Disintegration (11 page)

The uncertain marriage prospects of educated, single black women are usually presented as some sort of tragedy, but that’s not the impression I get. I see instead a fascinating process of self-invention, and I think I might be seeing American society’s most radical experiment in rewriting the definitions of household, family, and fulfillment.

The truth is that I never fully bought the matriarchy idea. But I always thought that the women’s movement was mostly old news to African American women. They were long accustomed to juggling family and career, well acquainted with the tradeoffs that modern life demands. Now, I believe, Mainstream black women may be blazing another trail that the rest of American society will follow as we redefine the concepts of household and family. In this sense, the black Mainstream is at the cutting edge of societal evolution.

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It is hard to overstate how heroic the Mainstream’s rise has been. Larger numbers of African Americans have made a greater advance, and done so more swiftly, than has been the case with any other significant “outsider” group that successfully pushed, charmed, or clawed its way into the American middle class. Just as it’s wrong to ignore the overlapping pathologies of poverty, hopelessness, unemployment, crime, incarceration, and family disintegration that plague black Americans disproportionately, it’s also wrong to deny that the rise of the black Mainstream is truly a great American success story—arguably, the greatest of all.

To state the obvious, African American progress cannot be measured from the very beginning—the arrival of the first African
slaves at Jamestown in 1619. (The Spanish had brought some Africans to Florida decades earlier, but that turned out to be a false start.) For more than half the elapsed time since, black progress was not just discouraged, not just hampered, but actually outlawed—in South Carolina, Georgia, and other Southern states, it was against the law to teach a slave to write. These restrictions against black literacy—in effect, laws to prevent black intellectual development, which was rightly considered dangerous—became more draconian, not less so, during slavery’s final tumultuous decades. White Southerners had long lived in constant fear of black insurrection, and in 1831 the Nat Turner revolt in Southampton County, Virginia, turned that fear into something like sheer panic throughout the slave-owning states. In Mississippi, for example, legislators promptly passed a new law requiring all free blacks to leave the state, lest they incite the slaves by educating them.

It is equally useless to take emancipation as a starting point. This is not just because of the enormous deficits that newly freed blacks faced. Without assets or education they had to start from scratch, but during Reconstruction they made rapid gains. The problem was that those gains were promptly and often brutally taken away by Southern officials when Reconstruction was abruptly halted. This betrayal was committed with the acquiescence of the federal government—which was more interested in reaching an accommodation with the South than in following through on General Sherman’s promise of “forty acres and a mule”—and a stunningly racist Supreme Court. Jim Crow laws in the South deliberately kept the building blocks of meaningful development—education, opportunity, wealth that could be passed down through the
generations—out of African American hands. Black advancement simply wasn’t allowed.

This situation, in which African Americans were deliberately and at times brutally held down, persisted through the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. In 1945, black sociologists St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton published
Black Metropolis
, a landmark study of the huge African American community in Chicago. Benefiting from extensive data collected during the Depression by WPA researchers, the book is perhaps the most comprehensive and vivid portrait ever assembled of separate but unequal black America. The authors devote one chapter to “The Job Ceiling”—the strictures that confined most blacks to semiskilled, unskilled, or “servant” jobs where the pay was low and the opportunity for advancement, for “betterment of the race,” was close to nil. In 1940, according to Drake and Cayton, nearly 75 percent of employed black men in Chicago and more than 85 percent of employed black women worked in these low-paid categories as gardeners, housemaids, janitors—menial jobs, essentially, that entailed providing services to whites.
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For black men, even those with a better-than-average education, there was security rather than shame in working as a Pullman porter or a Red Cap luggage handler—two occupations so dominated by African Americans that they were known in the community as “Negro jobs.” Chicago was by far the nation’s busiest and most vital railway hub, and trains were vastly more important as a means of long-distance travel than they are today. In 1930, of the approximately nine thousand Pullman porters in the nation, about four thousand lived in Chicago and the great majority were black. Some in the African
American community saw this hegemony in railroad service jobs as unfortunate. “We do not believe we should have a monopoly on Pullman porter service any more than that white people should have a monopoly on Pullman conductor service, or that Irishmen should have a monopoly on police and fire departments,” the
Chicago Defender
, a leading black weekly, editorialized. But the pay was better than blacks could dream of in most other jobs, especially after the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, under the leadership of the legendary A. Philip Randolph, negotiated a contract that gave porters a “living wage.” The additional cash that porters earned in tips elevated the job from tolerable to desirable.

Of the estimated six hundred Red Cap baggage handlers in Chicago, four hundred were African American. The black Red Caps were, generally, much better educated than their white colleagues; one union official reported that of the ninety African Americans in his local, seventy-two had at least some college and two were practicing physicians, according to Drake and Cayton.
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For white men, hauling valises, suitcases, hatboxes, and steamer trunks through train stations was a low-status job. For black men, it was simply a job that offered mediocre pay but good tips, and thus could support a family. Status wasn’t the point.

For black women, the default job was domestic service. The pay was low—during the Depression, the going rates were $2 a day for occasional work, $20 a week for steady employment—and conditions varied widely. Employers could be capricious, unreasonable, or abusive; their homes and habits could be filthy. Those were the “hard people to work for.” Or a black domestic worker could be lucky enough to be employed by families that were consistent, thoughtful, and generous—
“nice people to work for.” The families of women who worked for the “nice” folks could benefit from the employers’ largess toward loyal retainers, which sometimes, though not usually, could be genuinely large; Mrs. Lucille Foster of Washington, for example, was given a new car every few years and ultimately even a house by the wealthy Georgetown family for whom she worked for decades, and the family went so far as to establish a trust to care for her in her old age. But this kind of generosity was rare. The more common and significant benefit that domestic workers received was the socialization that resulted from close daily contact with people who lived on a different plane of existence. They learned the white world with an intimacy that could only come from literally examining people’s dirty laundry. This knowledge helped the workers and their families survive.

But these urban, sophisticated black men and women were stuck at the bottom of the income scale—and this was true even in Chicago, the boomtown with the big shoulders. Back in the South, millions of African Americans who hadn’t joined the Great Migration were still tied to the land, not as slaves but as sharecroppers, tenant farmers, or hired labor. Official policy in the South was to keep blacks uneducated and dependent on white landowners for employment or subsistence. It is not possible to rise when you have a boot on your neck.

Progress has to be measured, then, roughly from the middle of the twentieth century, which is when the economic and social ambitions of African Americans began to change as new possibilities emerged. The first big impetus was World War II. The rapid mobilization of what was to become the world’s biggest military-industrial complex provided instant employment, both voluntary and involuntary, for large numbers
of African Americans, many of whom had been out of a job. In 1940, as war raged in Europe and U.S. industry geared up, A. Philip Randolph threatened a march on Washington to demand that African Americans be given some of the new jobs being created. President Franklin D. Roosevelt responded by creating a new federal committee to investigate and eliminate workplace discrimination. In the end, it didn’t matter that Roosevelt’s Fair Employment Practices Committee had no real power, thanks to the intervention of powerful Southern congressmen. There was simply no way to meet the wartime industrial demand without African American workers, who ended up with high-paying jobs they couldn’t have dreamed of a few years earlier.

Once the United States entered the war, eligible black men volunteered or were drafted to serve in the military. Those who served in the segregated armed forces during the war years returned to civilian life with new skills, a new appreciation for their own potential, and a new attitude of entitlement and impatience. The old separate but unequal devil’s bargain, which many blacks had long accepted—and which they had found ways to rationalize, since there appeared to be no way to change it—was no longer tolerable.

Those stirrings of militancy helped produce the second big push: the civil rights movement. That great, tumultuous struggle culminated in 1964 and 1965 when President Lyndon B. Johnson secured passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act. Even then, however, black Americans had to struggle to force the nation to begin to fulfill the promises it had made more than a century earlier.

It’s only possible to measure black progress from roughly forty years ago, when opportunity became more than a rumor.
And if you look at aggregate indices, you could argue that African Americans haven’t come very far at all. In 2005, according to the Census Bureau, the median household income was $50,784 for non-Hispanic whites and $30,858 for blacks. That ratio—with black households earning about three-fifths of what white households earn—is about the same as it was in 1967, when the median household income was $36,895 for whites and $21,422 for blacks (in constant dollars).
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To put it mildly, that’s discouraging. It looks at first glance as if forty years of antidiscrimination laws, affirmative action programs, and relentless consciousness-raising have made African Americans wealthier as the whole society became wealthier—but that in relative terms, all this has gotten us precisely nowhere.

Look more closely, however, and the numbers tell two stories—one about the surging advance of the Mainstream, the other about the bitter retreat of the Abandoned.

In 1967, just 25.8 percent of black households had a median income of more than $35,000 in today’s dollars; by 2005, however, 45.3 percent of black households had crossed that threshold. In those four decades, the percentage of black households earning more than $75,000 went from 3.4 to 15.7.
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To be sure, much higher percentages of white households are affluent. But in terms of actual numbers, that meant roughly six million African Americans had become wealthy enough to live in spacious homes, buy luxury goods, travel abroad on vacation, spoil their children—to live, in other words, just like well-to-do white folks.

Those income figures are more impressive when you take geography into account. The Great Migration notwithstanding, a majority of African Americans have always lived in the South—where the cost of living is well below the national
average. In recent years, a trend of reverse migration has seen increasing numbers of blacks moving south, not just to metropolitan centers like Atlanta or Charlotte but to smaller cities and towns as well. In Manhattan, living on $75,000 a year sounds like bare subsistence. In Jackson, Mississippi; Dothan, Alabama; or Kingstree, South Carolina, it sounds like a ticket to the promised land.

In education, given the centuries-long policy of keeping black people ignorant and unlettered, African American gains have been even greater. In 1967, 53.4 percent of whites but only 29.5 percent of blacks had completed high school, according to the Census Bureau. In 2008, the figures were 87.1 percent for whites and 83 percent for blacks—for all intents and purposes, full parity. In 1967, 10.6 percent of whites and only 4 percent of blacks had completed four years of college. In 2008, 29.8 percent of whites and 19.6 percent of blacks were college-educated—a threefold increase for whites but a quintupling for African Americans.
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The oft-quoted “statistic” about there being more young black men in prison than in college—Barack Obama cited it during the presidential campaign—is wrong by miles; there are about three times as many college-age African American men on campus as there are behind bars. It’s true that one big hurdle remains: While the percentage of African Americans entering college is approaching that of whites, significantly fewer black students stay long enough to graduate. But leaving college short of a degree is hardly the same as being sent to prison.

Roughly half of black families own their homes. More than one-fourth of African American adults work in management or professional jobs. Before the 2008 financial meltdown, African
Americans had an aggregate purchasing power estimated at $913 billion.
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If Mainstream black America were a sovereign nation, it would have the seventeenth-largest economy in the world—bigger than that of Turkey, for example, or Saudi Arabia, or South Africa. That all this has happened in the space of forty years, due to the ambition and labor of just two generations, is something of which Horatio Alger would be proud.

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Why hasn’t this Mainstream success penetrated the national consciousness? Mostly because we tend to see what we expect to see. Our eyes confirm what we “know,” and everybody “knows” that black America is mired in intractable problems that defy solution. Everybody “knows” that black America, on average, has hardly begun to catch up with the rest of society—and since we “know” this, there is no reason to look more closely. If people would actually open their eyes, the existence of an enormous black Mainstream would be obvious. In terms of population and income, it’s almost like failing to notice the existence of Australia.