05-Healey-Reader.qxd 11/3/03 2:52 PM Page 145 5 AFRICAN AMERICANS The system of de jure segregation that perpetuated the oppression and exploitation of African Americans following slavery came to an end in the 1960s, destroyed by a combination of court rulings, legislation, and the courageous activism of civil rights demonstrators. Since that time, the status of African Americans has improved in many ways. The black middle class has increased in size and affluence, average levels of education have risen, and the income gap between blacks and whites has diminished. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, African Americans can be found at all levels of society and include some of the wealthiest, most respected and prestigious people in the world. At the same time, enormous problems of poverty and powerlessness, racism and exclusion remain. Black Americans are still three times more likely to live in poverty as whites and, even more distressing, one-third of black children (versus about 13 percent of white children) will be raised in poverty. The black urban underclass continues to grow, and black Americans are the victims of continuing, systematic discrimination in every societal institution, including, in particular, the criminal justice system. Antiblack prejudice and racism persist in American culture and in the minds of many, albeit in a somewhat muted and covert form. The selections in this chapter address this mixture of racial progress and failure from a number of angles. The Narrative Portrait focuses on the loneliness and alienation that some- times affects upwardly mobile black Americans and other peoples of color. The story of Leanita McClain raises questions about the meaning of success, the price of living in multiple worlds, and the persistence of prejudice at the highest levels of American society. The Readings examine antiblack racism, discrimination, and exclusion across a broad spec- trum of American life. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and Tyrone Forman document the “modern” or symbolic form that racism has assumed in the United States. The overt, unapologetic prejudice of the past has evolved into a more subtle form that tends to hide just below the surface but continues to view African Americans as unworthy of full equality. Angela Davis explores the dynamics of racism and discrimination in the criminal justice system, an area in which race relations are particularly volatile and sensitive. She documents the racism, discrimination, and sexism that is built into the system, including the racist results of the so-called War on Drugs. She then examines the many ways in which the disproportionate imprisonment of blacks is blamed on the black community, blaming the victims and thereby insulating the institution from charges of racism. In the third reading, Kathleen Korgen analyzes the ways in which racism affects close, cross- racial friendships. She finds that the members of these intimate relationships develop strategies for avoiding the topic of race and ignoring the “elephant in the living room.” Racism remains so pervasive in American society, however, that it affects even close friendships, a fact that suggests how far we remain from the ideal of a truly “color-blind” society. 145 05-Healey-Reader.qxd 11/3/03 2:52 PM Page 146 146–•–UNDERSTANDING DOMINANT-MINORITY RELATIONS IN THE U.S. The Current Debate focuses on a proposal for narrowing the racial gaps in income and quality of life. The idea of paying reparations to blacks for the kidnapping of their ancestors from Africa, the centuries of slavery, and the continued exploitation under de jure segregation is controversial, to say the least. The black community is not unanimous in its support for repa- rations, as pointed out by John McWhorter, but there are some compelling reasons to consider the possibility, as argued by Manning Marable. Furthermore, as Joe Feagin and Eileen O’Brien point out, there are precedents for such repayments and the possibility of positive outcomes far exceed the mere transfer of cash. NARRATIVE PORTRAIT THE PRICE OF SUCCESS The selection following raises questions about the cost of upward mobility for people of color in U.S. society. Success on white middle-class terms may well require the suppression of habits and patterns learned in earliest childhood and separation from relationships deeply rooted in one’s biography. Of course, many make the transition without regret for what was left behind. Others find the price too high, the alienation from self and background too agonizing, the strain of navigating multiple social worlds too exhausting. Leanita McClain was a highly successful journalist and an African American female. She won numerous awards and was the first African American to be named a member of the Chicago Tribune’s editorial board. She was also named one of the ten outstanding working women in America by Glamour magazine. She was born in Chicago’s housing projects and survived gang warfare, poverty, and despair. As an adult, she lived in multiple social worlds. From the black to the white community and from the lower to the upper middle class, she nav- igated the perils of race, class, and gender in the United States. In 1984, at the age of 32, she took her own life. The following selection is excerpted from a magazine piece on professional black women that focused on her life and death. TO BE BLACK,GIFTED, AND ALONE Bebe Moore Campbell Her success had netted her a posh address in the now rears five children on welfare, the boy from city’s predominantly white, gentrified north church who is in prison for murder, the pal side, but McClain wasn’t entirely comfortable found dead of a drug overdose. Sometimes in her new setting. In October, 1980, in when I wait at the bus stop, I meet my aunt get- Newsweek’s “My Turn” column, she wrote, “It ting off the bus with other cleaning ladies on is impossible for me to forget where I come their way to do my neighbor’s floors.” from as long as I am prey to the jive hustler who McClain realized that she couldn’t go home does not hesitate to exploit my childhood again. Yet, despite her fair skin and sandy hair, friendship. I am reminded, too, when I go back despite her credentials and awards, she didn’t to my old neighborhood in fear—and have my have access to her new world either. “She purse snatched—and sit down to a business got thrown into a white world and was expected lunch and have an old classmate wait on my to act the part,” says a friend. “She was often table. I recall the girl I played dolls with who fighting and grappling with her real self. She 05-Healey-Reader.qxd 11/3/03 2:52 PM Page 147 African Americans–•–147 couldn’t even write what she wanted. She had to [but] they don’t have the additional burden of bottle up her rage.” compromising their cultural selves. If black As her personal desires eluded her [her mar- women...relinquish their cultural selves, they riage to journalist Clarence Page had ended, as are unable to function in the old world that still had several other relationships] and the values claims them. They learn to wear a mask. of her old and new worlds collided, close “Each day, when I get into my car, I always friends witnessed spells of hysterical crying, begin the ride to work by turning on a black brooding silence, and mounting depression.... radio station so that it blares,” says Karen For all of her accoutrements of professional suc- [another professional black woman interviewed cess, McClain was as full of despair as any for the story]. “I boogey all the way down the ghetto dweller. On the night of what would have highway. A few blocks from my job, I turn the been her tenth wedding anniversary, McClain music down and stop shaking my shoulders. swallowed a huge overdose of amitriptyline and When my building comes into view, I turn the left both worlds behind.... music off, because I know the curtain is about to It is rare for a black woman to ascend to go up.”... the professional heights that McClain Leanita McClain had felt guilty about mov- attained.... Understandably, then, the loss of ing away from her old friends; she felt awkward McClain’s influence, power, and her ability to about fitting the militant blacks’ stereotype of a be a role model is perceived by some blacks as “sell out.” “I am not comfortably middle class,” a group loss. [Other professional black she wrote. “I am uncomfortably middle women interviewed for this article know] that class.”...Isolated from blacks, black executive a black woman’s climb to corporate power is women often are alienated from the whites with at least as arduous as survival in the ghetto: whom they are supposed to assimilate. They see a part of themselves in Leanita McClain wrote, “Some of my ‘liberal’ white McClain’s life. acquaintances hint that I am a freak, that my Stress is the common experience these success is less a matter of talent than of luck and women all share....[This] stress is from the affirmative action. I may live among them, but oppressive combination of racism, sexism, and it is difficult to live with them.” professional competition that separates black Towards the end of her life, Leanita women not only from their white colleagues, McClain’s loneliness was perhaps a heavier but also insidiously pits them against their black burden than her professional struggles. The male professional counterparts. The overload on combination was, for her, unbearable...