Disintegration (22 page)

Washington-Williams’s mother was Carrie Butler, a servant in the household of Thurmond’s parents. Butler was just sixteen when her daughter was born; Thurmond was twenty-two. This was the pattern of interracial relationships for much of American history—master-slave until the Civil War, then
employer-servant afterward. In the South, these unions were almost exclusively between white men and black women. The determination of white Southerners to eliminate the possibility of sexual relations between the other variable in the matrix—black men and white women—was one of the foundational pillars of Jim Crow.

Naturally the unthinkable did happen—jazz musicians with their white groupies and patrons, Sammy Davis Jr. marrying May Britt. But such relationships were formed on the fringes of society, among entertainers, hipsters, hopheads, bon vivants, academics, and foreigners. In 1961, one such union, between an adventurous young student from the American heartland eager to discover the world and a brilliant but mercurial scholar from Kenya, produced the forty-fourth president of the United States.

The
Loving v. Virginia
decision in 1967, which legalized interracial marriage in the states where it was still illegal—Virginia, Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, South Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, West Virginia, and Maryland (which repealed its law after the suit was filed but before the court ruled)—was a huge step. Perhaps a more important event, that same year, was the Summer of Love in San Francisco, which marked the beginning of the American cultural revolution. For those young enough to tune in, turn on, and drop out, barriers such as race existed only to be overcome. The wild side existed only to be walked on. And for those who might not have felt compelled to make a political statement—or who, perhaps, had found other effective ways to annoy their parents—there was the simple circumstance of falling in love.

This once-forbidden love made possible the existence of Tiger Woods, Halle Berry, Derek Jeter, Mariah Carey, Alicia Keys—bold-faced names who are part of Emergent black America. It is difficult to tease out of census data an accurate figure for the number of black-white biracial Americans in the United States. My best guess, after looking at the data and making a few conservative assumptions, is at least two million. Whatever the number may be, I’m quite confident in predicting that it’s about to soar.

The baby boomers were the first generation of African Americans to know desegregated schools and neighborhoods. Subsequent generations of Mainstream African Americans have known nothing else. To the boomers, race was important, inescapable, urgent. To their children, race means much less. There is no cultural gap between black children who grew up in suburban, middle-class settings and their white classmates from down the street. From kindergarten through high school, they are taught about tolerance and diversity; they don’t just learn about Christmas, they decorate their classrooms for Hanukkah and Kwanzaa, too. Born mostly in the 1980s, this so-called millennial generation is as far removed from the tumult of the civil rights struggle as my generation is from the Great Depression. They can read about that time in history books, but there is no way that they could have a feeling for what it was like, no way that they could really connect.

The young people who are now in their twenties have had a radically different experience of race than my generation had. I wouldn’t call it a “post-racial” generation, because to me that implies a denial that such a thing as race still exists. “Anti-racial” seems to me a better term, in that the millennials have heard one overriding lesson about the subject since they
were in the cradle: Race doesn’t matter. On college campuses, especially, the idea that race should in any way restrict any student’s dating choices is viewed as antediluvian and weird. So far, this militant open-mindedness has not translated into an explosion of interracial marriage. It may be that while racial barriers to campus friendships, hookups, and other relationships have been all but eliminated, the search for a life partner is freighted with more societal baggage. Marriage inevitably brings families into the picture, and it may be the case that the millennials’ parents, despite their pride in being members of the generation that changed the world, find that their political beliefs against racism of any kind are overmatched by history and culture—a stubborn inheritance that no one generation, not even the boomers, could possibly erase. But history’s direction is clear, and the imperatives of human nature that compel young adults to fall in love and procreate are eternal. I’m confident that we are about to see an unprecedented wave of interracial marriages and the largest cohort of interracial children in American history.

In other words: I have seen the future, and it is beige.

* * *

I hesitate to return to a character who has already become quite familiar in these pages—President Barack Obama—but he is relevant in this chapter, too, because in addition to being the ultimate Transcendent black American, he is also a double Emergent. As the son of a Kenyan, he represents the internationalization of black America (although his father was part of a smaller, precursor trickle of black people from Africa and the Caribbean who were high-powered enough to gain entry
before the immigration laws were changed). And, of course, he is also the son of a white woman from Kansas.

When he launched his campaign, Obama was seen—not by the African American public, generally, but by the national media—as perhaps insufficiently “black” to win black America’s unconditional support. That quickly fizzled out—it was obvious that Obama’s self-identification as a black American was complete and unambiguous, and in any event he didn’t look like anyone who could ever be called “white” in the United States. Obama grew up mostly in Indonesia and Hawaii, so it was an act of conscious will for him to adopt his black American identity. That was how society was going to brand him whether he liked it or not, but he cultivated his black Americanness (American blackness?) with what looked almost like the zeal of a convert. His skin color and African facial features were always going to be there for everyone to see, and to categorize, but still he might have emerged from his adolescent search for himself as essentially colorless—deracinated, not just in the sense of being raceless but also rootless. He had to be black, but he didn’t have to
act
black.

Instead, he evolved a persona that could best be described as black urban cool. He walks with an easy lope; he plays basketball, not tennis. On the occasions when I’ve seen him interact with groups that are mostly or exclusively black, he shows no hint of unfamiliarity with in-group gesture, mannerism, cadence, or tone. He strikes no false notes. It is difficult to spell out exactly what I mean, since it has so much to do with affect and vibe. Perhaps this helps: In any setting, if he chooses, he can effortlessly give the impression of someone walking into an upscale jazz club and gliding through the room toward his regular table.

The he’s-too-black phase of Obama’s campaign—courtesy of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright and his Trinity United Church of Christ—came a year after the not-black-enough phase. Both were ridiculous, but the too-black meme was a real threat to Obama’s chance of winning the Democratic nomination. He responded by giving a remarkable speech in Philadelphia about race and how it fit into the broader American historical narrative. As rhetoric, as political theater, and as a display of erudition, it was stunning. But I was less interested in the broad sweep of Obama’s speech than in a few lines that were intensely personal.

At that point, during the first Wright eruption, Obama was not yet ready to cut ties with his longtime pastor. He acknowledged Wright’s failings, but he added:

Commentators who picked up on that line accused Obama of “throwing his grandmother under the bus” by alleging she made racist remarks. But I heard something much more interesting:
the simple statement that while Obama was a black American, the fact that he was biracial meant that his relationship with white America was necessarily different from mine, in that it was personal. Obama might sit in a pew and listen to the Afrocentric “us versus them” fire and brimstone of Wright’s preaching, but he could never fully buy into it. At a fundamental level, for Obama the conflict would have had to be “us versus us,” or even “me versus me.” For anyone who wants to avoid crippling self-loathing and years of psychoanalysis, it’s best not to go there.

This is the real question posed by Emergent black America: Do the rapidly increasing numbers of immigrant and biracial African Americans have the same sense of historical injury that other black Americans do? And if not, does it matter? Might it change the atmosphere, and perhaps lower the temperature as well?

I’m reminded of Obama’s observation, in my Oval Office interview, that soon—if it is not already the case—there will be more African Americans who have no experience of Jim Crow racism than those who do. This is an important milestone because memories of those pre-enlightened times are more stubborn, more vivid, and more ambiguous in their psychological impact than many people might think. A rough equivalent, I suppose, would be having survived and escaped an abusive relationship. Nobody would choose to go through that kind of trauma, and nobody would wish such an experience for their son or daughter. But having endured and overcome the abuse, one learns. One becomes cautious. One does not give trust or commit lightly. And one never, ever forgets.

When I was growing up, sometimes it seemed as if white
folks spent most of their waking hours trying to think up new ways to keep black people down. Given the time and place, South Carolina in the early ’60s, that wasn’t far from the truth. When the Voting Rights Act gave black people access to the polls, for example, white officials simply gerrymandered the city limits—including white suburban developments, excluding black ones—to ensure that African Americans could not take power at city hall. Any reasonable person would conclude that the great legislative triumphs of 1964 and 1965, as monumental as they were, didn’t represent the end of the struggle. They marked the beginning of a new phase in which the adversary would fight with subtlety and nuance, not with burning crosses.

It was easy for some African Americans to slip into something resembling paranoia—indeed, my colleague at
The Washington Post
, columnist Richard Cohen, once cautioned me to remember that “the word ‘paranoid’ has no meaning for blacks and Jews.” After Dr. King was killed, did “they” purposely allow the black commercial centers of major cities to burn, thus setting back the quest for economic empowerment? Was it an accident that the heroin and crack epidemics raged in the inner cities but not in the white suburbs?

I never put stock in conspiracy theories, simply because my experience as a reporter taught me that it’s almost impossible for three or four people to pull off any kind of secret plot; that there could be thousands or even millions of coconspirators, and that they could keep quiet for decades, is beyond fantasy. But I know that the experience of Jim Crow has left me with a hard little nugget of suspicion and resentment buried deep inside, and that it gives me motivation and strength. It’s the
feeling that there are people out there who don’t want me to succeed, which makes me all the more determined to deny them satisfaction.

African Americans of my generation transmit some of this legacy to our children, either consciously or unconsciously. It’s like passing down through the family a suit of armor—an heirloom that protects but also burdens. But the fastest-growing segments of black America—the Emergents—have less reason, or perhaps no reason at all, to go through life wearing chain mail.

For black immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean, the United States may be judged guilty of modern sins, but not the ancient kind that fester in the blood. Immigrants may have complicated feelings about the European colonial powers, but America is seen as an imperfect society that nevertheless offers economic opportunity and political freedom—seen in this light unambiguously, with no historical asterisk. Why else would Jamaicans and Bahamians be so eager to come to this country to join the family members who came before them? Why would Ethiopians or Nigerians leave their homelands and move halfway around the world?

The immigrants are anything but ignorant about America’s racial history, but they arrive at the theater in the middle of the third act. They don’t enter a country that trains fire hoses on black people, they enter one that practices affirmative action and makes a special effort to enroll their children in the best colleges. They don’t enter a country that is obviously hostile to black entrepreneurs, they enter one with minority set-asides and small-business loans. The American dream doesn’t look like a cinch, but neither does it look like a cruel deception.

I don’t want to overstate. The men, women, and children
who constitute Emergent black America have no immunity from racial discrimination. If they want to feel a sense of community, they are more likely to seek it—and find it—among the four black Americas than elsewhere. And anyone who might believe that immigrant status confers any degree of protection from the most corrosive residues of history should remember what happened to Abner Louima and Amadou Diallo, two black men, at the hands of New York City police. In 1997, Louima, who was born in Haiti, was arrested outside a Brooklyn nightclub, taken to a station house, and brutalized by officers, including being sodomized with a broken broomstick. Two years later, Diallo, an immigrant from Guinea, was killed—shot nineteen times—as he stood at the front door of his Bronx apartment house; police said they thought he was reaching for a gun, but Diallo, unarmed, was actually trying to take out his wallet and identify himself to the officers. Every black man in America knows he is more likely to be the victim of police brutality or mistaken identity than his white coworker in the next cubicle—every black man, no matter where he was born.