As wide-eyed Southern migrants stepped off trains in the big cities of the North a century ago, they were met by groups like the National Urban League, who presented them with care packages that often included basic items like soap and toiletries. This racial noblesse oblige was motivated by a sense of community responsibility, but also by the embarrassment that an upper tier of black America felt at the rough-hewn ways of their newly urban counterparts. The gifts were sometimes accompanied by handbills detailing the behavior expected of the new arrivals: admonitions against congregating on stoops, dressing inappropriately, wearing hair rollers in public, or raising chickens in the city. From the most cynical—and not entirely incorrect—perspective, the black struggle for civil rights in this country was driven by the desire of a fragile class of black strivers to distance themselves from the Negro non grata in a way that segregation made all but impossible.
At the turn of the twentieth century, W. E. B. Du Bois crusaded against the evils of segregation, one of which was the forced association of men of his standing with ruffians and undesirables. The sentiment was familiar to me long before I ever encountered his work, from my father’s frequent admonishment: “Never be common.” This was told to me by a man with only three grades of formal education, the product of an overlooked outpost called Hazelhurst, Georgia, who had joined the Army and then made his way to Harlem in pursuit of better odds. The pervasive inequity, and nearly uniform poverty, of Jim Crow did not eliminate the capacity for class condescension among black people; it simply meant that “class” would be defined far more by behavior than by education or wealth.
Years later, at the graduation where I received my doctorate, I gave my degree to my mother—a woman born in Bessemer, Alabama, who left the South at age fifteen for Chicago and finished high school there, but who, throughout her life, wielded her refined diction as a shield. Handing her the diploma was partly an act of filial deference, and mostly acknowledgement of an inside joke. The casual observer might see the arc of this family history—from an elementary school education to a Ph.D., in a single generation—as a metaphor for the successes of the civil-rights movement and a testament to the elastic potential of American democracy. But to my mother it had more to do with the guile of Brer Rabbit than the benevolence of Lyndon B. Johnson.
Of late, we have begun to speak a great deal about black aspiration. Between the announcement, at the end of February, of Barack Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper initiative, and Paul Ryan’s uncommonly blunt appraisal, last week, of “inner-city” men, poor black people find themselves, once again, part of a vexed dialogue about poverty, race, and government. “Common,” as my father used it, has become an obscure epithet, but for those curious about its meaning Ryan provided a serviceable definition:
Ryan’s remarks soon gave way to the usual protestations of innocence: “This has nothing to do whatsoever with race,” he declared the next day. “It never even occurred to me. This has nothing to do with race whatsoever.” But this bit of theatre only obscured a more troubling issue, one that Ta-Nehisi Coates raised on the Web site of The Atlantic earlier this week. Ryan’s indictment of “inner-city” laziness, with its obvious echoes of Ronald Reagan’s “Welfare Queen” rhetoric, doesn’t sound so different from Barack Obama’s exhortations to African-American personal responsibility—which were on display in the White House at the end of last month, when the President launched his initiative to help young men of color. As Coates wrote:
Obama’s frequent recourse to what is often called “responsibility politics” is not without its supporters: I made an oblique criticism of the program during a television appearance, and a small tide of black recrimination followed in response. On Thursday, Jonathan Chait, New York’s politics writer, defended Obama against Coates’s criticism, on the grounds that the President had a very different perspective from Paul Ryan, who believes that liberal public policies are responsible for the “cycle of poverty.” By contrast, Chait wrote, “Obama’s habit of speaking about this issue primarily to black audiences is Obama seizing upon his role as the most famous and admired African-American in the world to urge positive habits and behavior.”
To the extent that Obama was speaking about the condition of young black men as a matter of American concern, Chait raises an important point. But on another level this is “never be common” all over again—this time, spoken with the moral authority of a man who, by virtue of his race and office, is the least common entity in the history of this nation. It has been Obama’s consistent habit to douse moments of black achievement with soggy moralizing, whether at the commemoration of the 1963 March on Washington or during a commencement speech at Morehouse College.
Those who defend Obama or excuse Ryan take recourse in the common-sense argument that such exhortations, even at their worst, do no harm. But this is to miss the point entirely: when the President, or any other leader, decides that black audiences need, more than anything else, to hear some variant on “never be common,” that decision confirms the long and ugly tradition that conflates blackness with laziness and poverty, and whiteness with virtue and wealth.
Consider a rather more disturbing specimen of respectability politics: an essay by John Ridley, published by Esquire, in 2006, that attracted renewed attention earlier this month after Ridley won the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for “12 Years A Slave.” If the title of Ridley’s essay, “The Manifesto of Ascendancy for the Modern American Nigger,” doesn’t adequately convey its contents, consider the opening paragraph:
Set aside the belief, naïve at best, that the word “nigger” is less contemptuous when uttered by another black person. These human epithets, Ridley asserts, should under no circumstances be conflated with black Americans—the respectable, striving citizens deserving of common decency. (Reading Ridley’s essay, in fact, casts “12 Years A Slave” in a different light: for all its brilliance, the film is also the story of a virtuous black family man brought low by whites, who see no distinction between him and others of similar pigmentation.)
It would be tempting to single out Ridley for his inability to separate catharsis from analysis, were that confusion not so widespread. Years earlier, Chris Rock declared in a comedy routine that he loves black people but hates niggers. And, long before that, the unnamed protagonist of Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” was sent on his journey by accidentally exposing a rich white man to the type of unreconstructed Negro that black leaders had spent decades trying to wash, educate, or camouflage until better times were at hand. During the Great Migration, black newspapers featured letters from Northerners who resentfully inverted history, complaining that the migrants were “bringing racism north with them.” It was a logical fallacy that became a kind of conventional wisdom by the sheer frequency of its repetition.
The common ground here isn’t so much between Ryan and Obama—it’s between them and an entire skewed history of race in the country. Absent history, we overlook the fact that the “inner-city,” “not working” men who so trouble Ryan are the descendants of people who came to cities specifically in search of employment. You only have to skim a few pages of Isabel Wilkerson’s magisterial history of the migration, “The Warmth of Other Suns”—or even watch a season of “The Wire”—to realize that, when we talk about the history of the American inner city, we’re talking about what happened to those migrants, clutching their etiquette handbills and charity soap, in the weeks, months, and decades after they walked out of those train stations. In his piece, Chait acknowledges the racism that played an outsized role in shaping their fortunes:
But this is the kind of treacly liberalism best reserved for movies about dedicated white teachers who inspire their angry inner-city students—and it was precisely the myth that I meant to reject on the day of my graduation. A team on the receiving end of biased officiating loses more often, period. And, at some point, it quite reasonably begins to lose faith in the entire enterprise. To believe that my family history represents anything more than the confluence of hard work and an even greater degree of good luck would be to concede that a third-grade Jim Crow education represents a reasonable starting point from which to produce high-achieving children. And to do that would be to lend support, however unintentionally, to the belief that the implications of racism have been overstated.
It’s not a coincidence that the history of black self-help has been so closely associated with many of the fiercest critics of the American social order. Discussions of race in America are mired in comparisons between blacks and other immigrant groups, but the dividing line is apparent: while the immigrant effort at self-improvement has often been rooted in a faith in American possibility, the ethic of black uplift was frequently entwined with its very opposite, an indictment of that possibility—or a loss of faith in its promise.
It’s worth recalling that the poverty of which Ryan spoke both preceded and has outlived the liberal policies he derides. The black unemployment rate has been reliably half again as much as the white one. This gap was at its largest in 1989—at the end of eight years of Reaganomics—when the black figure was a hundred and seventy-six per cent of the white average. Even without the “culture of poverty,” black wages lag behind at nearly every level of educational attainment: the average lifetime earnings of a black person with a Master’s degree are roughly equivalent to that of a white person with a Bachelor’s. And yet the myth that education alone can be the great equalizer persists.
To his credit, Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper initiative offers more than a handbill with rules for good behavior. But both its scale and its intentions leave unsettling echoes. A century ago, the newly created National Urban League launched a program to identify ideal black job candidates and then work with industry to create a niche into which they could advance. It was a noble undertaking, but a hopelessly small one when pitted against the calcified will to maintain racial subordination.
Obama himself has become the greatest advertisement for black striving as well as its most dramatic indictment—an example of the widespread desire for African-American success, undercut by the blockaded frustrations of his Presidency. At the end of his press conference announcing the new initiative, Obama offered, as his parting statement, a vow that “we will beat the odds.” Coming from the most powerful black person in the history of this country, those words stung: trying to beat the odds is what you do when you’ve relinquished all hope of turning them in your favor.
Photograph by Kevin Lamarque/Reuters.
