Reviews -- Blacks in the White Establishment?: A Study of Race and Class in America by Richard L. Zweigenhaft and G. William Domhoff

Journal of Negro Education, The, Winter 1994 by Woodruff, Darren

The ongoing struggle by African Americans to gain access to high-level educational and career opportunities from a presumably penitent White society is chronicled in this book with an eye to the unforeseen consequences. Authors Zweigenhaft and Domhoff make provocative use of the title's question-posing stance to explore whether or not African Americans are successfully integrated into the White power structure. If not, why not? they ask; and if so, what is the price of membership? Answers to these and other relevant questions are offered via personal reflections from African American veterans of the White educational establishment. The experiences under analysis are those of some of the more than 5,000 graduates of A Better Chance, Inc. (ABC). ABC was created with government and private funding during the civil rights thrust of the 1960s, and it has continued into the present in an abbreviated, less enthusiastically funded form. This study blends ABC program data with interviews conducted from 1986 to 1988 to create an interesting and insightful portrait of Black students' transitions into lily-white prep school culture, the shifting and often difficult relations they experienced with White schoolmates and with friends and family back home, and their subsequent college and career triumphs and disappointments.

In the chapter entitled "From the Ghetto to the Elite," Zweigenhaft and Domhoff detail how promising African American students aged 13 to 16 (as well as some Latino, Asian, and Native American students) were removed from their urban, low-income home and school environments and placed in prestigious, wealthy New England preparatory schools. Ninety-nine percent of ABC's early graduates went on to college, compared to only 40% of their inner-city high school peers. Students like Vest Monroe (1988), who wrote of his experiences in Brothers--Black and Poor: A True Story of Courage and Survival, were part of a select group of 430 ABC students who in 1966 made their first journey into the elitist world of schools such as Andover, Exeter, Concord, and St. George's academies. BIacks in the White Establishment? includes Monroe's anecdotal account of a doomed attempt to replicate at home the formal eating style he had acquired while at school. According to Monroe, he was quickly advised by his sister, "Why don't you leave that St. George's bulls*** at St. George's?" This example vividly illustrates the unanticipated dilemmas of growing up in two culturally separate worlds. Another ABC graduate, who attended the MacDuffie School, relates a poignant memory of her first day on campus, when, as she recalled, a White student promptly informed her that she had never been near anyone Black other than her maid. Other ABC students describe the turmoil associated with leaning how to talk, dress, and act "properly" in the elite private school environment, and the cultural clashes that emerged as a result.

To be sure, the story of most ABC graduates is primarily an account of the successful entry of carefully selected African American students into a privileged society, the vast majority of whose participants go on to accomplished professional careers facilitated by the social skills learned and perfected during their prep school experience. Twenty percent of ABC graduates are categorized by Zweigenhaft and Domhoff as "stars," people who have had exceptional success in their careers; while another 50% they classify as "professionals," that is, minority prep school graduates who are doing well in a variety of white-collar fields and are solidly middle-class. The authors therefore conclude that the bulk of ABC alumni are doing well despite acknowledged bitterness over encountering career ceilings based on race. Most, they contend, have the skills to move comfortably in mainstream class and corporate structures but continue to struggle with issues of racism and nonacceptance in both the Black and White worlds.

Blacks in the White Establishment? tempers its recollections of mainstream mastery by bringing to light experiences of painful and often lonely transitions into a foreign culture, difficult interactions with insensitive Whites, and youthful psyches plagued by self-doubt and the awkwardness of returning home a changed person. For many ABC graduates, entry into comfortable, middle-class life has come at the cost of reduced ease and involvement with their lower-class cultural origins and a general lack of success in establishing successful marital relationships, particularly with spouses from their home neighborhoods. Forty percent of those interviewed for this study have never married. An estimated 5% to 10% of ABC graduates married Whites. Of the 20% who married people from their home neighborhoods, all but one interviewed for this study were divorced.

Blacks in the White Establishment? does not provide a comprehensive survey of the ABC graduate pool such as that undertaken by Johnson and Prom--Jackson (1984). Indeed, the authors base their conclusions upon a very small and definitely nonrandom sample of ABC graduates. Nonetheless, this book provides interesting and thought-provoking reading, particularly recommended for African American parents who have exposed or plan to expose their children to private schooling.