that half of your history was written in Africa and the other half in England or Ireland or Germany or Sweden? What if you were biracial?

According to the way American society has always worked, you would still be black. But societies evolve, and this one is no exception. Do you now have the option of being white as well? Are you something in between? And who gets to decide, society or the individual?

There is a long backstory to this question of modern identity, and to understand it we can look at a society where the story began much like it did here but took a different turn: Brazil.

More than twelve million people were brought from Africa to the New World to work as slaves, roughly between 1500 and 1870, and more than 40 percent of them went to Brazil—far more than to the United States or any other country. The Portuguese colonists who crossed the ocean in search of fortune
were overwhelmingly male, so there was a long history of miscegenation between settlers and female slaves. The same was true in this country, of course, but one important difference is that in Brazil—and in the rest of Latin America—the offspring of these black-white unions were considered not black or white but mulatto. This intermediate designation persisted after emancipation, and compared to the United States there was only a mild taboo against interracial marriage. Brazil today is characterized by racial disparities—white people, generally, are richer and more powerful than black people—but the question of who is “white” and who is “black” has been more a matter of skin color than family history.

In the United States, by contrast, the unwritten one-drop rule mandated that anyone with any African genetic heritage, visible or not, was “colored” or “Negro” or “black.” As far as Jim Crow was concerned, no one was mulatto or biracial. If you had one black parent and one white parent, you were unambiguously and permanently black. If you happened to think otherwise—and decided, say, to use the “white” restroom or water fountain—you were soon instructed in the error of your ways.

That pattern has never changed, but now it might. Since interracial marriage was made legal throughout the country in 1967 and gradually became socially acceptable, what once was an anomaly has become commonplace. Stanford University sociologist Michael J. Rosenfeld estimated that the number of black-white interracial couples has increased fivefold since 1960, and that in 2000 about 7 percent of all married and cohabitating couples in the country were “interracial.” While Asian-white and Hispanic-white marriages are more numerous, the frequency of black-white marriages—more
“transgressive” of societal norms than other cross-couplings, according to Rosenfeld—is accelerating.
¹

A Pew Research Center survey, based on analysis of census data, found that in 2008, a full 22 percent of black male newlyweds married “outside their race.” This reflects what Pew called a “stark” gender difference: Just 9 percent of black female newlyweds had embarked on interracial marriages.
²

Race still matters in love and marriage, but it matters much less now than it did just a few decades ago. I attended the previously all-white Orangeburg High School in the late 1960s, and the students I got to know best were in the fast-track classes. There were not many girls who took the upper-level math and science courses. One who did was Kathy Kovacevich, who was from somewhere up north and didn’t fully understand what race meant in my hometown. Once the two of us were working together on a project, and I gave her a ride to pick up some notes she had left at home. We walked into her house and I froze at the door—I remembered myself. I knew that for a young black man to be alone with a young white woman was asking for a world of trouble, even if I were just sitting on the couch and waiting while she found the papers she was looking for. What if her father came home while I was there? What if the neighbors had seen me go inside? At a minimum, she was risking social ostracism. At worst, I was risking life and limb.

Today this all sounds ridiculous. But back then, the idea of seeing an interracial couple walking down Russell Street, past the main square with its statue of a Confederate soldier, would have been as far-fetched as the notion of seeing a Martian and a Venusian strolling beneath the Spanish moss down by the Edisto River. The only difference is that the extraterrestrials wouldn’t have risked a beating.

The reality was, of course, that interracial relationships took place all the time. In 2003, when it was revealed that Essie Mae Washington-Williams—a light-skinned black woman—was the daughter of arch-segregationist Strom Thurmond, and that she had attended South Carolina State University in Orangeburg, I called home to tell my family the news. “Oh, we thought you knew,” my mother said. “Everybody knew. All the older people, I mean.”

It turned out that a good friend and longtime coworker of my mother’s had been at SCSU at the same time as Washington-Williams. She had told my mother—and everybody else in town, I guess—about the day when Thurmond had pulled up in a big sedan in front of a building on the SCSU campus and waited patiently until Washington-Williams came out and got into the car. They sped off, and the car brought her back to campus hours later. Apparently Thurmond visited his daughter fairly often and actually paid for her education. While he never could have publicly acknowledged her as family, privately he accepted his paternity and assumed at least some measure of parental responsibility. Since the relationship was not revealed until after Thurmond’s death, no one had the chance to ask him about the obvious conflict between his die-hard insistence on separation of the races, which had been the basis of his failed presidential campaign, and his fatherly concern for the well-being of a child. Not for the first time, philosophy proved no match for biology.