Disintegration (3 page)

That was then.

In 2008, more than half a century after the
Brown v. Board of Education
Supreme Court ruling desegregated the schools, Dunbar High’s student body was 94 percent black; the remainder was mostly Hispanic. Less than 19 percent of Dunbar students were tested as “proficient” in reading and just 25 percent in math. Incredibly, given the school’s history, not even 2 percent of the school’s students qualified as “advanced” in either reading or math. Even more incredibly, this abysmal performance represented a modest
improvement
over the previous year.
⁸
At this rate, it will take Dunbar another half century to get back to where it started. On a school-evaluation website that solicits evaluations from students, one recent graduate called the onetime pearl of African American secondary education “just another ghetto school.”

The Dunbar band looked and sounded great on inauguration day, though, thundering and high-stepping down Pennsylvania Avenue to celebrate a day that few black Americans imagined would ever come. It was a rare glimpse of the Abandoned during a week of self-congratulatory events that at times looked like a mandatory roll call of the Transcendent.

There was the party, for example, that BET’s Lee threw at her home—a midcentury modernist classic that once was billionaire Jack Kent Cooke’s pied-à-terre. Amid the Dale Chihuly glass sculptures and the sleek furniture by Mies van der Rohe and Breuer, there loomed Earvin “Magic” Johnson, the basketball legend who had become a multimillionaire with his shrewd cineplex and restaurant developments in black urban and suburban communities nationwide. He was chatting
in the living room with his wife, Cookie; his mother sat on the couch next to the wife of Congressman James Clyburn of South Carolina, the majority whip in the House of Representatives and one of the most powerful men on Capitol Hill. Across the room full of luminaries from Hollywood, New York, Chicago, Atlanta, and Washington was Gayle King, the radio host best known as Oprah Winfrey’s best friend, giving an account of an intimate dinner she and Winfrey had shared with Barack and Michelle Obama—just the four of them—a few days after the election.

Winfrey wasn’t there that night, but she appeared two days later at a vast, glittering, black-tie party held in the Smithsonian’s newly renovated National Museum of American History on the Mall. She was whisked right to the VIP room, of course, but other celebrities mingled with the hoi polloi—Samuel L. Jackson, Spike Lee, all the usual-suspect media luminaries, plus the odd Hollywood ingenue or Wall Street venture capitalist.

Also present at the museum party was Harvard’s “Skip” Gates, the most famous black academic superstar in the country and perhaps the world. A few months later, he would give the nation an object lesson in the new, uncharted realities of a disintegrated black America.

* * *

Six months into his term, the first African American president of the United States was giving what was a fairly boring and predictable news conference—until Barack Obama volunteered that police had acted “stupidly” in handcuffing, arresting, and tossing in jail his friend Skip Gates.

A story that had been simmering for days suddenly boiled over. Gates, feeling unwell, had been returning from an exhausting trip to China in connection with a new documentary he was making for PBS. He was met at the airport by his regular driver, a man of North African descent who worked for a local car service. The town car pulled up at Gates’s house near the Harvard campus—as one of the most lauded faculty members at the nation’s most prestigious university, Gates was accorded the perk of living in Harvard-owned housing. He has a disability and walks with a cane, so the driver helped him carry his bags to the house. To his annoyance, Gates found that the front door was jammed; neither he nor the driver could open it, so he went around to the back and let himself in. He and the driver began working on the front door from the inside and managed to get it open.

A passerby had been watching as two men carrying bags arrived at a house in one of Cambridge’s most expensive and exclusive neighborhoods, tried to force the front door, and then headed around to the back. Understandably, she called the police and told them what she had seen.

Sergeant James Crowley, who is white, responded to the call. By the time he got there, Gates was already in his house. Crowley demanded that Gates identify himself, and Gates—weary, cranky, and now, from his point of view, hassled—went semi-ballistic. He protested that he was in his own house. He accused Crowley of harassing him because of his race. He pulled rank, at one point telling the Cambridge police sergeant: “You have no idea who you’re messing with.”

Crowley satisfied himself that Gates was in his own home, that there had been no burglary, and that no one was in any peril. Then, as Gates walked out onto the front porch—still
giving the officer some lip—Crowley arrested him for disorderly conduct, handcuffed him, and took him down to the station, where he was booked and put into a cell. He was soon released, and within days all charges were dropped.

It should have been a teachable moment, but few seemed to understand the lesson: For both men, this was a new power dynamic.

Crowley wrote in his police report that the complaining witness had told him she saw two “black men” acting suspiciously at the house, when in fact she hadn’t specified race at all. This suggests that Crowley arrived on the scene with a bag full of assumptions. Nowhere among them was the notion of a Transcendent black man who towered above him in affluence, education, status, and power—and who acted that way.

Crowley had spent more than twenty years on the Cambridge police force; encountering a rock-star Harvard professor who happens to be arrogant is like meeting a professional basketball player who happens to be tall. This can’t have been the first time a Harvard grandee had treated Crowley like a lesser species. Yet there was something about Gates’s uppitiness that led the police sergeant to arrest a fifty-eight-year-old man who stands five seven, walks with a cane, and without question was in his own house.

But Gates, too, was in unfamiliar territory. It’s as if he didn’t fully appreciate the noblesse oblige requirements of his Transcendent status. He immediately assumed the defiant posture of the underdog, the disenfranchised, the powerless, when in fact he is a card-carrying member of today’s Establishment. He obviously felt that he couldn’t give an inch to Crowley, and I believe that’s because many successful African Americans, even Transcendents, secretly worry that somehow their gains
are all precarious. I think that at some level Gates feared that while today he might be a rich and famous Harvard professor, tomorrow he could be just another black man trying to make his way in a hostile and discriminatory world.

Even Obama read the situation wrong. He approached it with a Transcendent mind-set, assuming that everyone would understand why such a high-status black man might react, or overreact, the way Gates did. Not everyone understood. The president’s reaction took account of the historical baggage that even the most successful African Americans carry around—the sensitivity to perceived racial slights, along with the suspicion that there are whites who resent the success of African Americans. To some whites, however, Obama’s words came across not as a dispassionate analysis of the incident but as an expression of racial solidarity. The thing is, Obama was right: Pretty much by definition, arresting a nonthreatening man on his own front porch for being in a bad mood is a pretty stupid thing for a police officer to do. But Obama had to apologize and invite everybody for a beer.

The story became a “talker” precisely because it was such a familiar scenario—white cop, black suspect—with such an unfamiliar power relationship. It’s as if the laws of societal physics had changed, as if a basic formula like
F = ma
no longer worked the way it had for Newton or Einstein.

* * *

This book is an exploration of the new social and demographic landscape in a disintegrated black America, and the implications for the larger society. It grew out of a talk I gave several years ago, what was supposed to be a five-minute address to
a group of black publishing executives. I had been thinking about black America and its increasing incoherence, at least for me, as a useful conceptual framework.

It seemed to me that one size no longer fit all. We could talk about the need to increase black academic achievement in the poorest neighborhoods of Atlanta and the need to increase black academic achievement in the comfortable suburb of Lithonia, for example, but the problems aren’t the same and the solutions wouldn’t be the same. We could pretend not to notice how distinctive African immigrants are from native-born black Americans, or we could try to understand those differences and put them in context. We could continue to accept the one-drop rule mandating that anyone with any discernible African heritage was black, period, end of story, or we could remember that the rule was imposed on us in the context of slavery and Jim Crow and decide to look under the rug to see what we could find. We could not, it seemed to me, expect to convince anyone that all of black America still suffered equally from its unique history, not when black Americans were plainly visible in positions of supreme power and influence. It was increasingly clear to me that there was no one black America—that there were several, and that we had to distinguish among them if we were to talk intelligently about African Americans in the twenty-first century.

It was also clear to me that not everyone would immediately warm to this idea. Unity has always been a powerful weapon in African Americans’ struggle for freedom, justice, and equality. Solidarity was essential; the privileged few could not, and would not, sell out the underprivileged many. Anything that divided us could only weaken us; and since others would surely try to split us apart, we could at least vow not to
do their dirty work for them. I was raised to honor and cherish this ethic of absolute, unquestioned, unqualified African American unity. Then again, that was some time ago.

I decided to broach this touchy subject in my remarks to the publishing executives. What happened next was a complete surprise: My audience reacted immediately with such engagement and enthusiasm that my scheduled drive-by greeting turned into an animated, intense, hour-long dialogue.

These black professionals—all members of the Mainstream—didn’t just want to hear my ideas about the disintegration of black America; they wanted to tell me about their own experiences and explain their own views. Several chimed in to reinforce the idea that a gap has opened between an educated, middle-class black America and a poor, uneducated black America. Some said they saw the gap becoming ever larger and lamented the growing separation. “And you haven’t mentioned the African immigrants,” one listener offered. And from another: “There are more people who are mixed race, and they’re causing us to redefine what it means to be black.”

I began poring through census data, marketing studies, and any other material I thought might help advance my thinking or turn it around. Eventually some of this research surfaced in my
Washington Post
column. A piece entitled “Which Black America?” included these passages:

These observations got me an off-the-record cussing out by one of the elders of the civil rights struggle, who thought I had taken cheap shots at two historic freedom-fighting organizations that had made my life and career possible. I was sorry that anyone took the column that way. But it also inspired hundreds of e-mails, most of them supportive (or at least polite), and it electrified the weekly discussion I host on washingtonpost.com. What struck me was how rarely anyone rejected my ideas out of hand as some kind of betrayal of historical unity. Much more common was a desire to move forward, to find contemporary language for contemporary conditions, to frame our search for effective policies—and constructive individual actions—in terms of how things are rather than how they were. Some callers and e-mailers demanded to know why, in their view, I’d pulled my punches. Why hadn’t I been more critical of the National Urban League, always so brainy and analytical, for not being more incisive about the disintegrative process that was so obviously taking place? And why hadn’t I slammed the NAACP for wasting its time on symbolic gestures, like a mock funeral
to bury the word “nigger,” when historic changes were taking place in the real world?

With no offense to the NAACP, which is now under new leadership, such symbolic gestures seem particularly lame in the face of the Obama presidency. Suddenly objective reality is plenty profound: After nearly four hundred years of struggle that commenced when the first African slaves were brought ashore at Jamestown, a black man was freely elected president of the United States—and a black family moved into the White House. Psychologists can search all they want for combinations of words and images that penetrate the chamber of our collective subconscious labeled “race,” and still they won’t do better than the network-television crews that follow the president wherever he goes, cameras rolling as he motorcades to a summit or helicopters to Camp David. One of Obama’s early acts was to issue the traditional proclamation making February Black History Month, and the irony was inescapable. As president, he had just assumed the role of History-Maker in Chief. The nation was going to have to acknowledge that
every
month is Black History Month.