Authors: Eugene Robinson
So the Democrats are the only game in town, and not since the presidential campaigns of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton have the party’s Transcendent bigwigs or its Mainstream rank and file challenged the party’s leadership from an explicitly black perspective. Rather, African Americans have won genuine power in the party by working within the system. For instance, Congressman Clyburn, the second-most-powerful African American in Washington after Obama, was instrumental in finally getting the president’s health-care-reform legislation passed. As the third-ranking member of the House of Representatives, he also has managed to keep a stream of much-needed funds flowing to cash-strapped historically black colleges and universities. Clyburn is a graduate of South Carolina State University, which is just down the street from the house where I grew up. African Americans should continue to use their power and influence within the Democratic Party, and maybe someday the Republicans will come calling with a bouquet of flowers.
Meanwhile, it’s all but inevitable that at times the four black Americas will rub up against one another, and the points of
contact may chafe. There is already friction between the immigrant Emergent and the Abandoned, who complain of being exploited by immigrant-black-owned businesses just as they once complained about neighborhood stores whose proprietors were white, Jewish, or Korean. The Mainstream have long whispered their disapproval of how Emergent immigrants were taking—or, to be honest, winning—college admissions slots that some believe should go to the native-born. Now, increasingly, those objections are being spoken out loud.
The biracial Emergent have the advantage of straddling two worlds—but also the disadvantage of being able to reject neither. Those who embrace African American identity with no reservation, as President Obama did, are in turn embraced warmly by the other black Americas. Those who have more difficulty composing a coherent racial self are viewed with a certain cool ambiguity.
One example of this involves Washington mayor Adrian Fenty, who is biracial and was elected in a landslide, winning every precinct in the city. Once in office, he put fewer African Americans in key, high-profile posts than his predecessor black mayors had done; his cool, technocratic style had none of the glad-handing, back-slapping empathy that voters were used to from the likes of Marion Barry, who emerged as one of Fenty’s harshest critics. An impression was somehow created that the mayor was acting with favoritism toward white residents—or, I think more accurately, that he was acting without favoritism toward black residents. As he prepared to stand for reelection in 2010, he had a campaign war chest that looked big enough to overwhelm any challenger. But his poll numbers among African Americans—in both Mainstream and Abandoned neighborhoods—were plummeting, and I believe
it is fair to say that the reason had to do less with any of his specific words or deeds than with unease about his sense of identity.
The Abandoned increasingly stand apart and alone. They resent immigrant Emergents who use their communities as stepping-stones, Mainstream do-gooders who come to lecture them by day but make sure to leave before nightfall, and Transcendents who talk black but in every sense act white. The rest of us moved away and left them to their own devices, without the tools or the knowledge to better themselves. They noticed.
W. E. B. DuBois famously wrote that “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the color-line.” I believe the problem of the twenty-first century is the problem of the Abandoned. The longer we wait to solve it, the harder it will be to even know where to begin.
And the longer we wait, the longer we forestall the possibility of a day when race ceases to be the defining attribute of African Americans. Throughout our history, other groups of outsiders, such as the Irish, the Italians, and the Jews, have been looked down upon, stigmatized, and discriminated against, but eventually through hard work and sacrifice have won their rightful place in American society. African Americans have overcome far greater obstacles to accomplish the same feat—and yet race still separates us, preoccupies us, and defines us.
There is no longer one black America, no longer a complete sense of racial solidarity based on clearly defined common interests. But there remains one black racial identity that the majority of African Americans—Mainstream, Abandoned, Transcendent, and Emergent—still share. As long as the Abandoned remain buried in both society’s and their own dysfunction,
with diminishing hope of ever being able to escape, the rest of us cannot feel that we have truly escaped, either. We cannot begin to un-hyphenate ourselves. Certainly, DuBois’s “color-line” has been shifted to entrap fewer black Americans, but at the same time it has become more impregnable. The challenge for every American now is to erase it once and for all.
1.
Carmen DeNavas-Walt, Bernadette D. Proctor, and Cheryl Hill Lee,
Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2005
(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Census Bureau, 2006), 34.
2.
Ibid.
3.
Ibid., 31.
4.
Mary Mederios Kent, “Immigration and America’s Black Population,”
Population Bulletin
62, 4 (2007): 4.
5.
Sara Rimer and Karen W. Arenson, “Top Colleges Take More Blacks, But Which Ones?,”
The New York Times
, June 24, 2004.
6.
David R. Harris and Hiromi Ono, “Cohabitation, Marriage, and Markets: A New Look at Intimate Interracial Relationships,” in
Discussion Paper
(Ann Arbor, MI: Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan, 2003).
7.
“Optimism About Black Progress Declines: Blacks See Growing Values Gap Between Poor and Middle Class,” Pew Research Center, November 13, 2007.
8.
D.C. Public Schools website, available at
http://dcatlas.dcgis.dc.gov/schoolprofile/
.
9.
Eugene Robinson, “Which Black America?,”
The Washington Post
, October 9, 2007.
10.
Charles Johnson, “The End of the Black American Narrative,”
The American Scholar
(Summer 2008): 6; also available at
www.theamericanscholar.org/the-end-of-the-black-american-narrative/
.
1.
Booker T. Washington, “Atlanta Compromise Speech,” September 18, 1985, Booker T. Washington Collection, African American Odyssey, American Memory (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress).
2.
W. E. B. DuBois, “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others,” in
The Souls of Black Folk
(Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Company, 1903), 33.
3.
Ray Stannard Baker,
Following the Color Line: An Account of Negro Citizenship in the American Democracy
(New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1908), 9–10.
4.
Ibid., 9.
5.
W. E. B. DuBois, “A Litany of Atlanta,” in
The Book of American Negro Poetry
(New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1922), 49–54.
6.
Baker, 14.
7.
Ibid., 16–17.
8.
Stewart E. Tolnay, “The African American ‘Great Migration’ and Beyond,”
Annual Review of Sociology
29 (2003): 209–32.
9.
“Optimism About Black Progress Declines: Blacks See Growing Values Gap Between Poor and Middle Class,” Pew Research Center, November 13, 2007.
1.
Sam Smith, “A Short History of Black Washington,”
The Progressive Review
(2003).
2.
Ben W. Gilbert et al.,
Ten Blocks from the White House: Anatomy of the Washington Riots of 1968
(New York: F. A. Praeger, 1968), 23–24.
3.
Chicago Center for Working Class Studies, Community Walk Project
www.workingclassstudies.org
;
www.labortrail.org
;
www.communitywalk.com
.
4.
Thomas J. Sugrue, “Motor City: The Story of Detroit,”
History Now
11 (March 2007); also available at
www.gilderlehrman.org/historynow/03_2007/historian6.php
.
5.
U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development website, available at
www.hud.gov/offices/fheo/FHLaws/index.cfm
.
6.
“Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders,” available at
www.eisenhowerfoundation.org/docs/kerner.pdf
, 1.
7.
Loving v. Virginia
, U.S. Supreme Court, available at
www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/historics/
USSC_CR_0388_0001_ZO.html
, 2.
8.
Ibid.
9.
Esteban J. Parra et al., “Estimating African American Admixture Proportions by Use of Population-Specific Alleles,”
The American Journal of Human Genetics
63, 6 (December 1998): 1839–51.
10.
U.S. Census Bureau, “Population by Race and Hispanic or Latino Origin for the United States: 1990 and 2000 (PHC-T-1),” Table 2, available at
www.census.gov/population/www/cen2000/briefs/phc-t1/index.html
.
11.
Mary Mederios Kent, “Immigration and America’s Black Population,”
Population Bulletin
62, 4 (2007): 13.
12.
Ibid., 6.
13.
Carmen DeNavas-Walt, Bernadette D. Proctor, and Cheryl Hill Lee,
Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2005
(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Census Bureau, 2006), 31.
1.
All figures from U.S. Census Bureau, available at
http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/index.html
.
2.
Ibid.
3.
St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton,
Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City
(New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1945), 226–27.
4.
Ibid., 239–42.
5.
Carmen DeNavas-Walt, Bernadette D. Proctor, and Cheryl Hill Lee,
Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2005
(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Census Bureau, 2006), 32–34.
6.
Ibid., 34.
7.
U.S. Census Bureau, “Current Population Survey,” Historical Tables, Table A-2, available at
www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/educ-attn.html
.
8.
Jeffrey M. Humphreys,
The Multicultural Economy 2008
(Athens, GA: Selig Center for Economic Growth, University of Georgia, 2008), 14; see Table 1.
9.
Media Matters for America, September 21, 2007, available at
mediamatters.org/research/200709210007
.
10.
U.S. Census Bureau, “U.S. Population Projections, Released 2008 (Based on Census 2000),” Summary Table 2, available at
www.census.gov/population/www/projections/
summarytables.html
.
11.
Stephen Provasnik, Linda L. Shafer, and Thomas D. Snyder,
Historically Black Colleges and Universities, 1976 to 2001
(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Education), 4.
1.
Greater New Orleans Community Data Center, see Pre-Katrina Poverty Map, available at
www.gnocdc.org
.
2.
Bruce Katz, “Concentrated Poverty in New Orleans and Other American Cities,”
The Chronicle of Higher Education
(August 4, 2006); also available at
www.brookings.edu/opinions/2006/0804cities_katz.aspx
.
3.
Greater New Orleans Community Data Center.
4.
The following summary is taken from
A Failure of Initiative: Final Report of the Select Bipartisan Committee to Investigate the Preparation for and Response to Hurricane Katrina
, Congressional Reports: H. Rpt. 109–377 (Washington, D.C.: Government Publishing Office, 2008), 7–9; available at
www.gpoaccess.gov/serialset/creports/katrina.html
.
5.
Greater New Orleans Community Data Center.
6.
William Julius Wilson, “When Work Disappears: New Implications for Race and Urban Poverty in the Global Economy,” Centre for Analysys of Social Exclusion, London School of Economics, November 1998, available at
sticerd.lse.ac.uk/dps/case/cp/paper17.pdf
.
7.
Greater New Orleans Community Data Center.
8.
Ibid.
9.
Douglas S. Massey, “American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass,”
American Journal of Sociology
96, 2 (September 1990): 329–57.
10.
U.S. Census Bureau, “The 2010 Stastical Abstract: The National Data Book,” Table 295: Crimes and Crime Rates by Type of Offense, available at
www.census.gov/compendia/statab/cats/law_enforcement_courts_prisons/
crimes_and_crime_rates.html
.
11.
U.S. Census Bureau, State and County QuickFacts, available at
http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/11000.html
.
12.
Rose M. Kreider,
Living Arrangements of Children: 2004
(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Census Bureau, February 2008), 4; also available at
www.census.gov/prod/2008pubs/p70–114.pdf
.
13.
William J. Sabol, Heather C. West, and Matthew Cooper,
Prisoners in 2008
(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2009), 2; also available at
http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=1763
.
14.
Reuters news story, available at
www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE5AP1EV20091126
.
1.
Shailagh Murray, “Obama Camp Pushes Back on ‘Rookie’ Ad,”
The Washington Post
, January 18, 2008.
2.
Katharine Q. Seelye, “BET Founder Slams Obama in South Carolina,”
The New York Times
, January 13, 2008.
3.
Fox News, December 10, 2007, available at
www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,316366,00.html
.
4.
These statistics are available at
http://health.usnews.com/health-news/family-health/childrens-health/articles/2010/03/01/risk-of-childhood-obesity-higher-among-minorities.html
.
5.
Carmen DeNavas-Walt, Bernadette D. Proctor, and Cheryl Hill Lee,
Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2005
(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Census Bureau, 2006), 24.
6.
Fox and Friends
, transcript, February 22, 2008.
7.
Eugene Robinson, “Black America’s New Reality,”
The Washington Post
, July 19, 2009.
8.
Harold Ford Jr. official website, available at
haroldfordjr.com
.
9.
Michael Barbaro, “Senate Hopeful in New State Airs Evolving Views,”
The New York Times
, January 12, 2010.