Disintegration - The Splintering Of Black America Part 1

Disintegration : the splintering of Black America.

Eugene Robinson.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.

Disintegration could not have been written without the incisive, timely, good-natured, and sometimes positively uncanny contributions of Kris Puopolo, my editor at Doubleday, who often knew precisely what I was trying to say before I did. I also owe a tremendous debt to my literary agent, Rafe Sagalyn, who believed in this project from the beginning and was utterly committed to making it a reality. could not have been written without the incisive, timely, good-natured, and sometimes positively uncanny contributions of Kris Puopolo, my editor at Doubleday, who often knew precisely what I was trying to say before I did. I also owe a tremendous debt to my literary agent, Rafe Sagalyn, who believed in this project from the beginning and was utterly committed to making it a reality.

A book-in-progress is like a new member of the author's household-a fussy, demanding weekend guest who never left-and my wonderful wife, Avis Collins Robinson, welcomed this interloper with unfailing patience and grace; she even came up with the t.i.tle, among many other substantive contributions.

My editors at The Was.h.i.+ngton Post The Was.h.i.+ngton Post, Fred Hiatt and Autumn Brewington, and at the Was.h.i.+ngton Post Writers Group, Alan Shearer and Jim Hill, gave me the time and s.p.a.ce I needed to write the book; I am in their debt. And I owe special thanks to the many distinguished scholars whose research I cite in these pages. Any errors of a.n.a.lysis or interpretation are mine, not theirs.

1

"BLACK AMERICA" DOESN'T LIVE HERE ANYMORE.

It was one of those only-in-Was.h.i.+ngton affairs, a glittering A-list dinner in a stately mansion near Emba.s.sy Row. The hosts were one of the capital's leading power couples-the husband a wealthy attorney who famously served as consigliere and golfing partner to presidents, the wife a social doyenne who sat on all the right committees and boards. The guest list included enough bold-faced names to fill the Was.h.i.+ngton Post' Was.h.i.+ngton Post's Reliable Source gossip column for a solid week. Most of the furniture had been cleared away to let people circulate, but the elegant rooms were so thick with status, ego, and ambition that it was hard to move.

Officially the dinner was to honor an aging lion of American business: the retired chief executive of the world's biggest media and entertainment company. Owing to recent events, however, the distinguished mogul was eclipsed at his own party. An elegant businesswoman from Chicago-a stranger to most of the other guests-suddenly had become one of the capital's most important power brokers, and this exclusive soiree was serving as her unofficial debut in Was.h.i.+ngton society. The bold-faced names feigned nonchalance but were desperate to meet her. Eyes followed the woman's every move; ears strained to catch her every word. She pretended not to mind being stalked from room to room by eager supplicants and would-be best friends. As the evening went on, it became apparent that while the other guests were taking her measure, she was systematically taking theirs. To every beaming, glad-handing, air-kissing approach she responded with the Mona Lisa smile of a woman not to be taken lightly.

Others there that night included a well-connected lawyer who would soon be nominated to fill a key cabinet post; the chief executive of one of the nation's leading cable-television networks; the former chief executive of the mortgage industry's biggest firm; a gaggle of high-powered lawyers; a pride of investment bankers; a flight of social b.u.t.terflies; and a chattering of well-known cable-television pundits, slightly hoa.r.s.e and completely exhausted after spending a full year in more or less continuous yakety-yak about the presidential race. By any measure, it was a top-shelf crowd.

On any given night, of course, some gathering of the great and the good in Was.h.i.+ngton ranks above all others by virtue of exclusivity, glamour, or the number of Secret Service SUVs parked outside. What makes this one worth noting is that all the luminaries I have described are black.

The affair was held at the home of Vernon Jordan, the smooth, handsome, charismatic confidant of Democratic presidents, and his wife, Ann, an emeritus trustee of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and a reliable presence at every significant social event in town. Known for his impeccable political instincts, Jordan had made the rare mistake of backing the wrong candidate in the 2008 primaries-his friend Hillary Clinton. There are no grudges in Vernon's world, however; barely a week after the election, he was already skillfully renewing his ties with the Obama crowd.

The nominal guest of honor was Richard Parsons, the former CEO of Time Warner Inc. Months earlier, he had relinquished his corner office on Columbus Circle to tend the Tuscan vineyard that friends said was the favorite of his residences.

The woman who stole the show was Valerie Jarrett, one of Obama's best friends and most trusted advisers. A powerful figure in the Chicago business community, Jarrett was unknown in Was.h.i.+ngton until Obama made his out-of-nowhere run to capture the Democratic nomination and then the presidency. Suddenly she was the most talked-about and sought-after woman in town. Everyone understood that she would be sitting on the mother lode of the capital's rarest and most precious a.s.set: access to the president of the United States.

Others sidling up to the buffet included Eric Holder, soon to be nominated as the nation's first black attorney general, and his wife, Sharon Malone, a prominent obstetrician; Debra Lee, the longtime chief of Black Entertainment Television and one of the most powerful women in the entertainment industry; Franklin Raines, the former CEO of Fannie Mae, a central and controversial figure in the financial crisis that had begun to roil markets around the globe; and cable-news regulars Donna Brazile and Soledad O'Brien from CNN, Juan Williams from Fox News Channel, and, well, me from MSNBC-all of us having talked so much during the long campaign that we were sick of hearing our own voices.

The glittering scene wasn't at all what most people have in mind when they talk about black America-which is one reason why so much of what people say about black America makes so little sense. The fact is that asking what something called "black America" thinks, feels, or wants makes as much sense as commissioning a new Gallup poll of the Ottoman Empire. Black America, as we knew it, is history.

There was a time when there were agreed-upon "black leaders," when there was a clear "black agenda," when we could talk confidently about "the state of black America"-but not anymore. Not after decades of desegregation, affirmative action, and urban decay; not after globalization decimated the working cla.s.s and trickle-down economics sorted the nation into winners and losers; not after the biggest wave of black immigration from Africa and the Caribbean since slavery; not after most people ceased to notice-much less care-when a black man and a white woman walked down the street hand in hand. These are among the forces and trends that have had the unintended consequence of tearing black America to pieces.

Ever wonder why black elected officials spend so much time talking about purely symbolic "issues," like an official apology for slavery? Or why they never miss the chance to denounce a racist outburst from a rehab-bound celebrity? It's because symbolism, history, and old-fas.h.i.+oned racism are about the only things they can be sure their African American const.i.tuents still have in common.

Barack Obama's stunning election as the first African American president seemed to come out of nowhere, but it was the result of a transformation that has been unfolding for decades. With implications both hopeful and dispiriting, black America has undergone a process of disintegration.

Disintegration isn't something black America likes to talk about. But it's right there, doc.u.mented in census data, economic reports, housing patterns, and a wealth of other evidence just begging for honest a.n.a.lysis. And it's right there in our daily lives, if we allow ourselves to notice. Instead of one black America, now there are four: - a Mainstream middle-cla.s.s majority with a full owners.h.i.+p stake in American society - a large, Abandoned minority with less hope of escaping poverty and dysfunction than at any time since Reconstruction's crus.h.i.+ng end - a small Transcendent elite with such enormous wealth, power, and influence that even white folks have to genuflect - two newly Emergent groups-individuals of mixed-race heritage and communities of recent black immigrants-that make us wonder what "black" is even supposed to mean These four black Americas are increasingly distinct, separated by demography, geography, and psychology. They have different profiles, different mind-sets, different hopes, fears, and dreams. There are times and places where we all still come back together-on the increasingly rare occasions when we feel lumped together, defined, and threatened solely on the basis of skin color, usually involving some high-profile instance of bald-faced discrimination or injustice; and in venues like "urban" or black-oriented radio, which serves as a kind of speed-of-light grapevine. More and more, however, we lead separate lives.

And where these distinct "nations" rub against one another, there are sparks. The Mainstream tend to doubt the authenticity of the Emergent, but they're usually too polite, or too politically correct, to say so out loud. The Abandoned accuse the Emergent-the immigrant segment, at least-of moving into Abandoned neighborhoods and using the locals as mere stepping-stones. The immigrant Emergent, with their intact families and long-range mind-set, ridicule the Abandoned for being their own worst enemies. The Mainstream bemoan the plight of the Abandoned-but express their deep concern from a distance. The Transcendent, to steal the old line about Boston society, speak only to G.o.d; they are idolized by the Mainstream and the Emergent for the obstacles they have overcome, and by the Abandoned for the s.h.i.+ny things they own. Mainstream, Emergent, and Transcendent all lock their car doors when they drive through an Abandoned neighborhood. They think the Abandoned don't hear the disrespectful thunk thunk of the locks; they're wrong. of the locks; they're wrong.

How did this breakup happen? It's overly simplistic to draw a straight line from "We Shall Overcome" to "Get Rich or Die Tryin'," but that's the general trajectory.

Forty years ago, after major cities from coast to coast had gone up in flames, black equaled poor. Roughly six in ten black Americans were barely a step ahead of the bill collector, with fully 40 percent of the total living in the abject penury that the Census Bureau officially labels "poverty" and another 20 percent earning a bit more but still basically poor. Over the next three decades-as civil rights laws banned discrimination in education, housing, and employment, and as affirmative action offered life-changing opportunities to those prepared to take advantage-millions of black households clawed their way into the Mainstream and the black poverty rate fell steadily, year after year. By the mid-'90s, it was down to 25 percent-and then the needle got stuck. Today, roughly one-quarter of black Americans-the Abandoned-remain in poverty.1 And the poorest of these poor folks are actually losing ground. In 2000, 14.9 percent of black households reported income of less than $10,000 (in today's dollars); in 2005, the figure was 17.1 percent.2 Demographically, the Abandoned const.i.tute the youngest black America; they are also by far the least suburban, living for the most part in core urban neighborhoods and the rural South. Demographically, the Abandoned const.i.tute the youngest black America; they are also by far the least suburban, living for the most part in core urban neighborhoods and the rural South.

Those who made it into the Mainstream, however, have continued their rise. In 1967, only one black household in ten made $50,000 a year; now three of every ten black families earn at least that much. More strikingly, four decades ago not even two black households in a hundred two black households in a hundred earned the equivalent of more than $100,000 a year. Now almost one black household in ten has crossed that threshold to the upper middle cla.s.s-joining George and Louise Jefferson in that "dee-luxe apartment in the sky," perhaps, or living down the street from the Huxtables' handsomely appointed brownstone. All told, the four black Americas control an estimated $800 billion in purchasing power-roughly the GDP of the thirteenth-richest nation on earth. Most of that money is made and spent by the Mainstream. earned the equivalent of more than $100,000 a year. Now almost one black household in ten has crossed that threshold to the upper middle cla.s.s-joining George and Louise Jefferson in that "dee-luxe apartment in the sky," perhaps, or living down the street from the Huxtables' handsomely appointed brownstone. All told, the four black Americas control an estimated $800 billion in purchasing power-roughly the GDP of the thirteenth-richest nation on earth. Most of that money is made and spent by the Mainstream.3 Here's another way to look at it: Forty years ago, if you found yourself among a representative all-black crowd, you could a.s.sume that nearly half the people around you were poor, poorly educated, and underemployed. Today, if you found yourself at a representative gathering of black adults, four out of five would be solidly middle cla.s.s.

And some African Americans have soared far higher. A friend of mine who lives in Chicago once took a flight on the Tribune Company's corporate jet. Noticing a much larger, newer, fancier private jet parked on the tarmac nearby, he asked his boss whose it was. The answer: "Oprah's." The all-powerful Winfrey is one of the African Americans who have soared highest of all, into the realm of the Transcendent. There have long been black millionaires-Madam C. J. Walker, who built an empire on hair-care products in the early twentieth century, is often cited as the first. But never before have African Americans presided as full-fledged Masters of the Universe over some of the biggest firms on Wall Street (Richard Parsons, Kenneth Chenault, Stanley O'Neal). There have been wealthy black athletes since Jack Johnson, but never before have they transformed themselves into such savvy tyc.o.o.ns (Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods). And while African Americans have made billions for the music industry over the years, even pioneers such as Berry Gordy Jr. and Quincy Jones never owned and controlled as big a chunk of the business as today's hip-hop moguls (Russell Simmons, P. Diddy, Jay-Z).

And the Emergent? They're the product of two separate phenomena. First, there has been a flood of black immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean. In 1980, the census reported 816,000 foreign-born black people in the United States; by the 2000 census, that figure had more than tripled to 2,815,000.4 You might question my use of the word "flood" for numbers that seem relatively small in absolute terms, but consider these newcomers' outsize impact: Half or more of the black students entering elite universities such as Harvard, Princeton, and Duke these days are the sons and daughters of African immigrants. You might question my use of the word "flood" for numbers that seem relatively small in absolute terms, but consider these newcomers' outsize impact: Half or more of the black students entering elite universities such as Harvard, Princeton, and Duke these days are the sons and daughters of African immigrants.5 This makes sense when you consider that their parents are the best-educated immigrant group in America, with more advanced degrees than the Asians, the Europeans, you name it. (They're far better educated than native-born Americans, black or white.) But their children's educational success leads Mainstream and Abandoned black Americans to ask whether affirmative action and other programs designed to foster diversity are reaching the people they were intended to help-the systematically disadvantaged descendants of slaves. This makes sense when you consider that their parents are the best-educated immigrant group in America, with more advanced degrees than the Asians, the Europeans, you name it. (They're far better educated than native-born Americans, black or white.) But their children's educational success leads Mainstream and Abandoned black Americans to ask whether affirmative action and other programs designed to foster diversity are reaching the people they were intended to help-the systematically disadvantaged descendants of slaves.

The second Emergent phenomenon is the acceptance of interracial marriage, once a crime and until recently a novelty. A University of Michigan study found that in 1990, nearly one married black man in ten was wed to a white woman-and roughly one married black woman in twenty-five was wed to a white man. These figures, the researchers found, had increased eightfold over the previous four decades.6 Barack Obama, the man who would be president; Adrian Fenty, the mayor of Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C.; Jordin Sparks, a winner on Barack Obama, the man who would be president; Adrian Fenty, the mayor of Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C.; Jordin Sparks, a winner on American Idol American Idol-all are the product of black-white marriages. And the boomer-echo generation, raised on a diet of diversity, has even fewer hang-ups about race and relations.h.i.+ps.

In a sense, though, we're just headed back to the future. Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. recently produced a public-television series in which he used genealogical research and DNA testing to unearth the heritage of several prominent African Americans. When he sent his own blood off to be tested, Gates discovered to his surprise that more than 50 percent of his genetic material was European. Wider DNA testing has shown that nearly one-third of all African Americans trace their heritage to a white male ancestor-likely a slave owner.

So forget about whether the mixed-race Emergents are "black enough." How black am I? How black can any of us claim to be?

This gradual but relentless fragmentation-economic, geographic, psychological, cultural-is by now undeniable. In 2007, a remarkable study by the Pew Research Center came up with a finding that made my jaw drop: An incredible 37 percent of African Americans agreed with the statement that "blacks today can no longer be thought of as a single race because the black community is so diverse."7 To someone like me who grew up in the Jim Crow era of separate but unequal, this is profoundly unsettling. I left the South at sixteen to go to college and, like many of my peers, went through a process of interrogating my ident.i.ty. But that phase ran its course long ago, and I knew without the slightest doubt who I was: a black man in America. Now is there some question about what being "a black man in America" even means? Has a true-false exam suddenly become multiple-choice?

The Pew study found that black Americans whose incomes placed them in the vast, struggling middle-earning between $30,000 and $100,000 a year-were the most likely to believe that black people no longer const.i.tuted one race. Black Americans at the top of the scale, with incomes of more than $100,000 a year, were most likely to cling to the more traditional view that "blacks can still be thought of as a single race because they have so much in common." Perhaps we should begin to think of racial solidarity as a luxury item.

As a thought experiment, wind the clock back precisely forty years and try to imagine how different that evening at the Jordans' would have been.

In 1968, it was possible to defend the generalization that black equaled poor-and easy to defend the statement that black certainly did not equal rich. With only 2 percent of black households earning the equivalent of $100,000 a year or more, there simply wouldn't have been many African American families that could afford to host such a lavish social event, complete with liveried waiters and a well-stocked open bar.

Even in 1968, though, Was.h.i.+ngton was a magnet for the upwardly mobile black middle cla.s.s and the tiny black upper crust. The city has been home to a significant black elite since before the days of Frederick Dougla.s.s. Of the modest number of black Americans in 1968 wealthy enough to entertain in such grand style, some definitely would have lived in Was.h.i.+ngton.

They wouldn't have lived where the Jordans did, though. Chez Jordan is in one of the city's most expensive, most exclusive neighborhoods, a leafy enclave tucked next to Rock Creek Park. Forty years ago, the area would have been literally exclusive: By una.s.sailable tradition, if not by binding legal covenant (such contracts had already been ruled null and void by the courts), the neighborhood would have been all white. That prohibition wouldn't have included the suspiciously swarthy foreign diplomat or two who might have occupied one of the official residences in the area; diplomatic immunity brought with it a kind of honorary whiteness. But even a credit-to-their-race Negro couple as educated, successful, and affluent as the Jordans wouldn't have lived in a mansion with a swimming pool on Emba.s.sy Row.

By 1968, well-to-do African American families had already begun an exodus from their old haunts in the neighborhoods around prestigious, historically black Howard University, perched on the escarpment that defined the original boundary of the city. The cultural and commercial soul of those areas, called Shaw and LeDroit Park, had been immolated in the riots that followed the a.s.sa.s.sination of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. in April of that year. The small, educated, moneyed black demographic that W. E. B. DuBois called the "Talented Tenth" was now more likely to be found along the graceful, tree-lined streets branching out from upper Sixteenth Street Northwest, the meridian that runs down the middle of the city like an arrow aimed at the portico of the White House. This latter-day Strivers' Row was and still is called the Gold Coast, although there's no nearby body of water except tiny Rock Creek. Houses there are s.p.a.cious and impressive, though somewhat less so than the stately piles you see on Emba.s.sy Row.

So forty years ago there could have been a fancy dinner party in Was.h.i.+ngton hosted by an African American family in a big, elegant house, but the house would have been elsewhere in the city. Beyond this point, our thought experiment begins to break down.

For one thing, while most of the guests at Vernon and Ann Jordan's house that night were black, there were whites as well-Michael Lynton, the chairman of Sony Pictures, for example, and James A. Johnson, the longtime Democratic Party grandee who ran Fannie Mae before Raines did. While no one would claim that Was.h.i.+ngton social life is a model of integration today, four decades ago it was much more segregated. The best way to explain the difference is that in 1968 it would have been noteworthy if a society dinner was racially integrated, even in a token sense. In 2008, it would have been noteworthy if such an affair was not.

As for the political moment, always a relevant variable in a.s.sessing a Was.h.i.+ngton dinner party, there can be no comparison. It goes without saying that in 1968, the first African American had not just been elected president; the new occupant of the White House was one Richard Milhous Nixon.

There could have been no Valerie Jarrett to make her debut as a close friend and adviser to the new president. In fact, forty years ago there could have been no Valerie Jarrett at all-a princess of black Chicago (her grandfather was the first chief of the Chicago Housing Authority, her father a prominent physician, her ex-husband the son of a pioneering black journalist), whose history included stints as a behind-the-scenes operator in city government, a successful real estate developer, and the chair of the Chicago Stock Exchange. Black women of such pedigree were rare; black women with such resumes did not exist.

Nor would most of the other guests have existed. No African American had risen nearly as high in corporate America as Parsons or Raines. No African American ran a television network the way Lee did (or lived, as Lee did, just around the bend from the Jordans). No African American was waiting impatiently for his nomination as attorney general to be announced. As a general rule, only one black journalist at a time was taken seriously as a political pundit-exclusively on issues having to do with race. And black Was.h.i.+ngtonians only got bold-faced treatment in the gossip columns of the Afro-American Afro-American and other black newspapers, never in the ma.s.s-circulation and other black newspapers, never in the ma.s.s-circulation Was.h.i.+ngton Post Was.h.i.+ngton Post or or Evening Star Evening Star.

That lovely evening at the Jordans' never could have taken place without the disintegration of the black America we once knew. Some other aspects of disintegration, however, are much less salutary.

Two months later, when Obama was inaugurated, the band from Paul Laurence Dunbar High School marched in his parade. It was an occasion of great local pride, and not just because the school is located only a couple of miles from the Capitol: Dunbar, founded in 1870 as the Preparatory High School for Colored Youth, was the first public high school for African Americans in the nation.

It is hard to overstate what Dunbar High School meant to black America in the first half of the twentieth century. It was an elite inst.i.tution, the place where the best and brightest young African Americans were taught that it wasn't enough to be as focused, determined, and accomplished as their white counterparts-they had to be better. Graduates included Dr. Charles R. Drew, the inventor of the modern blood bank; Charles Hamilton Houston, the legal scholar best known for his a.s.sociation with one of the young lawyers he mentored, Thurgood Marshall; the eminent poet Sterling Brown; and scores of other black pioneers. The faculty included the likes of Carter G. Woodson, the second African American to receive a PhD from Harvard (after W. E. B. DuBois) and the father of black history as a recognized academic discipline; and a music teacher named Henry Lee Grant, who found time to give after-hours lessons in the art and science of harmony to a promising young pianist named Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington. Ambitious black parents would pick up and move to Was.h.i.+ngton so their children could attend Dunbar High.

That was then.

In 2008, more than half a century after the Brown v. Board of Education 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 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 improvement over the previous year. 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." 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 cla.s.sic that once was billionaire Jack Kent Cooke's pied-a-terre. Amid the Dale Chihuly gla.s.s 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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 Mich.e.l.le 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 doc.u.mentary 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 pa.s.serby 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, ha.s.sled-went semi-ballistic. He protested that he was in his own house. He accused Crowley of hara.s.sing 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 a.s.sumptions. 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 n.o.blesse oblige requirements of his Transcendent status. He immediately a.s.sumed 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, a.s.suming 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 dispa.s.sionate a.n.a.lysis 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 relations.h.i.+p. It's as if the laws of societal physics had changed, as if a basic formula like F = ma F = ma no longer worked the way it had for Newton or Einstein. 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 publis.h.i.+ng 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 publis.h.i.+ng 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-cla.s.s 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 Was.h.i.+ngton Post Was.h.i.+ngton Post column. A piece ent.i.tled "Which Black America?" included these pa.s.sages: column. A piece ent.i.tled "Which Black America?" included these pa.s.sages: Why does the National Urban League, an organization for which I have great respect, compile its annual "State of Black America" report in a way that makes the condition of African Americans seem both better and worse than it really is?Trying to encompa.s.s all of black America in a few easily grasped numbers is far from a meaningless exercise. But it doesn't point the way toward specific policies for different segments of a diverse population.Why has the NAACP, once such a potent force, lost so much of its members.h.i.+p and relevance? I would argue that it's because the organization continues to look for a "black agenda" around which we can all unite with the fervor and pa.s.sion of decades past, when in fact there's a need for multiple agendas.9 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 was.h.i.+ngtonpost.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 a.n.a.lytical, 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 "n.i.g.g.e.r," when historic changes were taking place in the real world?

With no offense to the NAACP, which is now under new leaders.h.i.+p, 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 ash.o.r.e 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 a.s.sumed the role of History-Maker in Chief. The nation was going to have to acknowledge that every every month is Black History Month. month is Black History Month.

Perhaps, for the first time, it is impossible for anyone to escape the fact that the black American experience is nothing more or less than an integral and necessary component of the American experience. In the summer of 2008, as the Obama campaign churned along, the writer, scholar, and MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant winner Charles Johnson published an article in The American Scholar The American Scholar t.i.tled "The End of the Black American Narrative." He posited that a "unique black American narrative, which emphasizes the experience of victimization, is quietly in the background of every conversation we have about black people, even when it is not fully articulated or expressed. It is our starting point, our agreed-upon premise, our most important presupposition for dialogues about black America." This narrative is based on "group victimization," Johnson writes, and it is obsolete; it blinds us to "the inevitability of change"-and the fact of change. t.i.tled "The End of the Black American Narrative." He posited that a "unique black American narrative, which emphasizes the experience of victimization, is quietly in the background of every conversation we have about black people, even when it is not fully articulated or expressed. It is our starting point, our agreed-upon premise, our most important presupposition for dialogues about black America." This narrative is based on "group victimization," Johnson writes, and it is obsolete; it blinds us to "the inevitability of change"-and the fact of change.10 His argument is deliberately provocative, and I believe it goes too far; he seems ready to dismiss race as almost irrelevant in today's America, while I believe its relevance is changed and diminished but still clearly palpable. Someday, perhaps, I won't worry that my two middle-cla.s.s, educated, young-adult sons run the risk of being unfairly pulled over by police for "driving while black," or that the ensuing interaction with the police officer is disproportionately likely to spin tragically out of control. Until then, I'm convinced that race still matters, even if it matters less. His argument is deliberately provocative, and I believe it goes too far; he seems ready to dismiss race as almost irrelevant in today's America, while I believe its relevance is changed and diminished but still clearly palpable. Someday, perhaps, I won't worry that my two middle-cla.s.s, educated, young-adult sons run the risk of being unfairly pulled over by police for "driving while black," or that the ensuing interaction with the police officer is disproportionately likely to spin tragically out of control. Until then, I'm convinced that race still matters, even if it matters less.

But Johnson is onto something when he argues that a single black narrative no longer applies-if it ever did-and that heterogeneity of cla.s.s and culture are as much a feature of black America as they are of the rest of America. He is also right when he says that it is time to look at black America-I would say the four black Americas-with a clear and critical eye.

To find out where we are, we have to trace where we've been. There was a time before disintegration, a time before integration. So let us turn now to the era of segregation, a system designed to oppress and demean-and a time African Americans made much more of than we sometimes give ourselves credit for.

2

WHEN WE WERE ONE.

The wooded hills around Atlanta boast some of the wealthiest black-majority suburbs in the country, sylvan tracts where cavernous McMansions line emerald-green golf courses and the relatively disadvantaged are marked by their puny entry-level BMWs and Benzes. It's no exaggeration to say that the city whose destruction was so lavishly lamented by Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind Gone with the Wind has become, in the early years of the twenty-first century, the closest thing to an authentic mecca for the black middle cla.s.s. Thirty or forty years ago, upwardly mobile African Americans were all about making their way to Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., also known as Chocolate City, a place of seemingly limitless possibility for the young, gifted, and black. Now the preferred destination is Atlanta-the ATL in the argot of hip-hop culture, of which Atlanta is a nexus-and n.o.body stops to think of the irony: Wasn't the idea to get has become, in the early years of the twenty-first century, the closest thing to an authentic mecca for the black middle cla.s.s. Thirty or forty years ago, upwardly mobile African Americans were all about making their way to Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., also known as Chocolate City, a place of seemingly limitless possibility for the young, gifted, and black. Now the preferred destination is Atlanta-the ATL in the argot of hip-hop culture, of which Atlanta is a nexus-and n.o.body stops to think of the irony: Wasn't the idea to get away away from Tara? from Tara?

In the years following the civil rights movement, when Atlanta was struggling to shed its Old South historical ident.i.ty and become a hub of the modern world, boosters called it "The City Too Busy to Hate." A hundred years ago, however, hate was the main event. Black Atlanta was under an a.s.sault no less relentless than the scorched-earth campaign waged decades earlier by General William Tec.u.mseh Sherman, but not nearly so well known-a campaign of terror against African Americans, with a climax that isn't mentioned, for some reason, in the slick promotional materials handed out by the Atlanta Convention and Visitors Bureau. Back then, the story of race in Atlanta mostly centered on a swath of more or less contiguous neighborhoods south of the city's busy center-the University Center District, Sweet Auburn, Brownsville, and Darktown-and was largely defined by white Atlanta's white-hot revanchist rage.

By 1906, the systematic disenfranchis.e.m.e.nt of African Americans in the states of the former Confederacy was well under way. Then, as now, Atlanta was the economic and cultural heart of something called the "New South." Henry Grady, a prominent journalist, orator, and eventual co-owner of the Atlanta Const.i.tution Atlanta Const.i.tution, had coined the term a decade after the Civil War to herald his vision of a reborn South, literally risen from the ashes of Sherman's apocalypse-a New South in which the old order was reestablished, with whites as masters and blacks as their laborers and servants. The 1877 removal of the last federal troops from the South, along with the 1883 Supreme Court ruling in the so-called Civil Rights Cases that allowed states to enforce Jim Crow laws, put an end to the false spring of Reconstruction. For black people in Atlanta, the air turned bitter cold. A poll tax was imposed. Mixing in theaters, on streetcars, and at public parks was outlawed. Atlanta moved toward becoming the most segregated city in the South, its code of strict separation, white dominance, and black subservience enforced by all-too-frequent lynchings.

The same thing was happening throughout the South: the virtual re-enslavement of African Americans and a return to what racists like Grady considered the "natural" order of things. Nowhere was this bitter pill more difficult for black people to swallow than in Atlanta, where the former slaves and their descendants had come so far. There, a critical ma.s.s of black ambition had ignited what seemed an unstoppable reaction. Black educational inst.i.tutions such as Atlanta University and Morehouse College were producing an educated elite. Black businesses, while still small in relative terms, were expanding and producing real economic benefits for the whole African American community. The grand project of black uplift looked so promising; now it was being snuffed out. In Atlanta, which was the intellectual center of black America, prominent thinkers waged a vital debate: What could black people do about this brutal campaign to kill the black American dream?

It was in Atlanta's Piedmont Park, during the Cotton States and International Exposition of 1895, that Booker T. Was.h.i.+ngton gave his famous-or infamous-"Atlanta Compromise" speech. He was willing for "the race" to indefinitely postpone its demands for full equality; in exchange, he demanded only the chance for African Americans to make slow, steady economic and educational progress. Once black people were sufficiently prepared, he believed, the barriers that now confined them would simply fall away.

To the white citizens of Atlanta, Was.h.i.+ngton offered soothing rea.s.surance: [You] can be sure in the future, as in the past, that you and your families will be surrounded by the most patient, faithful, law-abiding, and unresentful people that the world has seen. As we have proved our loyalty to you in the past, in nursing your children, watching by the sick-bed of your mothers and fathers, and often following them with tear-dimmed eyes to their graves, so in the future, in our humble way, we shall stand by you with a devotion that no foreigner can approach, ready to lay down our lives, if need be, in defense of yours.

And to black Atlantans, a warning not to get too uppity: The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing. No race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world is long in any degree ostracized. It is important and right that all privileges of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercise of these privileges. The opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now is worth infinitely more than the opportunity to spend a dollar in an opera-house.1 The other side of the argument was represented by W. E. B. DuBois, the brilliant black scholar who would later be remembered as one of the founders of the National a.s.sociation for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). A Northerner who moved to Atlanta to take a professors.h.i.+p at Atlanta University, DuBois initially had favorable things to say about the "Atlanta Compromise," partly out of respect for Was.h.i.+ngton and his position as the most powerful and influential black man in the country. Soon, though, DuBois lost both his patience and his tolerance for any kind of compromise: "Mr. Was.h.i.+ngton represents in Negro thought the old att.i.tude of adjustment and submission," he wrote in The Souls of Black Folk The Souls of Black Folk, his landmark 1903 book of essays. "[His] programme practically accepts the alleged inferiority of the Negro races."

DuBois continued: Mr. Was.h.i.+ngton distinctly asks that black people give up, at least for the present, three things-First, political power,Second, insistence on civil rights,Third, higher education of Negro youth,-and concentrate all their energies on industrial education, and acc.u.mulation of wealth, and the conciliation of the South. This policy has been courageously and insistently advocated for over fifteen years, and has been triumphant for perhaps ten years. As a result of this tender of the palm-branch, what has been the return? In these years there have occurred:1. The disfranchis.e.m.e.nt of the Negro.2. The legal creation of a distinct status of civil inferiority for the Negro.3. The steady withdrawal of aid from inst.i.tutions for the higher training of the Negro.These movements are not, to be sure, direct results of Mr. Was.h.i.+ngton's teachings; but his propaganda has, without a shadow of doubt, helped their speedier accomplishment.2 The debate, for the moment, was academic: Jim Crow marched relentlessly through the South, regardless of what black intellectuals might have to say about it. In Atlanta, the black entrepreneurs who had prospered during the boom years of the city's fin-de-siecle renaissance were forced to retreat from the bustling central business district and consolidate in segregated enclaves, especially along Auburn Avenue-Sweet Auburn-which Fortune Fortune magazine in 1956 called "the richest Negro street in the world," a mile and a half of black affluence. Like Harlem's Strivers' Row or Was.h.i.+ngton's LeDroit Park, Sweet Auburn became an important focal point of a new and growing phenomenon: the black middle cla.s.s. magazine in 1956 called "the richest Negro street in the world," a mile and a half of black affluence. Like Harlem's Strivers' Row or Was.h.i.+ngton's LeDroit Park, Sweet Auburn became an important focal point of a new and growing phenomenon: the black middle cla.s.s.

To the west of the Auburn Avenue neighborhood, a unique complex of African American educational inst.i.tutions was being a.s.sembled-Morehouse College for men and Spelman College for women, Clark College, Morris Brown College, Atlanta University. If Sweet Auburn was black America's most powerful economic engine, the University Center District was its most dynamic intellectual center. At the eastern end of Sweet Auburn lay a sprawling, dirt-poor, all-black slum known as Darktown-one of scores of black ghettoes across the nation known by that generic name. The economic and social disparities among black Atlantans were clear for all to see, but at the time everyone a.s.sumed that eventually these gaps would become irrelevant. Ultimately, the rising tide of uplift would benefit all.

The few black Atlantans who were rich and the many who were poor had something in common, after all, that trumped any differences in wealth or education: They were all black, and white Atlantans were increasingly determined to keep them on the black side of town-and to do so "by any means necessary," as Malcolm X would say decades later in a very different context. There was nothing subtle about this campaign to put "colored" folks in their place and keep them there. In the summer of 1906, for example, a leading Georgia politician, Hoke Smith, issued what had become a typical warning: "We will control the Negro peacefully if we can-but with guns if we must."

On September 20, 1906, a white woman named Knowles Kimmel-a farmer's wife who would come to represent the flower of Southern womanhood-made a shocking claim. While she was alone at the Kimmel farmhouse, in a western Atlanta suburb known as Oakland City, a "strange, rough-looking Negro" had appeared out of nowhere and s.e.xually a.s.saulted her, she said. The a.s.sault, if it indeed took place, was built into a cause celebre by the race-baiting Atlanta newspapers. The idea of s.e.xually rapacious black men defiling innocent, defenseless white women was uniquely powerful-and, to white supremacists like Henry Grady and Hoke Smith, uniquely useful in radicalizing and mobilizing white public opinion.

Sensationalized reports about the Kimmel incident helped ignite a conflagration that turned out to be one of the most pivotal, least-remembered milestones in the history of race relations in the United States. In 1908, a muckraking New York journalist named Ray Stannard Baker-a contemporary and colleague of legends such as Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens-published a groundbreaking book, Following the Color Line: An Account of Negro Citizens.h.i.+p in the American Democracy Following the Color Line: An Account of Negro Citizens.h.i.+p in the American Democracy. In the first chapter, he told the story of what happened on September 22, 1906, when Atlanta reached its flashpoint: And finally on this hot Sat.u.r.day half-holiday, when the country people had come in by hundreds, when everyone was out of doors, when the streets were crowded, when the saloons had been filled since early morning with white men and Negroes, both drinking-certain newspapers in Atlanta began to print extras with big headings announcing new a.s.saults on white women by Negroes. The Atlanta News News published five such extras, and newsboys cried them through the city: published five such extras, and newsboys cried them through the city:"Third a.s.sault.""Fourth a.s.sault."The whole city, already deeply agitated, was thrown into a veritable state of panic. The news in the extras was taken as truthful; for the city was not in a mood then for cool investigation.

3.

By the time his book was published, Baker had thoroughly investigated the alleged incidents. "Two of them may have been attempts at a.s.saults," he wrote, "but two palpably were nothing more than fright on the part of both the white woman and the Negro. As an instance, in one case an elderly woman, Mrs. Martha Holcombe, going to close her blinds in the evening, saw a Negro on the sidewalk. In a terrible fright she screamed. The news was telephoned to the police station, but before the officials could respond, Mrs. Holcombe telephoned them not to come out. And yet this was one of the 'a.s.saults' chronicled in letters five inches high in a newspaper extra."4 But white Atlantans were in a mood to believe the worst. White mobs began to gather, and they were well-armed, liberally inebriated, and h.e.l.l-bent on revenge. Black Atlanta came under all-out attack.