Black future: black America has splintered into factions, and the one that gets the least attention deserves the most

National Review, Jan 29, 1996 by Barbara Lerner

Sometimes it seems as if there are only two views of America's race problems in the 1990s, the paranoid one and the Panglossian one. Last year was a bumper year for both, but in the end, the Panglossian one won out, at least in the white press. The stark contrast between black and white reactions to the verdict in the O. J. Simpson trial was momentarily daunting, but Candide latched onto two new Panglossian hopes. First, the fantasy that a single black superman could somehow save us, all by himself, if only we made him President. Colin Powell sensibly declined to don the cape and tights, and Candide decided that salvation lay with the million men who marched on Washington.

Fastening Panglossian hopes on Colin Powell was easy for white Americans. He's an attractive man, and most of his pale-faced fans had no idea of what his views were. Those who did -- pundits like Bill Kristol and Charles Krauthammer -- didn't care; for them, the symbol was all. The marchers were harder to fantasize about. The fact that they were assembled under the banner of a hate-monger and that they excluded women was an insurmountable downer for a few, Kristol and Krauthammer among them, but many more managed to discern a wonderfully positive message in it all.

White reporters who waded into the crowd on the mall found it full of sensitive, articulate black men, proud of their considerable accomplishments. Why, it was a veritable festival of love, a kind of black Woodstock without the sex or the drugs. And with a new rhetorical emphasis on responsibility and self-help too. What could be wrong with that?

A lot, I think, if we see the march as the response of one segment of the black baby-boomer majority to the racial problems of the black community on the 25th anniversary of the affirmative-action era, the era the boomer majority grew up in. That era is ending, and we all need to take a close look at the black community that has evolved out of it before deciding what to do next. When I do, I don't see the unity the marchers proclaim. I see three main groups of black Americans with three very different lifestyles and two sharply opposed views of the race problem in America today. I call them the winners, the predators, and the invisibles.

Black Winners: Look at the marchers and you see the winners. The marchers were overwhelmingly from the group of black baby-boomers who went to college, graduated to managerial and professional jobs, and are now spreading out in comfort in our increasingly segregated suburbs. The winners are not fighting this new segregation. Most see black middle-class self-segregation as a positive choice and embrace it, along with Afrocentrism generally.

Their enthusiasm for a black Woodstock on the Mall is easy to understand. Like many of their white peers, they are still believers in the boomer-era faith that low self-esteem is the root cause of all human failings, high self-esteem the cure. They see self-love as an unadulterated good, something you can never have too much of, a psychological and spiritual panacea. But they also hold fast to two additional beliefs that most of their white peers no longer share. They believe in affirmative action and, above all, they believe in endemic white racism. In their eyes, it is an all-pervasive negative force in American society. It's not because they've bought into Louis Farrakhan's devil-theories. It's because they believe that they themselves are frequent victims of white racism, in spite of all their accomplishments. And they are very angry about it.

Ellis Cose's book, The Rage of a Privileged Class, is a good place to start to examine this anger. Cose is a Newsweek editor who interviewed hundreds of black boomer winners like himself and found that they all had the same negative experiences with white people and responded with the same rage. That rage is forcefully expressed in a number of recent autobiographies by other boomer winners, such as Parallel Time by Brent Staples of the New York Times editorial board, and Makes Me Wanna Holler by Nathan McCall, the Washington Post reporter who is helping Farrakhan write his autobiography.

The victimization experiences that evoke their rage are of two basic kinds: running into white people who 1) manifest initial doubts about the competence of affirmative-action beneficiaries or 2) show a fear of black criminality when they encounter black male strangers. Boomer winners don't see any of these doubts or fears as understandable responses to real problems and dilemmas; they see them as racist assaults on their self-esteem.

Brent Staples's rage was more dramatically expressed than most, but the experience that triggered it was typical. As a graduate student at the University of Chicago in the 1970s he noticed that white strangers he passed on deserted campus streets at night were afraid of him when he didn't mean to frighten them. He says this came as a nasty shock to him. Staples is 6'2", wore his hair long, and liked to walk alone late at night, wearing a navy pea jacket "broad at the shoulders, high at the collar, making me look bigger and more fearsome than I was." Appearances notwithstanding, it wasn't hard for him to dispel the fear he evoked. He would whistle Vivaldi's The Seasons or a Beatles tune and observe the reaction: "The tension drained from people's bodies when they heard me. A few even smiled as they passed me in the dark."