Race has long had a rude presence in my life. While visiting relatives in Alabama as a child in the 1950s, I first saw water fountains marked “white” and “colored.” I vaguely recall being excited. I rushed over to the one marked “colored” and turned it on, only to find, to my deep disappointment, that the water came out clear, just like the water back home in Ohio.
“Segregation,” my dad said. I’d never heard the word before. My southern-born parents explained that it was something the white folks “down home” practiced. Some “home.” Yet unpleasant experiences in the North already had taught me a more genteel, yet no less limiting version.
“There are places white people don’t want colored to go,” my elders told me in their soft southern accents, “and white people make the rules.”
We had plenty of segregation like that in the North. We just didn’t have the signs, which made it cheaper and easier to deny. We could look out of my schoolhouse window to see a public swimming pool closed to nonwhites. We had to go across town to the separate-but-equal “pool for colored.” The steel mill that was our town’s biggest employer held separate picnics for colored and white employees, which seemed to be just fine with the employees. Everyone had a good time, separately and unequally. I think the colored folks were just happy to have something to call their own.
When I was about 6 years old, I saw a television commercial for an amusement park near the southern Ohio factory town where I grew up. I chose to go. I told my parents. They looked at each other sadly and informed me that “little colored kids can’t go there.” I was crushed.
“I wish I was white,” I told my parents.
“No you don’t!” Mom snapped. She gave me a look terrible enough to persuade me instantly that no, I didn’t.
“Well, maybe for a few minutes, anyway?” I asked. “Just long enough for me to get past the front gate?” Then I could show them, I thought. I remember I wanted to show them what a terrific kid I was. I felt sorry for the little white children who would be deprived of getting to know me.
“Don’t be showin’ yo’ color,” my parents would admonish me in my youth, before we would go out in public, especially among white folks. The phrase had special meaning in Negro conversations. Imbued with many subtle meanings and nuances, the showing of one’s “color” could be an expression of chastisement or warning, admonishment or adulation, satire or self-hatred, anger or celebration. It could mean acting out or showing anger in a loud and uncivilized way. Sometimes you can still hear black people say, in the heat of frustration, “I almost showed my color today,” which is a way of saying they almost lost their “cool,” “dropped the mask” or “went off.” Losing one’s cool can be a capital offense by black standards, for it shows weakness in a world in which spiritual rigor is one of the few things we can call our own. Those who keep their cool repress their “color.” It is cool, in other words, to be colorless.
My book’s title, “Showing My Color,” emerged from my fuming discontent with the current fashions of racial denial, steadfast repudiations of the difference race continues to make in American life. Old liberals, particularly white liberals who have become new conservatives, charge that racial pride and color consciousness threaten to “balkanize” American life, as if it ever was a model of unity. Many demand that we “get past race.” But denials of a cancer, no matter how vigorous they may be, will not make the malignancy go away.
No less august a voice than that of the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has taken to arguing in the 1990s for a “colorblind” approach to civil rights law, the area of American society in which color and gender consciousness have made the most dramatic improvement in equalizing opportunities.
The words of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. have been perverted to support this view. Most frequently quoted is his oft-stated dream of the day when everyone would “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” I would argue that King never intended for us to forget all about color. Even in his historic “I Have a Dream” speech, from which this most-often- quoted line is lifted, he also pressed the less-often- quoted but piquantly salient point about “the promissory note” America gave freed slaves, which, when they presented it, was returned to them marked “insufficient funds.”
I would argue that too much has been made of the virtue of “colorblindness.” I don’t want Americans to be blind to my color as long as color continues to make a profound difference in determining life chances and opportunities. Nor do I wish to see so significant a part of my identity denied. “Ethnic differences are the very essence of cultural diversity and national creativity,” black social critic Albert Murray wrote in “The Omni-Americans” (1970). “The problem is not the existence of ethnic differences, as is so often assumed, but the intrusion of such differences into areas where they do not belong.”
Where, then, do they belong? Diversity is enriching, but race intrudes rudely on the individual’s attempts to define his or her own identity. I used to be “colored.” Then I was “Negro.” Then I became “black.” Then I became “African-American.” Today I am a “person of color.” In three decades I have been transformed from a “colored person” to a “person of color.” Are you keeping up with me?
Changes in what we black people call ourselves are quite annoying to some white people, which is its own reward to some black people. But if white people are confused, so are quite a few black people. There is no one way to be black. We are a diverse people amid a nation of diverse people. Some black people are nationalists who don’t want anything to do with white people. Some black people are assimilationists who don’t want anything to do with other black people. Some black people are integrationists who move in and out of various groups with remarkable ease. Some of us can be any of the three, depending on when you happen to run into us.
Growing up as part of a minority can expose the individual to horrible bouts of identity confusion. I used to think of myself as something of a transracial man, a figure no less frustrated than a transsexual who feels trapped in the body of something unfamiliar and inappropriate to his or her inner self.
These bouts were most torturous during adolescence, the period of life when, trembling with the shock of nascent independence from the ways of one’s elders, the budding individual stitches together the fragile garments of an identity to be worn into adulthood. Stuttering and uncooperative motor skills left me severely challenged in dancing, basket shooting and various other social applications; I felt woefully inadequate to the task of being “popular” in the hot centers of black social activity at my integrated high school and college. “Are you black?” an arbiter of campus militancy demanded one day, when he “caught” me dining too many times with white friends. I had the skin pass, sure enough, but my inclinations fell well short of his standards. But I was not satisfied with the standards of his counterparts in the white world, either. If I was not “black” enough to please some blacks, I would never be “white” enough to please all whites.
Times have changed. Choices abound for black people, if we can afford them. Black people can now go anywhere they choose, as long as they can pay the bill when they get there. If anyone tries to stop them or any other minorities just because of their color, the full weight of the federal government will step in on the side of the minorities. I thank God and the hard-won gains of the civil rights revolution for my ability to have more choices. But the old rules of race have been replaced in many ways by new ones.
Today I live a well-integrated life in the suburbs. Black folks still tell me how to be “black” when I stray from the racial party lines, while white folks tell me how to be “colorblind.” I still feel as frustrated in my attempts to transcend race as a reluctant lemming must feel while being rushed over the brink by its herd. But I find I have plenty of company in my frustration. Integration has not been a simple task for upwardly mobile African-Americans, especially for those of us who happen also to be parents.
A few years ago, after talking to black friends who were raising teenage boys, I realized that I was about to face dilemmas not unlike those my parents faced. My son was turning 3 years old. Everyone was telling me that he was quite cute, and since he was the spitting image of his dad, I was the last to argue.
But it occurred to me that in another decade he would be not 3 but 13. If all goes well, somewhere along the way he is going to turn almost overnight from someone who is perceived as cute and innocent into someone who is perceived as a menace, the most feared creature on America’s urban streets today, a young black male. Before he, like me when I was barred from a childhood amusement park, would have a chance to let others get to know him, he would be judged not by the content of his character, but by the color of his skin.
The continuing effect of the color line
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Despite the growth of the black middle class, most blacks and whites live largely separate lives. School integration actually peaked in 1967, according to a Harvard University study, and has declined ever since. Economic segregation has proceeded without interruption, distancing poor blacks not only from whites but also from upwardly mobile blacks, making the isolation and misery of poor blacks worse. One out of every two black children lives below the poverty line, compared with one out of every seven white children. Black infants in America die at twice the rate of white infants. A record-setting million inmates crowd the nation’s prisons, half of them black. The black out-of-wedlock birth rate has grown from about 25 percent in 1965 to more than 60 percent (more than 90 percent in the South Bronx and other areas of concentrated black poverty) in 1990.
The good news is very good, but the bad news has become steadily worse. Economically, we are still playing catch-up. In 1865, newly freed from slavery, African-Americans controlled 3 percent of the wealth in America, United States Civil Rights Commissioner Arthur Fletcher tells me. Today we still control just 3 percent of the wealth. After all this time, we have become free, more often than not, to make other people wealthier. The decline of industrial America, along with low-skill, high-pay jobs, has left much of black America split in two along lines of class, culture, opportunity and hope. The “prepared” join the new black middle class, which grew rapidly in the 1970s and early 1980s. The unprepared populate a new culture, directly opposed not only to the predominantly white mainstream, but also to any blacks who aspire to practice the values of hard work, good English and family loyalty that would help them to join the white mainstream. The results of this spiritual decline, along with economic decline, have been devastating. While more black women go to college than ever before, it has become a commonplace to refer to young black males as an endangered species. New anti-black stereotypes replace the old. Prosperous, well-dressed African-Americans still complain of suffering indignities when they try to hail a taxicab. The fact that the taxi that just passed them by was driven by a black cabby, native-born or immigrant, makes no difference.
By the 1990s, even an icon of integrationism like Bill Cosby, at a Television Academy lunch honoring him, would complain of the “drive-by images” Hollywood still uses to portray black life, as if the writers just “drove by” the houses and neighborhoods of the people they depict. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the nation’s oldest and largest civil rights group, would be split over whether to form a working partnership with Nation of Islam minister Louis Farrakhan, the noted black supremacist. A black man would be run out of a white public housing development in Texas because of Ku Klux Klan harassment, only to be killed within days by a black mugger in his new neighborhood, a Houston ghetto.
And Rosa Parks, often called the mother of the modern civil rights movement, survived being arrested by white men for defying segregation on buses in Montgomery, Alabama, in the 1950s, only to be mugged in her own home by a black man in Detroit in the 1990s.
At the same time, affirmative action in the 1990s shows how innocent and even victimized white Americans now feel compared with how insecure and embattled black people continue to feel. Many whites blame blacks, complaining that we still don’t work hard enough or try hard enough to meet standards set by whites. Critics complain that even middle-class blacks, who share so much else with their white counterparts, persist in segregating themselves, to which many blacks respond, “It didn’t begin with us.”
It is fashionable in today’s America to behave as if we have, at last, transcended race, as if we could all just forget about it and get on with our “colorblind” ways if only a few loudmouthed ingrates would just shut up about it.
Then a major racial eruption exposes the raw bones of American bigotry and prejudices, and immediately we are sent into fevered, anguished bouts of finger-pointing. There was the 1989 gang rape and near-murder in Central Park of a twenty-eight-year-old woman, a stockbroker, by a pack of “wilding” black and Hispanic youths out of East Harlem. There were George Bush’s so-called Willie Horton campaign and the televised Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas, each of which had the races arguing over what was really racist and what was really good for black Americans. There were the murders like those of Charles Stuart’s wife in Boston and Susan Smith’s little boys in South Carolina, when the impulse to blame a black man sent our horrified nation, blacks included, on wild-goose chases before we discovered the terrible, painfully embarrassing truth.
“The problem of the 20th Century is the problem of the color-line–the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea,” W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in “The Souls of Black Folk” in 1903. Almost a century later, the black historian John Hope Franklin would write, “The problem of the 21st Century will still be the color line.” Little in today’s news would tend to refute his dire prediction.
Where are the leaders?
Why isn’t the black community producing leaders worth following? Talk of a “leadership crisis” haunts black conversations. They just aren’t making leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. or Malcolm X anymore, it is said, or movements like the civil rights or black power movement. Even among their admirers, Jesse Jackson and Louis Farrakhan just don’t stack up. Call it “movement nostalgia.”
“There has not been a time in the history of black people in this country when the quantity of politicians and intellectuals was so great, yet the quality of both groups has been so low,” writes Harvard’s Cornel West in “Race Matters.” “How do we account for the absence of the Frederick Douglasses, Sojourner Truths, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, Malcolm X’s and Fannie Lou Hamers in our time? Why hasn’t black America produced intellectuals of the caliber of W.E.B. Du Bois, Anna Cooper, E. Franklin Frazier, Oliver Cox, and Ralph Ellison in the past few decades?”
Or has the time for black messiahs passed? Leadership rises up from the ranks of people who need it. It also helps to have a rallying issue and organizing principles. Among blacks, as among whites, these organizing principles always have centered around two polar opposite ways of viewing the world, opposites I shall label “outside help” vs. “self-help.” When one failed to work for us, we listened with great interest to the other. It is instructive to note, as a tonic for all the media talk of welfare queens and Willie Hortons, that for most of black American history, black Americans took care of their own needs: making their own clothes, building their own houses, creating many of their own jobs and organizing their own churches and other civil organizations.
When government got in the way (slavery, segregation, etc.), black leaders rallied the masses through their civil organizations to change government policy. After years of blacks looking to government and others for help, I think self-reliance is ready to make a comeback, but not in the way many of today’s self-proclaimed black conservatives would have us believe.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and other traditional civil rights groups still do some good work, but, compared with the national scope of their past glories, since the 1960s they have been suffering from a bad case of what I call “agenda shock.”
When I took one prominent NAACP leader aside and asked for his personal, off-the-record appraisal of what needed to be done to reach today’s violence-plagued, dispirited and resentful youth, he responded, “Brother Page, I only wish I knew.” His hand-wringing frustration over this fundamental issue of our times confirmed an awful truth. In the current vernacular, our leaders didn’t have a clue.
When the Detroit News and Gannett News Services conducted a nationwide poll in 1992 (in a project initiated and supervised, I could not help noting, by a black editor-yet another sign of how much things have changed since the 1960s) of 1,211 African-American adults, 94 percent said civil rights organizations were out of touch with changing times. While they still ranked “civil rights” as an important concern, they ranked jobs, schools, crime, housing, and economic development as more important. That sounded to me like a solid agenda presented up from the streets, the grass roots. Yet when I asked the Rev. Ben Chavis about the poll during his brief tenure as executive director of the NAACP, he said, “Those other problems are civil rights problems, too! A job is a civil right. Schooling is a civil right. Housing is a civil right.”
Chavis, like other civil rights leaders-Joseph Lowery of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Jesse Jackson of Operation PUSH and the Rainbow Coalition, and so many lesser lights -saw no need for his organization to revamp its civil rights agenda for an age in which the problems plaguing black America were essentially economic and moral. Instead, he simply redefined new problems to fit his old agenda.
Suddenly I was reminded of something Robert C. Woodson, head of the Washington-based National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise, said about the folly of civil rights leaders who insist on seeing an economic world through civil rights glasses. “If the only tool you have is a hammer,” he said, quoting psychiatrist Abraham Maslow, “all problems begin to look like nails.” When polio was conquered, the March of Dimes shifted its agenda to take on the problem of birth defects. Chavis sounded to me as though he would have us think that birth defects were really polio in disguise.
I distinguish between “black conservatives” and “conservative blacks.” The former is a relatively small, if high-profile, movement of avowed conservatives who happen to be black. The latter best describes the black masses who harbor many conservative attitudes, but part company with traditional conservative party lines, especially the line that says black people make too much of racism.
Polls confirm that most black Americans are quite comfortable to be socially conservative, yet politically liberal. Black Americans are acutely aware of how much racism is alive and well, but we also are acutely aware, when we are not too outraged to admit it, that the worst problem facing black Americans today is the failure of so many of us to take advantage of opportunities that already have opened up. As the nature of the problems facing black Americans has changed, so has the need for new strategies to cope with them. At the same time, you must, as the street saying goes, “remember to watch your back.”
Woodson is an African-American who also proudly calls himself a conservative, a label this era has come to attach, properly or not, to anyone whose thinking parts company with traditional civil rights leadership. In the 1960s, black conservatives had little voice or visibility. But times have changed. Black Americans have grown weary of intellectual stagnation on the left and being taken for granted by the Democratic Party. Many have grown weary of the collapse of self-reliance and personal responsibility in too many black households. If ever there was a time when black Americans were ripe for another of our periodic seismic shifts from left to right, or outside help to self-help, this is it.
Woodson offers an example of how it can happen. He had been an NAACP organizer in Harrisburg, Pa., he says, when his conservative epiphany came about after his group had completed a hard-won victory, after much picketing and boycotting, to open up some slots for black chemists at a local plant. But, when he later approached the hired chemists for help in return, they said, “We got these jobs ’cause we were qualified,” Woodson recalls.
Suddenly Woodson decided something was out of whack. “I realized then that the poor, grass-roots black people who had worked so hard to win these victories were the last to receive any of the rewards,” he said. He determined to turn that around. He had not marched for the privilege of sitting next to white people, he said. He had marched to win freedom for black people. Black people had not depended on white people for their freedom in the past, he said; we need not depend on them now.
Woodson’s words struck a long-dormant responsive chord in me. He did not sound like conservatives I had known. He sounded, at different turns, like Martin Luther King, then like Malcolm X; like Fannie Lou Hamer, then like Huey P. Newton. He did not need to wear black berets or African garb. He let his ideas do the talking. Woodson was a critic of the civil rights movement, but he did not appear to have sold out. He had paid his dues with the movement, but he was not afraid of change. He spoke knowingly of poor people, not in the abstract as pitiable ghetto residents, but as people with intelligence who had not been “empowered” to take control of their own lives. He criticized government programs but, like Jack Kemp, did not want to do away with them. He only wanted to remove the bureaucratic middlemen, to dismantle what he called “the poverty Pentagon” and give money and power directly to the poor in the fashion of the Community Action Programs of Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty, a war Woodson saw as having considerable merit, before it was corrupted by bureaucrats, professional providers and machine politicians.
There was just one thing that troubled me about Woodson. He, like other new-wave black conservatives, showed too little respect for the civil rights leaders who remain the black community’s frontline defense against racism. But Woodson had answers for this, too. “If racism was to dry up and disappear off the face of the earth tonight, how much would it change the lives of poor black people tomorrow?” he said. Would street gangs disband? Would bad schools turn out scholars? Would crack addicts be cured? Would unwed mothers suddenly have husbands?
The original agenda of the NAACP and the southern civil rights movement was largely achieved in the 1960s, the new black conservatives say, except perhaps for a little mopping-up action here and there. The time has come to move on to the other great glory of the movement, which was not the demands made on white people, but the demands it put on black people. Make way for the age of accountability, a time for black people to take stock of themselves, a time to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, a time to bid a fond but long overdue farewell to what Woodson calls the “alms race.”
White people must also do their part. The big question for the future of American conservatism is whether it can move beyond its feigned racial innocence into a genuine and aggressive assault on racism, beginning with its own ranks. The willingness of white conservatives, after decades of benefiting directly from racial division, to meet this obligation will be the true test of their virtue and sincerity at century’s end.
What is race for?
Biracial children are quite special people with special needs in a society that is more obsessed with race than its members usually care to admit. They are white, but not quite. They are black, but not all-black. In some less-enlightened black circles, they find themselves envied and ostracized, exalted and defiled, all because of a genetic accident in which they had no say. They live, like their parents, on the edges of tribal life, on the margins of America’s historical racial contradictions. By their very existence, they flout both the immutability of the one-drop rule and the purity of Africa-descended Americans as a “race.”
But times are changing. Interracial marriage and reproduction are on the upswing, and a new generation of post-1960s multiracial children is demanding recognition, not in the margins of society but as a mainstream of their very own.
To get a glimpse of its future, look at Eldrick “Tiger” Woods, the golf prodigy. His mother, from Thailand, is half Thai, a quarter Chinese and a quarter white. His father is half black, a quarter Chinese and a quarter American Indian. Yet, since age 6, when he first was profiled in Ebony magazine, he has been called a “black” golf prodigy. On his first day in kindergarten in Cypress, Calif., Tiger was tied to a tree and taunted by older white kids who were not happy with the first “black” family in the neighborhood. Years later at Shoal Creek, a Birmingham club that once refused black members, he was picketed by black protesters for playing in a college tournament there. That was the story of Tiger’s life; either he was too black or he was not black enough. But in the spring of 1995 when he became, at 19, the fourth “black” golfer to play the Masters Tournament in Augusta, Georgia, while still enrolled in Stanford, he refused to settle for that label. It was an injustice to all of his heritages, he said, to call him simply “black.” He was not ashamed to be black. But it was not all that he was proud of, either. What does he put on forms? “Asian,” he told Sports Illustrated.
The future of race in America increasingly will sound out the question a Newsweek cover asked in 1994, “What Color Is Black?” What color is white? What is race? Such questions always have nagged at the rigid underpinnings of America’s racial order, but never more urgently than today, on the brink of a new century in which the standards of a new generation pose the greatest challenge yet to the curse of the color line.
The future of race in America is the focus of a current political and social movement by mixed-race children and their families. They don’t seek much, just recognition. They want the government to create a new “multiracial” category on census and school forms. Their organizations and support groups across the country include the Atlanta-based Project RACE, the San Francisco-based Association of Multiethnic Americans, the Chicago-based Biracial Family Network and the District of Columbia-based Interracial Family Circle, among others.
The future of race in America is in Mexico today. “Mexicans, especially, regard themselves as mestizo-part Spanish, part indigenous,” Carlos Fernandez, president of the San Francisco-based Association of Multi-Ethnic Americans, told American Demographics in 1994.
The future of race in America is being covered by new media, like Interrace and Biracial Child, two magazines based in Atlanta, and New People, based in Oak Park, Michigan.
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The future of race in America is Candy Mills, the editor and publisher of Interrace and Biracial Child. Mills is of black, white and Indian descent. Her husband, Gabe Gross, who handles the marketing, is white. Circulation quickly grew from 300 to 25,000 within a few years of their founding of the magazine in 1990. “We admit it’s a limited market,” says Gross, who assists his wife in editing Interrace and Biracial Child. “A lot of interracial couples are reluctant to buy it (Interrace) from a newsstand. Like a lot of gays are reluctant to let people see them buy gay publications. People don’t want to be identified by picking it up.”
The future of race in America can be seen in the “WURE”-the Woman of Unidentifiable Race or Ethnicity-who is selling gym shoes, mineral water or yuppie furniture to the MTV generation. Advertising executives and producers of rock videos who in the 1960s and 1970s rejected light-skinned black models because they didn’t instantly “read black” to consumers were relishing the same models in the 1980s and 1990s precisely because they were not easily identifiable as ethnically anything, thus enhancing their universal appeal.
Whatever this woman is, you really can’t tell, so it really doesn’t matter, and isn’t that the real point? She has yet to displace the blue-eyed blond as the perennial American beauty standard, but she has won a place firmly perched in the public mind and, one imagines, in America’s future. If there is a living embodiment of the next American century, she may be it. She is imposed colorblindness, rendering race virtually meaningless until, of course, she is called upon to fill out a form that asks, “What is your race?” What is it? What, indeed?
If black Americans of whatever color cannot be freed to be appreciated as individuals, one wonders, what is freedom worth when it is a freedom limited by the tyranny of small community minds dressed up in the trappings of cultural nationalism?
Perhaps, then, the future of race in America is captured at the end of a handy list of “Coping Tips” for biracial teens published in Biracial Child magazine: “Don’t try to befriend people who won’t accept you for whom you are.” It is the easiest advice for parents to give. And the most difficult for teens, still forming a sense of their own individual identities while also yearning to be part of a crowd, to follow.
Multiracial children bear a special burden. They hear black people instructing them to identify strictly as black because that is the way society will view them. Whose society? At bottom, it is the society of those very same black people. Black Americans who have internalized white supremacist attitudes and values become agents of those attitudes and values, enforcing them in others and passing them on to new generations more effectively than the Ku Klux Klan ever could.
Biracials point out that they are running away from nothing. I believe them. They cannot run away from race any more than any other American can, as long as they remain in America. They are still people of color, still evoking all the responses that people of color evoke. They cannot run away. They can only turn, as W.C. Fields once said, take the bull by the tail and face the situation.
“I want to be black,” Harvard’s Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who happens to have biracial children, once said, “to know black, to luxuriate in whatever I might be calling blackness at any particular time, but to do so in order to come out on the other side, to experience a humanity that is neither colorless nor reducible to color.”
The future of race in America will win a freedom not only to be black but also to discover and appreciate one’s own individual humanity. It will include not only our obligation as black Americans to the Africa-descended community that culturally nurtured us, whether others accept us or not, but also our obligation to be true to ourselves. Black self-determination is an empty victory if it is not accompanied by one’s individual ability to control one’s own fate. America will have to go through race to get beyond race.