Much more was on his mind than the fact that his partners were still “fumbling with my compensation.” One source of immense resentment was an encounter of a few days previous, when he had arrived at the office earlier than usual and entered the elevator along with a young white man. They got off at the same floor. No secretaries or receptionists were yet in place. As my friend turned toward the locked outer office doors, his elevator mate blocked his way and asked, “May I help you?” My friend shook his head and attempted to circle around his would-be helper, but the young man stepped in front of him and demanded in a loud and decidedly colder tone, “May I help you?” At this, the older man fixed him with a stare, spat out his name, and identified himself as a partner, whereupon his inquisitor quickly stepped aside.
My friend’s initial impulse was to put the incident behind him. Yet he had found himself growing angrier and angrier at the young associate’s temerity. After all, he had been dressed much better than the associate. His clients paid the younger man’s salary. The only thing that could have conceivably stirred the associate’s suspicions was race: “Because of his color, he felt he had the right to check me out.”
He paused in his narration and shook his head. “Here I am, a black man who has done all the things I was supposed to do,” he said, and proceeded to tick off precisely what he had done: gone to Harvard, labored for years to make his mark in an elite law firm, married a highly motivated woman who herself had an advanced degree and a lucrative career. He and his wife were in the process of raising three exemplary children. Yet he was far from fulfilled.
“Had I been given a fair shot, who knows where I would be?” he sighed. Moreover, despite his own clear achievements, he was concerned for his children. With so many black men in jail or beaten down by society, whom would his daughters marry? With prejudice still such a force, who could ensure their success? As for himself, he said, he had come to terms with reality. He no longer expected praise, honor, or acceptance from his white colleagues, or from the white world at large. “Just make sure my money is at the top of the line. I can go to my own people for acceptance.”
I was certain he did not mean what he said. If acceptance was not important to him, the perceived lack of it would not have caused him such pain. I was certain as well that his distress was not atypical. Again and again, as I spoke with blacks who have every accouterment of success, I heard a plaintive declaration–always followed by various versions of an unchanging and urgently put question. “I have done everything I was supposed to do. I have stayed out of trouble with the law, gone to the right schools, and worked myself nearly to death. What more do they want? Why in God’s name won’t they accept me as a full human being? Why am I pigeonholed in a ‘black job’? Why am I constantly treated as if I were a drug addict, a thief, or a thug? Why am I still not allowed to aspire to the same things every white person in America takes as a birthright? Why, when I most want to be seen, am I suddenly rendered invisible?”
That well-to-do blacks should have any gripes at all undoubtedly strikes many as strange. The civil rights revolution, after all, not only killed Jim Crow but brought blacks more money, more latitude, and more access to power than enjoyed by any previous generation of African-Americans. Some blacks in this new era of opportunity have amassed fortunes that would put Croesus to shame. If ever there was a time to celebrate the achievements of the color-blind society, now should be that time.
Yet, instead of celebrating, much of America’s black privileged class claims to be in excruciating pain. Donald McHenry, former U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations, told me that though he felt no sense of estrangement himself, he witnessed it often in other blacks who had done exceptionally well: “It’s sort of the in talk, the in joke, within the club, an acknowledgment of and not an acceptance…of the effect of race on one’s life, on where one lives, on the kinds of jobs that one has available.” Dorothy Gilliam, a columnist for The Washington Post, expressed a similar thought in much stronger terms. “You feel the rage of people, [of] your group…just being the dogs of society.”
Ulric Haynes, dean of the Hofstra University School of Business and a former corporate executive who served as President Carter’s ambassador to Algeria, has given up hope that racial parity will arrive this–or even in the next–millennium. “During our lifetimes, my children’s lifetimes, my grandchildren’s lifetimes, I expect that race will…matter. And perhaps race will always matter, given the historical circumstances under which we came to this country.” That makes Haynes angry. “Not for myself. I’m over the hill,” he says. “I’m angry for the deception that this [racial prejudice] has perpetrated on my children and grandchildren.” Though his children have traveled the world and received an elite education, they “in a very real sense are not the children of privilege. They are dysfunctional, because I didn’t prepare them, in all the years we lived overseas, to deal with the climate of racism they are encountering right now.”
Even many Americans who acknowledge Haynes’ distress will be disinclined to care. For one thing, few Americans of any color are as well-fixed as Haynes. For another, the problems of the black middle class pale by comparison with those of the underclass. Yet, formidable as the difficulties of the so-called underclass are, the nation cannot afford to use the plight of the poor as an excuse for blinding itself to the difficulties of the black upwardly mobile. For though the problems of the two classes are not altogether the same, they are in some respects linked. And one must at least consider the possibility that a nation which embitters these struggling hardest to believe in it and work within its established systems is seriously undermining any effort to provide would-be hustlers and dope dealers with an attractive alternative to the streets.
Why would people who have enjoyed all the fruits of the civil rights revolution–who have ivy League educations, high-paying jobs, and comfortable homes–be consumed with anger? To answer that question is to go a long way toward explaining why quotas and affirmative action remain such polarizing issues; why black and white Americans continue to see race in such starkly different terms; and why solving America’s racial problems is infinitely more complicated than cleaning up the nation’s urban ghettos and educating the inhabitants–even assuming the will, wisdom, and resources to accomplish such a task.
It is to understand, among other things, what a black financial manager feels upon being told that a client is uncomfortable with his handling an account, or what a black professor goes through upon being asked whether she is really qualified to teach. For many black professionals, these are not so much isolated incidents as insistent and galling reminders that whatever they may accomplish in life, race remains their most salient feature as far as much of America is concerned.
WHAT IS IT EXACTLY THAT BLACKS SPEND SO MUCH time coping with? For lack of a better phrase, let’s call them the dozen demons. This is not to say that they affect blacks only, or that there are only twelve, or that all black Americans encounter every one. Still, you’re not likely to find a bet more certain than this: that any random gathering of black American professionals, asked what ails them, will eventually end up describing, in one guise or another, the following items.
During the mid 1980s, I had lunch in the Harvard Club in Manhattan with a newsroom recruiter from The New York Times. The lunch was primarily social, but my companion was also seeking help in identifying black, Hispanic, and Asian-American journalists he could lure to the Times.
As we talked, it became clear that he was focusing on such things as speech, manners, dress, and educational pedigree. He had in mind, apparently, a certain button-down sort, an intellectual, nonthreatening, quiet-spoken type–something of a cross between William F. Buckley Jr. and Bill Cosby. Someone who might be expected to have his own membership at the Harvard or Yale Club. That most whites at the Times fit no such stereotype seemed not to have occurred to him. I suggested, rather gingerly, that perhaps he needed to expand his definition of a “Times person.”
Even as I made the argument, I knew that it was unpersuasive. Not because he disagreed–he did not offer much of a rebuttal–but because he and many similarly placed executives almost instinctively screened minority candidates according to criteria they did not apply to whites. The practice has nothing to do with malice. It stems more from an unexamined assumption that whites, purely because they are white, are likely to fit in, while blacks and other minority group members are not.
Ron Brown, a psychologist and specialist in interracial relations, notes that black professionals–like the corporate lawyer cited above–constantly have to prove they are worthy of respect. He recalls being in a car with a black general and several other blacks near a military base in Biloxi, Mississippi. As they approached the gates to the base, the general said, “Don’t worry,” and flashed his two-star badge. The guard replied, “No sir,” and demanded to see some identification. “And you could just tell from the back he [the general] was rocking with rage…These little incidents boil over [into fury] where you should feel…pride.”
Knowing that race can undermine status, African-Americans frequently take aggressive countermeasures in order to avoid embarrassment. One woman, a Harvard-educated lawyer, carries a Bally bag when going to certain exclusive shops. Like a sorceress warding off evil with a wand, she holds the bag in front of her to rebuff racial assumptions, in the hope that the clerk will take it as proof that she is fit to enter.
Shortly after I was appointed editorial board chairman of the New York Daily News, I was visited by a black employee who had worked at the paper for some time. More was on his mind than a simple desire to make my acquaintance. He had also come to talk about how his career was blocked, how the deck was stacked against him–how, in fact, it was stacked against any black person who worked there. His frustration and anger I easily understood. But what struck me as well was that his expectations left him absolutely no room to grow. He believed so strongly that the white men at the Daily News were out to stymie black achievement that he had no option but failure, whatever the reality of the situation.
Even those who refuse to internalize the expectation of failure are often left with nagging doubts, with a feeling, as journalist Joseph Boyce puts it, “that no matter what you do in life, there are very few venues in which you can really be sure that you’ve exhausted your potential. Your achievement is defined by your color and its limitation. And even if in reality you’ve met your fullest potential, there’s an aggravating, lingering doubt…because you’re never sure. And that makes you angry.”
Of the executives sociologist Sharon Collins met while doing her research, one black senior manager stood out. He was such a corporate politician, she recalls, that he could “hardly say anything without putting it in terms of what’s good for the company.” Yet, as he neared the end of an illustrious career, he had noticed that colleagues were passing him by; and he had reluctantly concluded that racial discrimination was the only explanation that made sense. That realization left him profoundly disillusioned. “He knows the final threshold is there, and he’s losing hope that he can cross it,” says Collins.
An associate in a prominent law firm experienced a similar disappointment after two years of trying desperately to succeed. The lawyer is Mexican-American, but insists his experience was also typical of the firm’s black associates–none of whom ever got a shot at any big assignments. This discontent, he makes plain, was felt by all the nonwhite lawyers. He remembers one in particular, a black woman who graduated with honors from Yale. All her peers thought she was headed for the stars. Yet when associates were ranked by the firm, she was never included in the first tier but at the top of the second.
If he had been alone in his frustration, he says, one could reject his complaint as no more than a case of sour grapes. “But the fact that all of us were having the same kinds of feelings” means something more systemic was at work. He acknowledges that many whites had similar feelings, that in the intensely competitive environment of a top law firm, no one is guaranteed an easy time. But the sense of abandonment, he contends, was exacerbated for nonwhites. He finally quit in disgust and became a public defender. By his count, every minority group member who entered the firm with him ended up leaving, having concluded that nonwhites–barring the spectacularly odd exception–were not destined to make it in that world.
For a year and a half during the early 1980s, I was a resident fellow at the National Research Council–National Academy of Sciences, an august Washington institution that evaluates scientific research. One afternoon, I mentioned to a white colleague who was also a close friend that it was a shame the NRC had so few blacks on staff. She replied, “Yes, it’s too bad there aren’t more blacks like you.”
I was stunned enough by her comment to ask her what she meant. She answered, in effect, that there were so few really intelligent blacks around who could meet the standards of the NRC. I, of course, was a wonderful exception. Her words, I’m sure, were meant as a compliment, but they angered me, for I took her meaning to be that blacks (present company excluded) simply didn’t have the intellect to hang out with the likes of her.
When Armetta Parker took a job as a public relations professional at a large manufacturing company, she assumed that she was on herway to big-time corporate success. A bright, energetic woman then in her early thirties, Parker bad left a good position at a public utility in Detroit to get on the Fortune 100 fast track.
Corporate headquarters was in a town of nearly forty thousand people, but only a few hundred black families lived there, and she met virtually no black singles her own age. Though she expected a certain amount of social isolation, “I didn’t expect to get the opportunity to take a really hard look at me, at what was important to me and what wasn’t.” She had to face the fact that success, in that kind of corporate environment, meant a great deal of work and no social life, and that it also required a great deal of faith in people who found it difficult to recognize competence in blacks.
Nonetheless, Parker did extremely well, at least initially. Her first year at the company, she made it into “The Book”–the firm’s roster of those who had been identified as people on the fast track. But eventually she realized that “I was never going to be vice president of public affairs [at that company].” Moreover, “even if they gave it to me, I didn’t want it. The price was too high.” Part of that price would have been accepting the fact that her race was not seen as an asset but as something she had to overcome.
After six years she left. A large portion of her ambition for a corporate career had vanished. She had realized that “good corporate jobs can be corporate handcuffs. You have to decide how high of a price you’re willing to pay.” Dave Johnson, a former IBM executive who retired last year after 29 years of service, agrees. “Corporate America’s culture will force you to retire real quick,” he says. Johnson now runs his own consulting business in Baltimore and spends much of his time helping younger black managers cope with corporate frustrations.
Once upon a time one would never have thought of appointing a black city editor, a big-city newspaper executive told me. Now one could not think of not seriously considering–and even favoring–a black person for the job.
The executive was making several points. One was about himself and his fellow editors, about how they had matured to the extent that they valued all managerial talent–even in blacks. He was also acknowledging that blacks had become so central to the city’s political, economic, and social life that a black city editor had definite advantages, strictly as a function of race. His third point, I’m sure, was wholly unintended but clearly implied: that it was still possible, even for the most enlightened management, to classify jobs by color. And logic dictates that if certain managerial tasks are best handled by blacks, others are best left to whites.
What this logic has meant in terms of the larger corporate world is that black executives have landed, out of all proportion to their numbers, in community relations and public affairs, or in slots where their only relevant expertise concerns blacks and other minorities.
The man was on the verge of retiring from his position as personnel vice president for one of America’s largest companies. He had acquired the requisite symbols of success: a huge office, a generous compensation package, a summer home away from home. But he had paid a price. He had decided along the way, he said matter-of-factly, that he could no longer afford to be black.
I was so surprised by the man’s statement that I sat silent for several seconds before asking him to explain. Clearly he had done nothing to alter his dark brown complexion. What he had altered, he told me, was the way he allowed himself to be perceived. Early in his career, he had been moderately outspoken about what he saw as racism within and outside his former corporation. He had learned, however, that his modest attempts at advocacy got him typecast as an undesirable. So when he changed jobs, he decided to disassociate himself from any hint of a racial agenda. The strategy had clearly furthered his career, even though other blacks in the company labeled him an Uncle Tom. He was aware of his reputation, and pained by what the others thought, but he had seen no other way to thrive. He noted as well, with evident pride, that he had not abandoned his race. He had quietly made it his business to cultivate a few young blacks in the corporation and bring their careers along; and he could point to some who were doing very well and would have been doing considerably worse without his intervention. His achievements brought him enough pleasure to balance out the distress of not being “black.”
Many blacks find their voices stilled when sensitive racial issues are raised. They are painfully aware, as New York politician Basil Paterson puts it, that “whites don’t want you to be angry.”
A big-city police officer once shared with me his frustration at waiting nineteen years to make detective. In those days before affirmative action, he had watched, one year after another, as less qualified whites were promoted over him. Each year he had swallowed his disappointment, twisted his face into a smile, and congratulated his white friends as he hid his rage–so determined was he to avoid being categorized as a race-obsessed troublemaker.
He had endured other affronts in silence, including a vicious beating by a group of white cops while carrying out a plainclothes assignment. As an undercover officer working within a militant black organization, he had been given a code word to whisper to a fellow officer if the need arose. When he was being brutalized, he had screamed out the word and discovered it to be worthless. His injuries had required surgery and more than thirty stitches. When he was asked by his superior to identify those who had beat him, he feigned ignorance; it seems a fellow officer had preceded his commander and bluntly passed along the message that it was safer to keep quiet.
Even though he made detective years ago, and even though, on the side (and on his own time), he managed to become a successful businessman and an exemplary member of the upwardly striving middle class, he says the anger still simmers within him. He worries that someday it will come pouring out, that some luckless white person will tick him off and he will explode, with tragic results. Knowing him, I don’t believe he will ever reach that point. But I accept his fear that he could blow up as a measure of the intensity of his feelings, and of the terrible cost of having to hold them in.
Even more damaging than self-imposed silence are the lies that seem an integral part of America’s approach to race. Many of the lies are simple self-deception, as when corporate executives claim their companies are utterly color-blind. Some stem from unwillingness to acknowledge racial bias, as when people who have no intention of voting for a candidate of another race tell pollsters that they will. And many are lies of business, social, or political convenience, as was the case with Massachusetts Senator Edward Brooke in the early 1970s.
At the time, Brooke was the highest-ranking black politician in America. His name was routinely trotted out as a vice presidential possibility, though everyone involved knew the exercise was a farce. According to received wisdom, America was not ready to accept a black on the ticket, but Brooke’s name seemed to appear on virtually everyone’s list. During one such period of vice presidential hype, I interviewed Brooke for a newspaper profile. After asking the standard questions, I could no longer contain my curiosity. Wasn’t he tired, I asked, of the charade of having his name bandied about when no one intended to select him? He nodded wearily and said yes, he was.
To me, his response spoke volumes, probably much more than he’d intended. But I took it as his agreement that lies of political convenience are not merely a nuisance for those interested in the truth but a source of profound disgust and cynicism for those on whose behalf the lies are supposedly told.
Political scientist James Q. Wilson has argued that the “best way to reduce racism…is to reduce the black crime rate.” There is much wrong with that way of thinking, but probably the most pernicious is that it makes hard-working, honest black people responsible for the acts of unregenerate crooks–which is not very different from defining the entire race by the behavior of its criminal class.
Law-abiding blacks generally find such presumptions galling–and point out that well-behaved whites rarely have to answer for the sins of white criminals. Until white middle-class people accept responsibility for “poor white trash,” says Ulric Haynes, “I’m not willing to accept the burden of my black brethren who behave outrageously…although I am concerned. And I will demonstrate my concern.” Yet, rejecting the “burden” of (or blame for) misbehaving blacks is not always an option.
In the mid 1980s, I was unceremoniously tossed out of Cafe Royale, a restaurant that catered to yuppies in San Francisco, on the orders of a maitre d’ who apparently took me for someone who had caused trouble on a previous occasion. I sued the restaurant and eventually collected a few thousand dollars from its insurance company. But that seemed cold consolation for the humiliation of being dismissed by an exalted waiter who would not suffer the inconvenience of distinguishing one black person from another,
Many African-Americans who have made huge efforts to get the right education, master the right accent, and dress in the proper clothes still find that certain doors never seem to open, that there are private clubs–in both a real and a symbolic sense–they cannot join.
In 1990, in testimony before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, Darwin Davis, senior vice president of the Equitable Life Assurance Society, told of the frustrations he and some of his black friends had experienced in trying to join a country club. “I have openly approached fellow executives about memberships. Several times, they have said, ‘My club has openings; it should be no problem. I’ll get back to you.’ Generally, one of two things happens. They are too embarrassed to talk to me or they come right out and tell me they were shocked when they made inquiries about bringing in a black. Some have even said they were told to get out of the club if they didn’t like the situation as it is.”
Two years after his testimony, Davis told me his obsession with private clubs sprang in part from concerns about his children. Several years before, he had visited a club as a guest and happened to chance upon a white executive he knew. As they were talking, he noticed the man wave at someone on the practice range. It turned out that had brought his son down o take a lesson from the club pro. Davis was suddenly struck by a depressing thought. “Damn!” he said to himself “This is being perpetrated all over again…I have a son the same age as his. And when my son grows up he’s going to go through the same crap I’m going through if I don’t do something about this. His son is learning how to…socialize, get lessons, and do business at a country club.” His own son (who is now an Equitable agent), Davis concluded, would “never ever be able to have the same advantages or even an equal footing.”
WHEN THE LAWYER fuming over his compensation package declares that he will “go to my own people for acceptance,” he is not only expressing solidarity with other members of his race, he is also conceding defeat. He is saying that he is giving up hope that many of his white colleagues will ever see him as one of them. His white peers would of course be shocked to discover that he finds his workplace a hostile environment and that he feels a need to protect himself from them emotionally. What, they would wonder, can be his problem?
Administrators watching black students huddled together on many college campuses often ask essentially the same question: Why can’t they join “the mainstream”? Whites often take such behavior as a manifestation of irrational antiwhite prejudice. But in most cases, it is perhaps better understood as a retreat from a “mainstream” many blacks have come to feel is an irredeemably unwelcoming place. Some people would say that blacks who feel that way are flat-out wrong, that for African-Americans who are willing to meet whites halfway, race no longer has to matter, at least not all that much.
Yet pretending (or convincing ourselves) that race no longer matters (or wouldn’t if minorities stopped demanding special treatment) is not quite the same as making it not matter. Creating a color-blind society on a foundation saturated with racism requires something more than simply proclaiming that the age of brotherhood has arrived. Somehow, as America went from a country concerned about denial of civil rights to one obsessed with “reverse racism” and “quotas” that discriminate against white males, some important steps were missed. Among other things, we neglected as a nation to make any serious attempt to understand why, if racial conditions were improving so much, legions of those who should be celebrating were instead singing the blues.
In many respects, that is not at all remarkable. For the United States clearly has more pressing problems than the complaints of affluent blacks unwilling to accept a few race-related inconveniences. And don’t whites have problems too? Don’t struggling whites–even if they are male–deserve a little sympathy? Isn’t there an inequality of compassion here? Life is rough for a lot of people, not all of whom are black. So why, given the advantages at least some African-Americans conspicuously enjoy, should whites feel any consternation (much less, guilt) whatsoever?
To an increasing number of whites, that question seems less and less outrageous. And that may not be entirely bad. It would probably be healthier for all concerned if the current dialogue about racial justice focused much less on issues of guilt and victimization. Making someone feel sorry for you, after all, is somewhat different from getting them to recognize you as an equal–or even as a human being. At best, pity provides a foundation for charity, or for what is perceived as charity–for which one is expected to be appropriately grateful, even if what is offered is not what one needs or feels one deserves.
It may very well be that the civil rights debate has been so distorted by strategies designed to engender guilt that many whites, as a form of self-defense, have come to define any act of decency toward blacks as an act of expiation. If an end to such strategies–and indeed an end to white guilt–would result in a more intelligent dialogue, I, for one, am all for wiping the slate clean. Let us decide, from here on out, that no one need feel guilty about the sins of the past. The problem is certainly not that people do not feel guilty enough; it is that so many are in denial. And though denial may be a great way to avoid an unpleasant reality, avoidance is not a good substitute for changing that reality. Nor, more to the point, will it do much to narrow the huge chasm that separates so many blacks and whites.
The racial gap will never be completely closed-not as long as blacks and whites in America live fundamentally different lives. But we can nonetheless take our hands away from our eyes and recognize, at the very least, that exhorting blacks to escape the ghetto then psychologically battering those who succeed is a sure prescription for bitterness. Honest dialogue may not be a solution. But it is certainly preferable to censorship that passes for civility.
