It seemed innocuous enough, but a routine photo opportunity for President Clinton has touched off the sort of controversy that periodically exposes a deep-seated difference in the way blacks and whites view the world.
The scene broadcast around the world was of a smiling Clinton, feet up and relaxed on the first day of his vacation in Martha’s Vineyard, being driven around the greens in a golf cart by a smiling Vernon Jordan, the former civil rights leader who has become a high-powered Washington lawyer and member of various corporate boards.
And that’s the flap: JORDAN IS DRIVING.
I must confess to what I would call an African-American reaction of amused astonishment when I saw the photo hit front pages across the country: Ah, yes, we have come a long way, but we’re still chauffeuring.
I, as it turned out, was not alone. Across the land, I found black professionals buzzing about the picture all week. “Here we go, Driving Miss Daisy, again,” a laughing George E. Curry, Emerge magazine editor, said, in a reference to the famous Oscar-winning movie.
“You mean, `Driving Mr. Clinton’,” another black colleague chimed in.
I realized this was a bigger story than I thought when, just before the Labor Day weekend, it rated a feature story in Friday’s Washington Post.
Reporter Ruth Marcus described how Jordan showed her a front-page clipping of the picture a prominent black friend of his had sent, after scrawling across it, “It’s better than driving Miss Daisy.”
Some other African-Americans found the chauffeur imagery unsettling, she said. “Driving Mr. President,” one black lawyer said. According to Marcus, he wasn’t smiling. Jordan scoffed. “I’m his (Clinton’s) friend, not his servant,” he said.
“Friend” is an understatement. In Washington power circles, Jordan is better known as “First Buddy.”
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Small wonder, then, that white folks I asked were surprised to hear that anyone saw anything in the photo except a very, very successful black man rubbing elbows with the most powerful leader in the world.
When one black professional woman ridiculed Jordan for taking the wheel, a senior white male executive responded, “Can you imagine for a minute how much any white corporate CEO in the country would give to sit where Jordan is sitting in that photo?”
I’m sure Jordan knows. No need to ask why this man is smiling. At 59, he has risen from a struggling childhood in the South, where his mother catered parties for white families, through leadership of the National Urban League to eventually land as a rain-making super-lawyer at the firm in which former Democratic Party chief Bob Strauss is a partner.
The president regularly turns to Jordan for advice and stays at his rented vacation house in Martha’s Vineyard. How many other folks can persuade the president to stay in their RENTED house?
Even so, Clinton watchers noted that the next time the two went out, Clinton drove. Coincidence or not, you can’t be too careful in politics.
Why do such images trouble black people so? Some say we black Americans persist too much in viewing the world through a prism of race. But everyone does, whether they realize it or not. Everyone views the world through the prism of their personal experiences, which can vary greatly in America, depending on your race or ethnicity.
Until the late 1960s, servile roles were the only ones white media moguls and audiences would let black people play. For years, Hollywood segregated movie production. Blacks producers produced black-only movies for black community theaters while whites omitted blacks from “major” productions, except as servants like “Beulah” the maid or Eddie “Rochester” Anderson, who played Jack Benny’s driver.
Memories of those days resurfaced in many minds when “Driving Miss Daisy,” in which Morgan Freeman chauffeurs Jessica Tandy, became a box office smash and won an Oscar. “Miss Daisy” has since become in black conversations an inside joke for whites who only feel comfortable around blacks who are in servile roles.
The joke only gets serious when it sends mixed signals to our children.
One professional couple I know was sharply questioned by their teenaged son as to why they “Tom,” as in a stereotypically obsequious ” Uncle Tom,” so much around white people.
Whenever it crossed racial lines, the common courtesies most people practice as the routine customs and protocols by which people get along and get ahead in society, their son, a product of the irreverent Hip-Hop Generation, viewed as bowing and scraping. Being nice to blacks is unity, by such reasoning; Being nice to whites is “Toming.”
It is chic for our restless, irreverent younger generation to say, as many of us baby boomers did in the ’60s, that the corporate world is just a new plantation of which they want no part-even as they study and work to earn diplomas that will enable them to succeed in it.
Such are the conflicts that dog the new black middle class as we try to negotiate the exotic contours of a new era, while images left over from an old era, images of Miss Daisy, run around in our heads.
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Clarence Page is going on leave for the rest of the year to write a book.