Post-Ghetto fabulous: coming to grips with black women's success

Washington Monthly, April, 2003 by Debra J. Dickerson

HAVING IT ALL? Black Women and Success by Veronica Chambers Doubleday, $23.95

WHEN IT COMES TO THE NATIONAL discourse, to be a black woman is to be that kid who moves to town the first week of February; you're going to get a fair number of Valentines, but your name will be misspelled and dutifully rendered in the handwriting of your new Classmates' moms. Black women, when not scapegoats--think: single parent homes, juvenile crime, and welfare--are after-thoughts. Black men's problems, we are to believe, are black people's problems.

Yet, without much public notice, black women have been taking care of business, and not primarily via lawsuit and bullhorn. As Woody Allen noted, 99 percent of success is just showing up--for application deadlines, for class, for birth-control pill refills, for each day on the job--and that is simply what black women have done. No magic. No treachery against black men. The continuing existence of racism, they deduced, is simply no reason not to try. According to Veronica Chambers in her new book, Having it All? Black Women and Succesi, "In a single generation, black women's lives have improved vastly on key fronts: professionally, academically, and financially." In recent decades, she reports, the number of African-American women earning bachelor's degrees has increased by three-quarters; the numbers attending law or graduate school have more than doubled. Between 1988 and 1998, the number of black families earning $100,000 or more almost doubled, driven largely by black women's increased earning power. While white women still outearn black women in management positions, according to a 1998 survey, black women are beginning to inch ahead in such fields as sales and administrative support roles.

Thankfully, as this not-so-new reality begins to seep into America's consciousness, works on black women that sidestep both the incomprehensible ghetto of women's studies and the "Girlfriend" aisle at Barnes & Noble are finally beginning to surface. In March 2002, The Washington Monthly published Paul Offner's analysis of the diverging fortunes of black men and women. Last month, Newsweek published a cover package on the black professional gender gap and its consequences. Eventually, all of America will have to notice that the American business district teems with black women in professional dress, however absent black men might be.

Having it All? operates as a social and cultural history of black women's portrayals in the business world (there is much more to Aunt Jemima than you think), entertainment, and the news media. Unbeknownst to me, Claire Huxtable almost single-handedly inspired the studious segment of the hip-hop generation to believe they, too, could have--sans nanny--a husband, five kids, a lavish Brooklyn brownstone, and a law career, while always looking fabulous. Primarily, however, the work is interview-driven, which is both a strength and a weakness. Anecdotes, however telling, are neither reliable nor replicable. Sometimes, the parade of stalwart black women--from attorney to museum grande dame to White House operative to actress--is feel-goody and somewhat superficial, like a public service announcement for Black History Month. On the other hand, the individual women's approaches to succeeding in highly competitive, "Oh great, I'm the only black person again" environments are both a revelation to the uninitiated and a cosmic props for those who pulled it off. Their anecdotes live and breathe our complicated racial and gender realities as no pile of statistics ever could. There's a gospel song to encapsulate every moment in a black person's life; the correct one here is Aretha Franklin's "(My Soul Looks Back and Wonders) How I Got Over." It makes you proud, it makes America shut up and take notice. Just like a feel-goody, superficial Black History Month PSA.

One of the few things America does tend to know about black women, successful or struggling, is that they're often alone, a reality which permeates Having It All? Professional, academic, and financial gains are wonderful things, but they don't give you a foot rub after a hard day in the operating room. A significant other does. That's one reason why the title, Having It All? is a question and not a declaration of victory. Chambers perhaps takes too lightly high-achieving black women's lack of husbands and children in her focus on exploring the daylight between black and white women's workplace realities. She writes that "many of the 30-something and even 40-something women interviewed in this book are childless. Unlike the panicked portraits of professional women depicted in the media, the women I spoke to routinely expressed no sense of regret, no Lichtenstein-like cartoon horror of `Damn, I forgot to have a baby.' Leaving aside the soupcon of contempt for white women's stereotypical neuroses, it is possible that these women were putting their best feminist feet forward to fortify both themselves and the women who will follow them--in their spinsterhood as well as their achievements. Speaking as a high-achieving black woman who married, to intergalactic surprise, at 40, solitude was the price I was willing to pay to achieve my dreams. It was not my preference. It was not easy. I was lonely. Married, to a good man, is better. Even if he can't figure out how to get dishes into the dishwasher. (In Chambers's defense, there is an entire chapter on black professional stay-at-home moms.)