AMONG THE INNUMERABLE RAMIFICATIONS...
OF THE AMERICAN WAY OF LIFE is bigotry, which instantaneously resurfaced at the very moment an African-American was elected as our President and brought forth the age-old prejudices and long-held Jim Crowism; both of which were once thought of as dead-and-forever-buried; we were again thrown back into those years when an Emmett Till could be murdered in Mississippi for the atrocious atrocity of whistling at a white girl. Our infinite capacity for absurdity and the enraged disease of hostile animosity ejected rapidly; the belief that we could love our country and justice, too, quietly dehydrated into the squalor of the sordid past, as the featherbrained folk with decaying minds covered their own miseries by blaming them on the Underclass.
For years I had chosen to ignore the existence of a permanent Underclass, dismissing it as the fevered dream of neoconservatives and the apostate liberals; there were too many signs of genuine racial progress in this country, and I was certain that what Langston Hughes called "a dream deferred" could not be deferred forever; that immediately changed the instant Obama became our President, and the fierce negative power of prejudice reared-up, hardened and condensed; the bitterness of bygone years was conveniently re instituted.
Instead of retreating back to the ferocious subculture and into the cliches of glib racialism, let me give a few facts about how the Underclass came to be a permanent Underclass, not with reports of whites using force to keep blacks from moving into their neighborhoods, a resurgent Klan in some places, of white cops too quick to arrest, abuse, or shoot down black suspects; but the fact that racism continues to be real in the United States; only a fool would deny it.
Almost 40 percent of all black American families are now living below the federal poverty line, in New York City it is estimated that 70 percent of black youths never finish high school, in at a time when even a high school diploma is barely sufficient to function in the job market. The national infant-mortality rate is 60 percent higher among blacks than among whites. The living face even greater hazards. One third of the black population in the city of Chicago between the ages of 5 and 19 are victims of homicide, and nationally the leading cause of death for black men between the ages of 16 and 44 is murder. Not smallpox. Not tuberculosis. Not influenza. Not one of the ancient plagues of earth. Murder.
What goes on here?
When I was young and growing up in the city of Denver, this simply didn't happen. If a young man got a young woman pregnant, her father, brothers, or uncles would come knocking at the door. Today, in the urban wilderness of the Underclass, too many young black men apparently think nothing of getting a woman pregnant and then moving on, leaving the children's care, feeding, clothing, and housing in the indifferent hands of the paternalistic state. Some feel that young black males are compensating for feeling so inferior in the larger society; that men like this are predestined to become who it is that they have become - insisting that human beings are prisoners of history and not its makers - which has been refuted by the stirring history of black Americans themselves, from Frederick Douglass to Martin Luther King Jr. and many millions in between. To insist that only black Americans are permanent prisoners of the past, unable to shape their own lives, is itself a form of racism.
Common sense alone tells me that if that had been true, then the trauma would have affected all blacks; obviously it hasn't. Fear of the Underclass is about class not race. This has much president in American history; at various times in our big cities, the middle class often felt threatened by the crime and moral disorder of the Jews, the Irish, and the Italian poor. There are three elements of the current catastrophe that were not present in previous generations: drugs, television, and welfare; to the point that when we walk down a street at night, we follow the pattern of peering over our shoulders, always alert to danger; if a group of young Black men is seen, we cross the street or reverse direction.
Not too many years ago, I had the opportunity to teach a writing class at a two-year college in the City of New York. My classes were filled with Pell Grant students who had come into Manhattan by subway from places like Harlem and the South Bronx, noted only for being the birthplace of the hip-hop culture and utter despair; because they were eager to learn; youngsters who had never heard of James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Jean Toomer, or Ralph Ellison, to mention only a few extraordinary black writers. They didn't know that Alice Walker wrote The Color Purple. They had never heard of Max Roach or Dizzy Gillespie or Charlie Parker. They knew nothing about Aesop's fables or the Old Testament or the tales of the Greek gods. Many white kids were equally as ignorant, but most of them did not have to fight their way out of the Underclass.
The first thing I came to understand was one terrible truth: for the black Underclass, life in the United States was infinitely worse than I had ever imagined. For them, King, Malcolm, and the rest had died in vain. Unlike newly arrived Koreans, Pakistanis, Cubans, Haitians - all of whom seemed to move to the top in many professions; for these kids, who had forefathers who were once nothing more than mere chattel, the black Underclass seemed incapable of progress.
And because they lived in the ghetto, they wanted role models that weren't crack dealers, pimps, stickup men. They desired the restoration of genuine pride and lost dignity. They wished to be a Duke Ellington walking along on Lenox Avenue or an Art Tatum getting out of a new car in front of Minton's; to speak like Adam Clayton Powell once did, or be as hip as Miles Davis or as elegant as Sugar Ray Robinson or Muhammad Ali. They knew that the time to begin was now; that they did have a chance to escape those "dead-end" jobs and make something of their lives; to repair the holes of the human spirit with hope for the future.
In the end, they taught me more than I could ever teach them.
About life.
About myself.
About racism.
About the world they wished to bolt out of.
For years I had chosen to ignore the existence of a permanent Underclass, dismissing it as the fevered dream of neoconservatives and the apostate liberals; there were too many signs of genuine racial progress in this country, and I was certain that what Langston Hughes called "a dream deferred" could not be deferred forever; that immediately changed the instant Obama became our President, and the fierce negative power of prejudice reared-up, hardened and condensed; the bitterness of bygone years was conveniently re instituted.
Instead of retreating back to the ferocious subculture and into the cliches of glib racialism, let me give a few facts about how the Underclass came to be a permanent Underclass, not with reports of whites using force to keep blacks from moving into their neighborhoods, a resurgent Klan in some places, of white cops too quick to arrest, abuse, or shoot down black suspects; but the fact that racism continues to be real in the United States; only a fool would deny it.
Almost 40 percent of all black American families are now living below the federal poverty line, in New York City it is estimated that 70 percent of black youths never finish high school, in at a time when even a high school diploma is barely sufficient to function in the job market. The national infant-mortality rate is 60 percent higher among blacks than among whites. The living face even greater hazards. One third of the black population in the city of Chicago between the ages of 5 and 19 are victims of homicide, and nationally the leading cause of death for black men between the ages of 16 and 44 is murder. Not smallpox. Not tuberculosis. Not influenza. Not one of the ancient plagues of earth. Murder.
What goes on here?
When I was young and growing up in the city of Denver, this simply didn't happen. If a young man got a young woman pregnant, her father, brothers, or uncles would come knocking at the door. Today, in the urban wilderness of the Underclass, too many young black men apparently think nothing of getting a woman pregnant and then moving on, leaving the children's care, feeding, clothing, and housing in the indifferent hands of the paternalistic state. Some feel that young black males are compensating for feeling so inferior in the larger society; that men like this are predestined to become who it is that they have become - insisting that human beings are prisoners of history and not its makers - which has been refuted by the stirring history of black Americans themselves, from Frederick Douglass to Martin Luther King Jr. and many millions in between. To insist that only black Americans are permanent prisoners of the past, unable to shape their own lives, is itself a form of racism.
Common sense alone tells me that if that had been true, then the trauma would have affected all blacks; obviously it hasn't. Fear of the Underclass is about class not race. This has much president in American history; at various times in our big cities, the middle class often felt threatened by the crime and moral disorder of the Jews, the Irish, and the Italian poor. There are three elements of the current catastrophe that were not present in previous generations: drugs, television, and welfare; to the point that when we walk down a street at night, we follow the pattern of peering over our shoulders, always alert to danger; if a group of young Black men is seen, we cross the street or reverse direction.
Not too many years ago, I had the opportunity to teach a writing class at a two-year college in the City of New York. My classes were filled with Pell Grant students who had come into Manhattan by subway from places like Harlem and the South Bronx, noted only for being the birthplace of the hip-hop culture and utter despair; because they were eager to learn; youngsters who had never heard of James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Jean Toomer, or Ralph Ellison, to mention only a few extraordinary black writers. They didn't know that Alice Walker wrote The Color Purple. They had never heard of Max Roach or Dizzy Gillespie or Charlie Parker. They knew nothing about Aesop's fables or the Old Testament or the tales of the Greek gods. Many white kids were equally as ignorant, but most of them did not have to fight their way out of the Underclass.
The first thing I came to understand was one terrible truth: for the black Underclass, life in the United States was infinitely worse than I had ever imagined. For them, King, Malcolm, and the rest had died in vain. Unlike newly arrived Koreans, Pakistanis, Cubans, Haitians - all of whom seemed to move to the top in many professions; for these kids, who had forefathers who were once nothing more than mere chattel, the black Underclass seemed incapable of progress.
And because they lived in the ghetto, they wanted role models that weren't crack dealers, pimps, stickup men. They desired the restoration of genuine pride and lost dignity. They wished to be a Duke Ellington walking along on Lenox Avenue or an Art Tatum getting out of a new car in front of Minton's; to speak like Adam Clayton Powell once did, or be as hip as Miles Davis or as elegant as Sugar Ray Robinson or Muhammad Ali. They knew that the time to begin was now; that they did have a chance to escape those "dead-end" jobs and make something of their lives; to repair the holes of the human spirit with hope for the future.
In the end, they taught me more than I could ever teach them.
About life.
About myself.
About racism.
About the world they wished to bolt out of.
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