Disintegration (10 page)

The temptation is to just keep running down the Transcendent roster—Venus and Serena Williams, Queen Latifah, Chris Rock—but you get the point. The nation is long accustomed to African American preeminence in entertainment and sports. But now there’s also the billionaire Robert L. Johnson, who founded Black Entertainment Television. There’s also the growing number of performer-tycoons, such as Sean “P. Diddy” Combs and Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter, who have expanded beyond the music business to create their own mini-conglomerates—fashion, fragrances, television, whatever—and now take the stage only as a means of burnishing the brand.

How it happened that a small but growing group of African Americans reached the top is no mystery. All it took was
opportunity—created by the civil rights revolution—and time. Forty years ago, remember, only 2 percent of African Americans had incomes of $100,000 or more.
¹³
Now more than 10 percent earn at least that much—and a small but growing number of black Americans earn many times more.

The Transcendents have impact far beyond their numbers. Someday America will get used to seeing African Americans in positions of supreme authority, wealth, or influence—exhibiting all the patterns of behavior that such status implies. When that day comes, Skip Gates won’t have to worry about being arrested in his own home for being insufficiently deferential to a white cop. We’re not quite there yet.

* * *

It took forty years. At times the process was gradual, at times abrupt, at times even violent. In the end, one black America became four—Mainstream, Abandoned, Transcendent, and Emergent. And the way to understand the African American condition today is first to examine all four.

W
e live in two worlds
. That may be the most overused cliché about the black Mainstream, but it’s also a central reality for most African Americans of my generation—working in integrated settings where we are often unsure of where we stand, socializing in black settings where solidarity flows from shared history and experience. A close second, cliché-wise, would be to point out that Sunday morning is the most segregated time of the week in America, when blacks and whites attend their separate churches.

But these statements of the obvious help make a more subtle point: A great deal of Mainstream black life is lived exclusively, or almost exclusively, among black people. Some would call this self-segregation. The pull of racial affinity remains strong among baby boomers, but our children, the millennials, don’t feel it the way we do. In the long term, that’s good for the nation; for now, it leads to friction within families and a generational divide.

Begin with the basic question of where to live. Mine was the first cohort of Mainstream black Americans who reached
adulthood with the legal right and the financial resources to settle anywhere we wanted. Since we had been born into a world when African Americans had fewer options, our choices were partly pragmatic and partly political. Some, like our family, decided to integrate what had been all-white or mostly white neighborhoods. Many others decided to make a different statement.

In the Washington area, where I have watched this process unfold over the past three decades, more African Americans now live in the suburbs than in the District of Columbia itself. While there is a significant black presence in all the surrounding counties, the size of that presence varies greatly. The Potomac River is a powerful dividing line—far more African Americans live to the east and north of the river, in the Maryland suburbs, than in the Virginia suburbs to the west and south.

There are plenty of reasons why this overall pattern might arise. When the Mainstream exodus began, neighborhoods in the western part of the city were mostly white and those in the eastern part mostly black; the Maryland suburbs were closer and more familiar for African Americans who were ready to move. And while both states are south of the Mason-Dixon Line, Virginia means “Dixie” in a way that Maryland doesn’t. Still, proximity and “Dixieness” don’t explain why the Potomac is such a sociological barrier. We’re talking about a compact metropolitan area where distance shouldn’t be much of a factor one way or the other; rush-hour traffic is equally hellacious no matter what starting point you choose on the circumferential Beltway. The close-in Virginia suburbs are politically liberal, and while there was a time when they wouldn’t have accepted large numbers of black newcomers, that hasn’t been
an issue at least since I moved to the area, which was three decades ago. Back then, jurisdictions like Arlington or Alexandria in Virginia were smart, tolerant, progressive bastions compared to Maryland’s Prince George’s County, which was mostly white and semirural, full of good old boys who drove pickup trucks and women who sported some of the last non-ironic beehives in America.

Yet today, Arlington has a black population of less than 10 percent. Prince George’s, where two-thirds of the residents are African American, is the most affluent black-majority county in the nation, with a median household income of about $68,000 a year.

The second-richest is DeKalb County, just east of Atlanta, with a median household income of about $52,000. In both cases, these averages are a distortion in the same way that the median household income figure for Manhattan—$63,704, as of 2007—doesn’t tell you about the heiresses and trophy wives who spend that much on clothes and personal grooming every month. Prince George’s and DeKalb aren’t Manhattan, but in parts of both counties six-figure incomes are the norm.

In Prince George’s, an unincorporated town called Mitchellville is the place to begin any examination of the upwardly mobile black Mainstream. Nearly 80 percent of Mitchellville’s 10,000 residents are African American. The mean household income in 2007 was $104,786—compared to $68,080 for the state of Maryland as a whole—and the average home cost a bit more than $500,000.
¹
Many of the houses are “Mitchellville Mansions”—cavernous, newly built structures with soaring entryways, multicar garages, and a design sensibility that could be called random historical nouveau: here a Palladian window, there a set of Doric columns, everywhere a joyous
mash-up of architectural time and space. A dwelling of six thousand square feet would be considered fairly modest.

Mitchellville’s unofficial boundaries encompass Woodmore, a gated community built around a country club and golf course. Just to the south is Lake Arbor, another exclusive community surrounding a golf course. Not far away is a golf course called Lake Presidential. The University of Maryland’s main campus is in Prince George’s, and the school’s golf course is open to the public. More than a dozen other public and private courses make Prince George’s County an epicenter of African American golf. On any reasonably clement spring, summer, or fall afternoon, you could tee off anywhere in the county and it would be perfectly normal to see an all-black foursome ahead of you and another one behind. They might be lawyers, doctors, government contractors, retired military; they might be ambitious professional women trying to learn the secret winks and nods of the executive suites. They might be beginners, but they also might be extremely good. Quiet as it was kept, African Americans were playing golf long before Tiger Woods was born.

The critical mass of black achievement and prosperity in Prince George’s didn’t just happen. The county was a logical destination for middle-class black families who were ready to abandon the city—it was the least-developed close-in county with the most-affordable land. But there was no compelling reason for those Mainstream families to clump together other than preference. Many later arrivals settled in Prince George’s not because that was where they could buy the biggest and best house for the least money but because they wanted to participate in the project of creating a black community like none other in the nation.

To be part of this upper-Mainstream enclave, they were willing to make compromises and sacrifices. The Prince George’s schools are better than those in the District of Columbia (which isn’t saying much) but not nearly as highly regarded as those in other Washington suburbs. Parts of the county, particularly those near the D.C. line, are suffering “spillover dysfunction” as gentrification pushes poor people out of the city proper; towns like Capitol Heights are plagued by drug dealing and crime. County government has seen an embarrassing series of corruption scandals, and the county police force has a reputation for shooting first and asking questions later, if at all. Top-of-the-line retailers like Nordstrom, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Neiman Marcus have bypassed the county in favor of other Washington-area jurisdictions with similar income figures, as have celebrity-chef restaurants and other luxury-class amenities. Prince George’s residents often complain of being overlooked and undervalued, and they often suspect that these slights are not a matter of economics but of race.

And that is one important regard in which the Mainstream black experience differs from that of other middle-class Americans: Despite all the progress that’s been made, there’s still a nagging sense of being looked down upon, of being judged, of being disrespected. What keeps this difference alive is that these suspicions aren’t always paranoia. They’re not always justified, either, but there’s enough reality behind them to keep alive a sense of separate but not-quite equal—enough to make many people seek safety, acceptance, and solidarity in numbers.

* * *

Prince George’s is home to distinguished black scholars, professionals, athletes, and other pillars of respectable society. It is also home to the best-selling author who writes under the pseudonym Zane. This is not to suggest that there is anything untoward or dishonorable about Zane’s success—she’s one of the most prolific and popular African American writers working today—but simply to note that it’s not the kind of achievement often celebrated in church or the classroom. Her niche is steamy, explicit, erotic fiction aimed at black female readers, and books such as
Addicted, The Sex Chronicles: Shattering the Myth
, and
The Sex Chronicles 2: Gettin’ Buck Wild
have made her a star in the publishing world. Think of her work as romance fiction in which the characters are black, anatomically correct, conscious of their sexual needs, and both diligent and imaginative at fulfilling them. Euphemisms like “throbbing manhood” are replaced by simpler, less ambiguous terms.

I mention Zane not so much because of her books but because of her readers. Much has been written about the decline of the two-parent household among African Americans. The focus has been mostly on the Abandoned—young single mothers, babies having babies. But this trend is also a Mainstream phenomenon. Yale University researchers have found that highly educated black women are especially likely to be unmarried and independent, and that they are increasingly unlikely to find black husbands of comparable accomplishment—black women pursuing postgraduate studies outnumber black men by almost two to one. Potential husbands come in other colors, of course, but studies show that black women, at least to this point, have been much less open to the possibilities of interracial marriage than black men.

In other words, in places like Prince George’s and DeKalb there is a substantial population of successful, independent black women who have never been married and never will be. Add them to the black women who are separated or divorced, and you’ve identified a large and growing segment of Mainstream black America. There is, so far, no truly analogous group among whites or other minorities; numbers of female SALAs (single adults living alone) are increasing throughout society, but nowhere has the rise been nearly as rapid or as significant as among African Americans. According to the Census Bureau, 21 percent of adult white women have never been married. Among adult black women, the figure is a stunning 42 percent.
²

These unattached women are giving a new twist to an old and disputed idea, which is that black America is essentially a matriarchy. The meta-narrative goes something like this: From the earliest days of slavery, black men were prized and of course exploited, but also feared and envied. In the imagination of white society, black men were imputed to have superhuman strength and sexual prowess, which was threatening to white men at the most primal level. Black men were thus subjected to the most sadistic tortures. After emancipation, the black man still had to be kept down; when the uppity black fighter Jack Johnson—who had the audacity to date white women publicly—defeated the white former heavyweight champion Jim Jeffries on July 4, 1910, in what had been billed as the “Fight of the Century,” angry whites rioted in cities across the nation.

The black woman, though, was less of a threat. Given more space in American society, she became the mainstay of the black family—she kept a steady job, she went to church, she
supported her man when the world was too much for him to bear, she forgave him when he strayed, she provided stability and continuity, she raised the children, she subjugated her own needs to those of her man and her family. She was the rock, the anchor, the queen.

But what is an anchor without a ship? To me, this is one of the most interesting developments in the evolution of Mainstream black America: Millions of women are on their own, improvising their way through life. Just in my circle of friends, I know single black women who have decided to have children but not get married, adopt children on their own, or take in the children of relatives who, for whatever reason, are unable to care for them. I also know black women who don’t want children but wouldn’t mind a husband. I know black women who use their disposable income to travel constantly and in great style, with Paris being a popular destination; Josephine Baker was a powerful role model.

Almost every accomplished, Mainstream, single black woman I know is involved in some kind of volunteer project whose aim is to uplift the Abandoned—reading to schoolchildren, mentoring teenage girls, helping victims of domestic violence. Almost every one belongs to at least one book club. Almost all date black men, when a suitable black man presents himself, but almost none date white men. None seems “desperate to find a man,” and most seem quite happy—with good jobs, high incomes, and no children or spouse to worry about, they tend to be financially savvy and secure. Most own their homes. Almost all the single black women of my acquaintance go to church regularly, but few see any contradiction between spending the morning in a pew singing hymns and the evening curled up with one of Zane’s X-rated tomes.