It's Bigger Than Hip Hop: The Rise of the Post-Hip-Hop Generation (31 page)

Simply replace “Negroes” with “Blacks” or “African-Americans” and Dr. King’s speech could be delivered today.

Dr. King gave that speech at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, an era remembered as a time of great struggle and sacrifice for African-Americans. A time when many of our parents and grandparents marched like soldiers against the wretched army of racial oppression. A time when we sat-in in order to stand up to institutions of hate and fear. A time when kings marched behind queens. A time when “by any means necessary,” “Black Power,” “freedom now,” “freedom ride,” “freedom driver,” and “we shall overcome” were not just catchphrases on pinback buttons, but ways to live.

Many people often point to the rise of the Black middle class as one of the triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement. Sociologist and educator E. Franklin Frazier, in his seminal work
The Black Bourgeoisie
,
observed that the African-American middle class, during his lifetime (1894–1962), never constituted more than 5 percent of the African-American populace. Within a few years of Frazier’s death, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the National Voting Rights Act of 1965 were passed, allowing for increased handfuls of Black folks to get a slice, however thin, of the American pie. Today the Black middle class makes up somewhere between 20 percent to 25 percent of the Black population.

Despite these gains, however, many of the ills that Dr. King and others organized against still plague us. Among African-American children under six years old, 50 percent live in poverty. Among African-American males between eighteen and thirty-four in Washington, D.C., 50 percent are in the criminal justice system. The Urban Institute estimates that 60 percent of America’s poor youth are Black.

Integration wasn’t the be-all and end-all as many thought it would be. Malcolm X once remarked that “An integrated cup of coffee isn’t sufficient pay for four hundred years of slave labor.” In 1962, in “Separation or Integration: A Debate” published in
Dialogue
, he wrote:

It is clear from the current state of Black America that integration has not returned “human dignity to dark mankind,” even if a small number of Blacks have risen in class status.

The whole scene is strangely reminiscent of Amiri Baraka’s short story “Neo-American,” in which Tim Goodson, a Black mayor, runs the city with a clique of WaBenzis. WaBenzis are what many East Africans call the new ruling class; the word in Swahili literally means “men of the Mercedes-Benz.” Despite the Black faces that now seem to call the shots in the story, the conditions of the masses of Black people haven’t changed. One perceptive character asks, “And what we got here in this town?” He continues, “Niggers in high places, black faces in high places, but the same rats and roaches, the same slums and garbage, the same police whippin’ your heads, the same unemployment and junkies in the hallways muggin’ your old lady.” Similarly, although there have been a great number of individual strides, the masses of Black people in America still live a life confined to the pits of poverty.

The Black middle class, however, has been trapped inside an illusion of symbols and tokens. In this illusion, they believe we can deconstruct institutional racism not by constructing Black institutions, but by the drip-drop approach in which Black America slowly assimilates into high-level positions. Sadly, it is this narrow thinking that causes liberal African-Americans to promote the advancement of Republican conservatives like Clarence Thomas or Condoleezza Rice despite the reality that their advancement works against their own purported ideological and social interests. Any strategy that sees race, Black or white, as more important than ideology is a failing one. In the wake of the civil rights and Black Power eras, a Black leadership has emerged that doesn’t even live in the Black community. We must come to grips with the fact that symbols of progress are not substitutes for progress.

It is tragically true, as Lerone Bennett, Jr., writes in
The Shaping of Black America
, that “the great movement of the sixties destroyed the brutal and visible manifestations of racism, but it did not and could not
at that time destroy invisible institutional manifestations of racism.” He goes on to add that there are “still invisible Jim Crow signs on the walls of every American institution.” And those signs still scream:

It seems as though many of us have fallen asleep on the “comfortable mattress” that Jordan King warned of—we have become too comfortable and have stopped fighting for what most African-Americans still don’t have. Consider the analogy of a sports team who has been held down illegally by unfair rules. As the team, after uphill battle upon uphill battle, starts to close the gap, they suddenly pull back, having mistaken their temporary momentum for victory. We must never forget that momentum; at its best, it is a symbol of the potential for a shift but it is not the shift. How can we, today, be content with momentum when we are still losing?

When I see the apathy of today, I’m reminded—no,
haunted
—by Malcolm X’s words: “You don’t stick a knife in a man’s back nine inches and then pull it out six inches and say you’re making progress.” He adds: “No matter how much respect, no matter how much recognition, whites show towards me, as far as I’m concerned, as long as it is not shown to every one of our people in this country, it doesn’t exist for me.” Regardless of individual examples of success, myself included, we must not forget that those examples are merely tokens who do not accurately reflect the potential of the masses so long as savage inequalities exist throughout the institutions of America. As
opera singer Leontyne Price once remarked, “All token blacks have the same experience. I have been pointed at as a solution to things that have not begun to be solved, because pointing at us token blacks eases the conscience of millions, and I think it is dreadfully wrong.” Make no mistake, the struggle for justice, freedom, and equality is not over.

Amid so much apathy, I found myself on the bus ride from the prison, asking what happened? Where did the momentum go? Wasn’t/isn’t it so painfully clear that the conditions for most Blacks hadn’t/haven’t changed?

In 1959
, at the height of the Cold War, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev came to America to meet with President Dwight Eisenhower, known to some as the “oatmeal president” for his dull demeanor. Despite this tag, however, he had been the first U.S. president to fly in a helicopter. So on this day, after a relatively unsuccessful dialogue session at Camp David, Eisenhower and Khrushchev boarded the
Seahorse
, Eisenhower’s presidential helicopter, for a tour of suburban Pennsylvania. They hovered over the private opulence that American capitalism made possible: the humungous houses, shiny automobiles, and neat lawns. Eisenhower geared Khrushchev’s gaze toward the ultramarine-blue swimming pools that bowled the area, then remarked, “That’s why my people will never revolt.” Eisenhower’s logic was simple: material possessions, be they pools or twenty-two-inch rims, nullify and trap the middle class, thus preoccupying and preventing them from challenging the status quo.

While Khrushchev and Eisenhower were helicoptering over the burbs, warrior penman James Baldwin was in Atlanta covering a story about the small percentage of middle-class Blacks that lived there at the time. In a piece entitled “Nobody Knows My Name: A Letter from the South,” published in
Partisan Review
, he described middle-class
African-Americans as being in “a really quite sinister position.” He elaborated:

Since Baldwin’s article, the Black middle class has grown. In 1960, there were 385,586 middle-class African-Americans; in 1980 that number jumped to 1,317,080; and in 1995, it mushroomed to nearly seven million. What’s more, the upper income bracket of African-Americans increased fourfold between 1967 and 2003.

However, with this growth it seems as though something has been lost. As NFL Hall of Famer and social activist Jim Brown told me on his West Hollywood porch, “We have an African-American community that’s headed nowhere because all of these individual millionaires are just individual millionaires with no effect upon nothing.”

This “headed nowhere-ness” is fueled by a brand of vulgar individualism that promotes disassociation from poor Blacks and, in fact, any of the social ills that confront us as a people, nation, and world. We see this in the high-pitched rhetoric of comedian Chris Rock who asks, “Who’s more racist? Black people or white people?” His answer: “Black people. Because we hate Black people, too. Everything white people don’t like about Black people, Black people
really
don’t like
about Black people.” He says there’s a “civil war” being waged: “There’s Black people, and there’s niggas. And niggas have
got to go.”
He goes on to say, “I love Black people, but I hate niggas.”

This tone is echoed in a more serious (and scary) way in articles such as “The Manifesto of Ascendancy for the Modern American Nigger” by John Ridley, a Black man, published for the largely white readership of
Esquire
.

This vile strain of thought is not only counterproductive, but to put it bluntly: counter-humanity. How can one be so stooped into his or her own self that they forget about their sister or brother? Can you imagine if Harriet Tubman took this attitude? John Brown? Nelson Mandela? Ella Baker? Rosa Parks? Gandhi? The unavoidable reality is that we are at our best as human beings when we realize that we’re all tied together in a labyrinth of interrelation that culminates in our collective destiny. What may harm some of us directly harms all of us indirectly. Put another way, I can’t be all that I can be until you are all you can be. I can never reach my full potential until others have reached theirs.

Many in the Black middle and upper classes have abandoned this idea of interrelatedness, claiming that “Blacks use charges of discrimination to avoid dealing with their cultural failings.” Black conservatives like the Manhattan Institute’s John H. McWhorter claim that Black people “spit in the eye of [their] grandparents” when they speak up and state that their lives are limited by racism. However, “contrary to McWhorter’s assertion,” as Algernon Austin
argues, ignoring racism and discrimination is “spitting in the eye of everyone, Black and White, who struggled for civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s.” What is most disturbing about any argument, on either side, is the oversight of not taking into serious consideration the role history plays in the present. When one combines a vulgarly individualistic society with lack of historical understanding (that is: how history affects the present), the result is a flimsy attack on poor people that overemphasizes “personal responsibility.” These narrow, harsh, and inflammatory arguments overlook all of the structural and institutional factors (low wages, chronic underemployment, job/capital flight, downsizing and outsourcing, poorly funded schools) that create and perpetuate Black poverty. They fail to realize that self-help does not eradicate poverty and create jobs in our communities. This is not to say that personal responsibility isn’t important, but we must recognize that without proper social justice, personal responsibility is impossible to exercise. The point, here, is not to blame today’s plight on the Black middle class, but rather to show, as John Donne once wrote, that “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main… any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” A failure to act would result in the continued and sustained attack on Black lives and perpetuate the suffering that the majority of Africans in this country face.