complexities of sustaining community in the new century: Challenges confronting a new generation of Africans in America, The

Black Collegian, Apr 2001 by Walters, Ronald

Challenges Confronting aNew Generation of Africans in America

Someone said that each generation has the obligation to fulfill its destiny or to betray it. As I consider the deep truth of this statement, especially as it is addressed to that generation of Black youth coming into their maturity in the 21st Century, I feel the necessity to bring many of the lessons of history to bear on that mission in this essay.

Pressures on the Idea of a Black Community - I would begin by stating that it is important to maintain the integrity of the Black Community as the repository of Black culture and the platform for engaging the destiny of our people. We have traditionally thought of "community" as a way of naming the collectivity that identified peoples of African descent, both as a general descriptor within the United States and as the identity of Blacks in any given location. Both of these are associated with the overarching Pan African idea of the global unity of African descendant peoples.

There is a clear and present danger to the idea of a Black community. We live in an era where many Blacks, feeling a sense of personal liberation, often elevate the value of diversity of personal identity and cultural life style over the unity of their basic group membership. They fail to understand that it is most often the viability of community, which makes possible individual achievement, rather than the reverse. In any case, the notion of the existence of distinct Black people in America is under considerable pressure.

The Mythical Community - The idea that is at the heart of the community is a moderate form of Black nationalism. Ask most people where they came from; they will say Africa. Ask them whether they believe in the dignity of Black people; they will say yes. Ask they if they have a duty to overthrow racism; they will say yes. Ask them if they also have a duty to contribute to humanity by beginning with the social, political and economic development of their own people; they will say yes.

Nevertheless, the mythical idea of Blackness is simultaneously being reinforced and changed most powerfully through cultural symbols of music and lifestyle, often in negative and perverse ways. But without engaging in a critique of this content, it is being consumed by young people, in particular, across cultures, even if they are only partially conscious of wearing a "Black" lifestyle. And even though the origin of this lifestyle emerged from the culture of the Black working poor, it has been adopted as "Black" or "hip-hop" or "street" or "urban" culture, by elements of the middle class as well.

In one sense, it has been adopted by large segments of the Black entertainment class, not only as personal lifestyle, but in relation to their connection to the most powerful market-driving factor in America. Blacks are hired out by whites to play caricatures of themselves, defined in the ways that make those comfortable who consume those images. Blacks who can make white folk laugh or feel good will always have a job; those who don't will always be in danger of rejection and annihilation.

The Black Community as Location - Stemming from oppression by the ruling class, the physically separate location of Black people was fostered by the enforcement of tightly segregated patterns of group residence. However, even as the force of residential restrictions by race have eased, we find that, although oppression still exists in the form of racial steering, manipulation of housing finance and other factors, racial housing patterns are also shaped by the voluntary patterns of white flight from the encroaching movement of Blacks and the natural attraction of Blacks to live with other Blacks. The latter has resulted in the fact that even where new communities are being formed outside of the old Black inner-city Black community, the newer patterns of residence finds Black middle enclaves to be predominant. This has resulted in the existence of two types of community, an older one, under pressure from higher rates of poverty, crime, lower quality of education, housing, services and jobs. This pattern has changed the nature of the Black family, fostering a breach between Black females as single-parents and the head of a household and with Black males under-employed or incarcerated.

The newer ones are sometimes Black gated communities, but most often more open integrated communities with a preponderance of Blacks, where most people commute significant distances to work and where the pressures of maintaining and accessing employment and the attendant lifestyle that the job requires, places economic and social pressures upon the Black family.

The Contradictions - This pulling apart of the older community into two forms of location is putting pressure on the nature of the older mythical idea of Black community and causing some cultural change. One such change is in the emergence of a Black class language, as expressed in the tendency to identify Blacks from the older community as having "ghetto names" or being "ghetto rats" or referring to the stylized behavior of Blacks in general as "ghetto" meaning a negative rather than a positive. This is evidence that many of the children of the Black middle class have constructed a parallel version of the culture of the ruling class, supporting their characterization of inner city Blacks in their project of self-satisfaction at having "made it out" and in their new project of "making it into" the white middle class system, without really "fitting in."