America Behind the Color Line (4 page)

“I think being successful has always been equated with being white,” she said. “It’s hard to change what’s always been . . . Things are different for some of the young people that Milton has brought into the industry. But things are also still the same.”

“Some of that perception,” added Milton, “is driven by the fact that a lot of blacks who are successful, at least on a corporate level, have moved out of what have traditionally been their communities . . . [and] then that community feels a loss of one of its people . . . White people have done a pretty good job of creating wealth. We were looking for a community where we could begin to create wealth, and Summit was one of them.”

Milton sensitively explained one of the most surprising dilemmas facing the continued success of our people: the growing gulf between the black middle class and those left behind in the inner cities. Wealth differentials
within
the race are becoming as large and potentially as unbridgeable as the traditional gaps between white and black were during the Civil Rights Era. And this is reflected in attitudes about education and values such as deferred gratification. It’s a gulf that is often as much cultural and psychological as it is economic.

Traditionally in America, entry into the middle class and the accumulation of wealth are enabled by the ownership of a home. Blacks in many parts of America were barred from owning homes, whether they could afford to purchase them or not. No one in America has done more to facilitate black home ownership than the CEO of Fannie Mae, America’s largest mortgage lender and our second largest corporation based on the size of its assets. Incredibly, it’s run by a black man. I went to see him at his corporate headquarters in Washington.

Franklin Raines was the first African American to become the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, in 1999. Raines escaped working-class poverty through education. He was recruited by Harvard, became a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, then graduated from Harvard Law School and Harvard Business School.

Raines has started a program at Fannie Mae designed to address the class gap among black Americans. By making it easier for African Americans to receive mortgages to purchase homes, Raines hopes to increase black home ownership by as many as 5 million people by the end of the decade. The ultimate effect of this on class distribution in American society would be profound.

His goal, Raines told me, is “to have the same class divide in the black community as . . . in the white community. I want the same percentage of middle class, the same percentage of rich, the same percentage of poor, in the white and black communities. Average is fine with me, because by all the measures, the black community is far behind average in income, in job status, and in education.”

So how do we get more black people into the middle class?

“Step by step,” said Raines. “There’s no shortcut. To begin with, we’ve got to get folks the preparation that’s needed. More people have got to finish high school . . . Then folks have got to get into these companies and persist.”

I asked Raines how we can inspire those very people who are trapped in the inner city to aspire to be the next Franklin Raines.

“You’ve got to let them know it’s possible,” he said, “because most of them don’t even know it’s possible. When I was growing up in Seattle, I hadn’t been to most of the city, let alone anywhere else. We’d go to day camp, and that was it. It was a big deal to go to another part of the city. My world was two or three square miles . . . Then I went to Harvard, across the country. After that I went to Oxford, and then it became the world. What I thought was possible just kept expanding. For many people it never expands; they never get off the block . . . We must make it clear that there are greater possibilities

. . . We just have to make lots of kids aware of the opportunities and give them a chance, and if we give them a chance, we’ll be surprised by how many will do well.”

How do we drive that message home to black children themselves, whose attitudes are shaped in an environment of unemployment, teenage pregnancy, school dropouts, drugs, instant gratification, and the bizarre attitude that success in school or in the white mainstream is an act of racial betrayal, an act of selling out to the white man?

Lenora Fulani, a political activist and educator, has devoted the last decade to tackling these issues on the street. I met her at her project’s offices in Manhattan. Her first observation echoed Raines’s comment about parochialism:

“We have kids living in New York City communities like Queens and Brooklyn today, forget thirty-five years ago, who never saw the World Trade Center. They didn’t know it existed until September 11. Almost none of the young men in these communities know the experience of putting on a suit and walking down a street in Midtown and finding a way of being related to that’s so very different from the usual ways in which they’re related to.”

But what happens when they see Colin Powell on TV, or Condoleezza Rice? Doesn’t this take them out of their environment? Don’t the accomplishments of black people of our generation, people like us, inspire black youth? Isn’t this the fundamental premise of integration, and the most important aspect of our individual accomplishments to our people?

“You want me to tell you what I really think?” she asked mysteriously. “Even on TV, the kids barely notice all the accomplishments of black people of our generation, the black role models of today, like Colin Powell and Maxine Waters. My experience is that when the kids recognize me on TV and say, oh I know Dr. Fulani, it’s because they’ve seen me first in their communities. A lot of these kids don’t know who Colin Powell is. It may seem impossible, but how could you have lived in New York and never seen the World Trade Center?”

For Fulani, successful black people at the top of the establishment can’t possibly serve as role models if the children in the inner city don’t know they exist. With Dr. Fred Newman, she founded the All Stars Talent Show Network and the Joseph A. Forgione Development School for Youth, designed to change dramatically the way that teenagers in the ghetto behave and think about themselves and their career possibilities. Fulani has designed a program that can be a class escalator, and she’s campaigning for poor kids to step on board. Her theory of performance starts with a controversial premise:

“We don’t have to negate the positive aspects of hip-hop culture, and I don’t think that being black has to be equated with hip-hop. I think it’s a cultural expression that’s in our community . . . A lot of white kids who come from affluent backgrounds are influenced by hip-hop, and they have five earrings and the whole bit. It’s a performance. We’re trying to teach inner-city kids that it’s a performance that they don’t have to be trapped in. They, too, can wake up the next day, put on a suit, and go to work.”

Fulani has “predominantly white, well-to-do businesspeople” who train the kids in her program to do corporate internships. “I tell them to teach the kids how to be white, and they almost fall off their chair. They have all the liberal reaction of oh my God, we’re going to step on their cultural toes. I tell them, believe me, after the twelve weeks of training they’ll still be black. But why don’t you use this time as an opportunity to share with them some of the secrets of white success?”

Skeptical, I observed one of Fulani’s programs. These teenagers, poor and from inner-city schools, were enrolled in her Development School for Youth. In just twelve weeks, the school promises to transform them from disaffected street kids to potential Wall Street employees. How can she possibly achieve this?

“What it means to use performance as a teaching method is that you put young people in situations that are way beyond anything they know how to do. This is totally new learning. You don’t know anything about Wall Street; you barely know how to spell the word ‘stock.’ And then we have them perform as if they do know these things. And, in the process, they learn how to produce their own learning.”

But what sorts of things does her program teach these kids?

“Oh, all kinds of wonderful things: basically, how to have conversations that are not in authoritarian situations. We teach them how to shake people’s hands, how to look them directly in the eyes. ‘Hi! My name is Shakimah Smith. It’s great to meet you.’”

I have to confess that, initially, I worried that this program might be little more than a finishing school for poor kids. But I was wrong. As well as a grounding in finance, the students are taught practical skills—like how to comport themselves in the corporate world—that their schools don’t teach them. They are taught, as Fulani humorously puts it, “to act white” to gain employment, without sacrificing the values of their home and neighborhood: in other words, how to be black and function successfully in a white world. Parents, schools, and churches did this when I was growing up but are failing at this acculturation process now. At the end of twelve weeks, Fulani’s students are given paid internships on Wall Street.

These are ghetto street kids, and Fulani transforms them into potential Wall Street executives in twelve weeks? “I don’t really care whether the kids in the Development School become Wall Street executives. I want them to know that Wall Street exists. I don’t care what they do with that knowledge or that experience; I want them to have it,” she said.

What Fulani is doing seems like a small miracle, but she would be the first to admit that it’s just a beginning, a drop in an ocean of black economic misery. When I was growing up in the fifties, becoming a successful doctor, lawyer, or businessman was about the blackest thing you could be. For too many of our young people today, mainstream America will always be a closed shop for white boys, and we’re better off on our own.

How we as people got here is, frankly, a dark and troubling mystery to me. Attitudes such as these are a perversion of Dr. King’s dream, of all that he gave his life for. But perhaps it is not so very surprising, really. For as long as any of us can remember, the odds have been deeply stacked against our success in American society. But historically, our political leaders, our mentors in school and church, our parents and families, all insisted that we fight to succeed, despite the odds.

The great poet Audre Lorde once wrote that you cannot dismantle the master’s house using the master’s tools. But what other tools can we use, except those that built the house in the first place? Since Dr. King’s death, as a result of the expanded opportunities of affirmative action and our own hard work, an unprecedented number of African Americans have succeeded in worlds once all-white, the doors to which were historically locked shut for more than a hundred years.

Despite the negative spin that Herbert Marcuse gave to it in the late fifties, the growth of the black middle class is one of the truly great victories of Dr. King’s Civil Rights Movement. Each hire and every promotion of a black on Wall Street is a victory over racism for our people. The challenge facing the black middle class is to use their clout and wealth to fight structural and institutional racism, on the one hand, and to become more effective role models— living, breathing mentors of social mobility—for dispirited millions of black youth thus far left behind, to show them that you no longer have to be white to aspire to obtain our share of the American dream. The level of social consciousness among the new black middle and upper middle class is deeply moving; built as their newfound status is on political gains made only because of the Civil Rights Movement, perhaps this should come as no surprise. These people’s lives and concerns, their political orientation and their social consciences, have refuted Marcuse’s worry that they would be tokens, or raceless, soulless black men and women in whiteface who had left their people behind, as E. Franklin Frazier describes the old middle class in
The Black Bourgeoisie
(1957). But unless we do these things, the new class divide within the black community will be a permanent fixture in African-American life, with deep and profound economic and structural differences masked to some extent, as they are now, by a seemingly shared African-American culture. No one can believe that Martin Luther King, Jr., died for that.

COLIN POWELL
The Good Soldier

When I go to the Middle East or China or wherever my job takes me and I walk into a room, people see a black man. But they also see the American secretary of state and they know that I’m not coming to them as a black man; I’m coming to them as a representative of the American people, as a representative of the president of the United States. I represent all the values of this country and the power of this country, its military power, its economic power and political power, and once we sit down and they get past whatever color I am, they want to do business with me.

Here at home in America, people sometimes ask what is the significance of my being the first African-American secretary of state. I hope it does have significance, particularly to African Americans, and I hope the significance is that it happened in America. It happened in a place where we were once slaves, nothing more than property. It happened in a place where at the time the Constitution was written, we were considered three-fifths of a white person for voting purposes. And it happened in a little over a couple of hundred years. Now that may be a long time by some standards, but by comparison with what’s happened in other countries around the world, it’s quite remarkable. When you also think that it happened to a guy whose parents just showed up in this country as immigrants off a banana boat back in the 1920s, it’s remarkable.

I hope it gives inspiration to African-American youngsters, Peruvian youngsters, and white youngsters who might not have come from a black background but came from a poor background. Back when Desert Storm ended and there was all this celebration, parades everywhere, I went back to the Bronx, where I was raised, and I went to my high school, still in the inner city—and to this day it is bringing along other kids like me. I talked to the kids there, essentially Puerto Rican and black kids who were in the audience, and they were looking at me and they started to ask questions about me being a role model for them. And I said, well, I’m glad that I’m a role model for you, but I want General Schwarzkopf also to be a role model for you. Don’t limit yourself by saying, if that black guy can do it, I can do it. If General Schwarzkopf can do it, you can do it, I tell them. Don’t limit yourself any longer on the basis of your race, your color, your background, your creed. We’ve come too far to create our own limitations.

I tell young people a bit of a joke when they say, “Well, gosh, you’re the black secretary of state.” I say, “No, I’m not. There ain’t a white secretary of state somewhere. I’m the secretary of state who is black, you know; there’s a difference.” I refuse to be limited by my race, and you shouldn’t, I tell young people, allow yourself to be limited or stereotyped. Don’t use your particular distinction as an excuse for you not to do your best. Take advantage of all the things that have been done for you over these 226 years. I wouldn’t be secretary of state if I hadn’t done that.

I was raised in a family that never felt constrained by their poverty or by their race. That had nothing to do with anything; we were as good as anyone. And I was raised in a community that had blacks, whites, Puerto Ricans, minority, you name it, we were it, a melting pot of the New York City environment. So I never really knew I was supposed to feel in some way constrained by being an inner-city, public school black kid, the son of immigrants. I just went into the army and I found an organization that said, no, no, no, we’ve changed, we’re ahead of the rest of the society. We don’t care if you’re black or blue, we only care if you’re a good green soldier. And if you do your best, you watch, you’ll be recognized. If you don’t do your best, you’ll be punished. And I started out as a black lieutenant but I became a general who was black.

I want to continue to be a role model for the kids in the neighborhood I grew up in, and for other youngsters in America. Not just a black role model in that stereotypical sense, but an example of what you can achieve if you are willing to work for it. And second, those of us in the African-American community who have been successful financially ought to give some of it back to the community. You can do it through scholarships, through donations, through mentoring, through adopting or sponsoring a school. There are lots of ways to do it, and everything I’ve just mentioned I have done, or try to do. You don’t have to scream and shout about it but just get it done, reach back and help these youngsters who are coming along. And to the extent we have benefited from this society, we can’t just walk away from these youngsters.

In fact, so many African Americans have been successful, and have been able to improve their physical station in life—have a nicer neighborhood to live in, a bigger house to live in, fancier cars, nice clothes—that those who get left behind are left further behind than they might have been forty or fifty or sixty years ago. Before integration, the successful people in the community still didn’t have anywhere to go, so that success stayed in the community and we had a thriving middle class. You couldn’t break out too far. Then integration kind of changed all of that, and for those of us who became successful, it became easier to leave those behind who had not yet gained success, especially those children who needed examples to follow.

The examples were no longer there the way they used to be; the successful people had moved on to some other place. So the kids today, rather than seeing successful middle-class professionals in their neighborhood, are to some extent denied that kind of example. So, then, what example should they follow? They tend to follow people who may not provide them the right example, who may not exert the right kinds of influences. And we’ve lost something as a result. Those of us who have been successful and have escaped have got to go back.

There are reasons why those of us who are in the black community and who have made it have such a great responsibility. Our youngsters need us more perhaps, for one thing. And our youngsters are still living in a society that is really only one generation removed from racism, discrimination, segregation, and economic deprivation, and we’re still suffering from that. It’s different in that regard from the way our white counterparts may view their responsibility to youngsters in, say, a poor white community.

We’re also living, to some extent, in a society that still sees people by color, much as we would like it to be otherwise. A few of us have been able to rise above that, to be frank. But there are a lot of youngsters walking down the street who get met with, watch out, there’s a black kid. There’s still that kind of discrimination in our society. Some people would call it racism. There is racism, but I don’t call it a kind of discrimination racism; it’s just there’s a difference there that is part of our legacy, part of our history, that has not yet been overcome. And those of us who have been successful have an obligation to reach back to these youngsters and help them, more so than I think our white brothers. But I tell my white colleagues, you’ve got to reach down to the black community too. You’ve got to reach down to any community in need.

I also tell black youngsters, get a white mentor. If there isn’t a brother, we’ll get you connected up with a white mentor. I had lots of white mentors. Most of my mentors that made me successful in the army were white, and nothing wrong with it. We have to not limit ourselves because of our race or color, and we shouldn’t limit ourselves with respect to where we go and get help from. More and more people in the white community are anxious to help those who are less fortunate, and especially those less fortunate in the black community.

I believe the most important thing that I can do, in relation to the black community and in relationship to myself, is to do the job. I have never been driven by ambition. I’m not unambitious—I wouldn’t have gotten where I did if I was unambitious—but I’m not driven by that ambition. I’m driven by my desire to do the job. I’ve always tried to do a good job everywhere I’ve been. And it’s been recognized and that’s why I was successful. I try to do the best job I can for people I work for and for the American people, and I try to be a good family guy, as best I can. I try to keep a lot of friends on my side.

The gulf between the two black communities—the middle class and those who have been left behind—need not be permanent, but it’s going to take a lot of work to change it. It’s going to take a lot of work on the part of both communities, the well-to-do and those who are striving. Those of us who have made it, white and black, need to give back with resources and mentoring. But there’s something else we have to give back. We have got to get to our young people and tell them they can be successful. We have to tell them, Rosa Parks did not ride in the back of a bus and Martin Luther King did not die so you could call young girls bad names, so that you could act like a fool, so that you could put stuff up your nose, or so that you could stick up somebody. Now, that is not acceptable. And these people did not die to create these opportunities for you that you refuse to seize. So let me not hear any excuses about why you don’t want to go to school or how you go to a bad school. We all went to bad schools at one time or another, but guess what was in that bad school: some education. So don’t allow these excuses to keep you from getting what is out there waiting for you if you will seize it.

We have got to teach our young people that as you come along and as you become parents, you have an enormous responsibility for the children you’ve brought into life. I’m sometimes disturbed by some of the television depictions you see on some of the channels and by some of the shows—and I don’t want to get into any particular show—where we pander to this kind of deplorable behavior. If I had ever said these words, or if I had ever talked to an adult that way or ever said anything like this to peers or to anyone, it would not have been tolerated. I would have been told, we don’t talk like that in this family. Or as Bill Cosby used to say, “I brought you into this world and I’ll take you out!”

We’ve got to get back to those standards and stop making excuses, saying, I can’t do this, I can’t do that, this person’s down on me, and things like that. Those are not reasons; they’re all excuses. We have got to start weaning our youngsters away from this sort of thinking. Most of our youngsters are fine, they’re in our universities, they’re fine.

I was on the board of Howard University, I was on the board of the United Negro College Fund, another way of giving back, so I know what our youngsters are capable of doing. But there are too many of them who are adopting hedonistic lifestyles. That’s simply deplorable and has to be stopped. Too many of our television stations are exploiting this kind of lifestyle and peddling it all over the airways, and other youngsters see it and hear this kind of language and see this kind of dress and this kind of behavior. Our humor has gone from Bill Cosby down to the worst kind, deep in the gutter.

I wear my blackness every day and I use it every day in one way or another, whether it’s a check I write for something or a youngster I speak to or a kid I mentor via e-mail. When I was in private life, I was able to do a lot more, whether it was for the College Fund or Howard University or America’s Promise, which is a youth campaign I ran. I never said we’re going after black kids, but when I went after kids, most of the kids who were in the greatest need were black, and I knew that. With respect to people who may say it’s no longer enough to do a good job, that we’re not brothers anymore, that we have lost our blackness if we’re not teaching in the ghetto at night, I can’t spend a lot of time worrying about what people say about me or whether I’m doing enough. I do as much as I can. All of us should do as much as we can and just take whatever compliments or criticism comes with it.