Rage of a Privileged Class: Why Middle-Class Blacks Are Angry; Why America Should Care. - book reviews

Danielle Allen

5

LATE one Friday night last May, I left my thesis work in the Classics Department of Princeton University and headed home for a couple of hours of studybreak sleep. Passing a dormitory near mine, I heard a shout from one of the upper floors: "F---ing nigger!" The shout was directed at me.

About racism, at Princeton and elsewhere, I was already no innocent. Speakers standing directly in front of me, in small rooms, had managed to deliver entire presentations without once looking at my face. I had often encountered the word '"black" in a list of derogatory adjectives. Shopping in department stores, I had more than once been taken for a salesperson. But never before had I experienced, at least on the Princeton campus or elsewhere, such overt racism.

That night I thought about the shout, and it left me with a sensation like the one when you've got a loose tooth and you can't help wiggling it with your tongue: not painful, but a squishy, rubbery, squeaky feeling. The shout didn't bother me more than a loose tooth would have done, because I do not fear racism. I know it exists. But I am not afraid that it will keep me from going anywhere I want to go. What I realized that night was that the shouted words, however ugly, had no power over me because I trusted the community I lived in and its commitment to my security.

In this way I am not, it turns out, a typical black American. As Ellis Cose shows in his new book, drawing on many interviews, there are many blacks over whom such words do indeed have great power. Mr. Cose's subject is the "privileged class of blacks" who, despite their success in the white world, do not trust the communities they live in. Rather, his witnesses testify to the lingering anger and discomfort of black folks who have "made it," financially and professionally--academics, lawyers, and business executives who, with Mr. Cose's skillful mediation, tell stories of snubs and insults experienced in the lobbies of expensive hotels, while driving in their own neighborhoods, and in other apparently safe settings.

A contributing editor and essayist at Newsweek, Mr. Cose introduces us to a minister who watched the families of deceased white parishioners decide to hold memorial services elsewhere; a journalist who managed to raise by 15 per cent the appraised value of his house simply by having his white secretary pose as its owner; a househunting attorney who asked over the telephone whether an apartment was in a good neighborhood, and heard: "Yes, it's a very good neighborhood. There are no black people here."

This is painful to read, but Mr. Cose says we must hear these stories because "certain widespread and amiable assumptions held by whites--specifically about the black middle class but also about race relations in general-are utterly at odds with the reality many Americans confront daily." He argues that we Americans are not yet in a position to celebrate the dawn of the color-blind age, despite the drastic institutional changes that this country has seen in the past forty years.

We need to digest this important fact: a black person living in America faces the very real prospect of insults and slights--not "institutional racism" but the real thing--just as a woman walking the streets of New York City faces the prospect, each day, of lewd remarks from passersby. Is this a reason, though, to indict America as a racist nation? Mr. Cose doesn't say so explicitly. But he does attempt an analytical move from the particular stories to general patterns of racial interaction, and the results are less than satisfying.

Mr. Cose wants to document the widespread belief on the part of professional-class blacks that they live in a society that is inhospitable to them, with special emphasis on the racist workplace. But he uses statistics and surveys in ways that are more rhetorical than analytical. For instance, he often cites surveys comparing work satisfaction among middle-class blacks with that among their counterparts of other races. Blacks tend to be less satisfied with their jobs than others are. But measures of satisfaction and disappointment mean nothing if we do not consider, as Mr. Cose does not, the expectations of the individuals surveyed. Perhaps, following the advent of affirmative action, with its promise of lightning-fast advancement, blacks have been led to expect too much from their jobs. Mr. Cose does not address that possibility.

He gives us a great deal of information about black professionals: about their dissatisfactions, their disgruntlemerits, their humiliations. But he often fails to distinguish those professionals who attained their positions before affirmative action began from those who attained them after affirmative action had reached its zenith. Mr. Cose believes there is a "glass ceiling" to block the career path of black professionals, like the "glass ceiling" that is said to impede the careers of women. He admits that some blacks have shattered this ceiling, but we are not given statements from any of these men and women. Such an omission must make us wonder about Mr. Cose's objectivity. This is unfortunate because the discomfort and distrust among blacks of the "privileged class" are real, and they pose a problem that needs careful consideration.

In my own life, trusting my American community ultimately depends on a leap of faith. Indeed, Mr. Cose sees "questions of faith---of whether one believes in the ability and willingness of those whites who still control the majority of important institutions in America to do what they have not done thus far: ensure that no group is systematically penalized as a consequence of color"--as largely determining people's positions on specific policy questions, such as affirmative action. My experience has taught me that it is possible to trust your community only if you have come to see particular incidents of racism as exceptional, instead of as manifestations of general cultural attitudes.

Last May, after four years as a member of the Princeton community, I could affirm my faith in that community. I trusted Princeton University and could view a racist act as an exception to a general rule of tolerance. This was despite the fact that I had experienced racism at Princeton even before my neighbor in that dorm shouted at me last spring. The men and women in this book have not been able to make the same leap. Why? With all his statistics and surveys, Mr. Cose is unable to provide an answer.

He misses a point in his own material that may lead us in a helpful direction. Mr. Cose presents a survey in which respondents commented on statements including this one: "American society just hasn't dealt fairly with people from my background."

In that phrase, "American society," may lie the key to the mystery of professional-class blaCK estrangement. We too often use such phrases as "American society" and "ethnic community" as if the two were entirely separate and distinct, as if one were not included in the other. In this, we---blacks and non-blacks---only imitate the "leaders" who stand up to speak for us on racial matters. As long as we think of our ethnic community as distinct from our American community, there will be a problem. We need a common vocabulary which depends upon an understanding of America as a nation composed of individuals, not ethnic groups. This too requires a kind of faith.

Of course faith comes with difficulty for blacks when white bigots lend their own form of support to the charge of endemic racism. But faith also comes with difficulty when blacks have heard repeatedly from people they respect---community leaders, academics, journalists--that the general community, composed of many races, is not trustworthy. As a leader of a kind himself, Mr. Cose has now done his part to aggravate the situation: this book will only confirm for its black readers that they are right to feel estranged from America.

And yet he also offers a hint of hope, although it is one I'm not sure he would recognize that way. He writes:

In the past... one knew that the color
 line, at some points, could never be
 crossed, and that it was worse than
 useless to try. In short, one knew one's
 place. For the parents of today, such
 certainty does not exist. Yet they still must
 help their children find their place in a
 world in which no one, white or black,
 knows precisely where that place will--
 or can be.

It is that kind of uncertainty that gives me hope--hope that, perhaps by the time I have children or at least by the time my children have children, most Americans, black and white, will join me in thinking of ourselves and one another as individuals, and of racist acts as acts committed by individuals rather than by entire groups. If I am right about this uncertainty, then my leap of faith will prove not to have been misguided.

Miss Allen, a former editorial assistant at NR, is studying on a Marshall scholarship at King's College, Cambridge.

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