Disintegration (12 page)

It’s hard to believe that half a century after Ralph Ellison’s
Invisible Man
was published we’d still be talking about invisibility. But we are. Remember the conservative commentator Bill O’Reilly’s famous dinner in September 2007 with the Reverend Al Sharpton at Sylvia’s, the upscale soul-food restaurant in Harlem? Afterward, O’Reilly shared his amazement—there’s no other word to describe it—with his radio audience. He marveled that “all the people up there are tremendously respectful.” He gushed, “I couldn’t get over the fact that there was no
difference between Sylvia’s restaurant and any other restaurant in New York City. I mean, it was exactly the same, even though it’s run by blacks, primarily black patronship.”

One wondered how, in O’Reilly’s imagination, a black-owned restaurant in a black-majority neighborhood might deviate from the standard restaurant template. He explained: “There wasn’t one person in Sylvia’s who was screaming, ‘M-Fer, I want more iced tea.’ You know, I mean, everybody was—it was like going into an Italian restaurant in an all-white suburb in the sense of people were sitting there, and they were ordering and having fun. And there wasn’t any kind of craziness at all.”

He didn’t stop there: “I think black Americans are starting to think more and more for themselves. They’re getting away from the Sharptons and the [Reverend Jesse] Jacksons and the people trying to lead them into a race-based culture. They’re just trying to figure it out. ‘Look, I can make it. If I work hard and get educated, I can make it.’ ”
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Commentators, including me, had great fun at O’Reilly’s expense. The remarks were outrageous, insulting, clueless, racist—all you had to do was pick a few loaded adjectives and fire away. There was another way to look at it, though. O’Reilly may be a bag of wind, but he’s an intelligent bag of wind. He’s not a Rush Limbaugh or a Glenn Beck or a Sean Hannity—not an entertainer who manipulates anger for ratings and wouldn’t know how to engage with the issues in any serious way. I think O’Reilly is wrong about most everything, but I’m confident that if I visited his house I’d find actual shelves of actual books that he had actually read.

That such a man would be so utterly ignorant of the existence of the black Mainstream—not in Atlanta or Chicago, not somewhere deep in flyover country, but in the most famous
black neighborhood in the nation, just blocks uptown from his studio—is astonishing. It’s not just that he wouldn’t have thought of venturing into a black Mainstream context without an escort. It’s that, apparently, he had no idea that such a thing as the black Mainstream even existed.

* * *

If O’Reilly or anyone else wanted to meet the black Mainstream in a setting where outsiders rarely venture, I’d suggest going to homecoming weekend on a historically black college campus. The last time a visit to see my family happened to coincide with South Carolina State University’s homecoming, I went to the game. When someone asked me about it later, I was able to report that the contest had been a squeaker, with the home team winning after several lead changes and momentum shifts. But for the life of me I couldn’t recall who the opponent was. And I hadn’t been drinking.

A friend of mine who lives in Washington—an SCSU graduate who retired not long ago after running a successful engineering consulting firm for many years—drives down to homecoming every year without fail, and never sets foot inside the stadium. He never even bothers to buy a ticket. If you were to conduct a survey asking what the point of SCSU’s homecoming is, watching football would score pretty low. Watching halftime would score higher. The normal pattern is reversed: The stands actually
fill
when the second quarter ends, only to thin out again when the third quarter begins. Nobody wants to miss the spectacle.

The year I went, there was a controversy about the other team’s cheerleaders, who were not just scantily and suggestively
clad but whose routine included a lot of bumping, grinding, pelvis-thrusting, and booty-bouncing. “They look like a bunch of hoochie mamas,” was the consensus of the women sitting in my row; the men wisely kept their opinions to themselves. SCSU’s cheerleaders were only marginally more demure, however, and their performance only slightly less sexual. The advent of dance-troupe cheerleading squads that look as if they’ve escaped from a hip-hop music video is a hotly debated innovation in black-college football, but everybody’s doing it.

Halftime’s main event was the traditional battle of the marching bands. The visitors, who were from Norfolk State University in Virginia—I looked it up—performed first, and they were good. Surprisingly good. No one ever goes to a football game between historically black colleges expecting to hear a bad marching band, but Norfolk State momentarily stunned the crowd. SCSU has one of the nation’s elite bands. The Marching 101 are expected to blow the competition away, not barely win the musical showdown. But that’s what happened: a narrow victory, owing to more sophisticated choreography, tighter formations, and richer sound.

After halftime, people started drifting away to where the real action was. Sprawled across an area large enough to accommodate several football fields that cool, rainy Saturday afternoon was a soggy but high-spirited encampment. There were huge, Winnebago-style RVs, most with awnings that unfurled from the sides or the rear to provide shelter. There were pickup trucks with trailers on which were mounted barbecue grills large enough to cook a whole pig. There were hundreds and hundreds of cars, of course—SUVs, mostly, but also luxury cars, politically correct hybrids, the occasional vintage Mustang or Corvette. Everywhere there were party tents, some
emblazoned with Greek letters signifying a fraternity or sorority. Vendors had set up tables to sell T-shirts, hats, and various tchotchkes. This was 2008, just a few weeks before the presidential election, and merchandise with the SCSU logo was running a poor second to anything labeled Obama.

Oh, and the people: thousands of men and women who belong to the black Mainstream, an unseen majority.

The invisibility of the black middle class is by now a standard trope of modern media criticism, but the phenomenon persists. Black dysfunction has always been newsworthy. Black achievement gets reported because those stories make everyone feel better, score points with black readers or viewers, and partly compensate for all the coverage of black dysfunction. Black normalcy is no more surprising, shocking, or heartwarming than any other color of normalcy, so it’s really no surprise that it doesn’t make the front page. But Mainstream black Americans seldom make the inside pages, either—the feature stories, for example, that are about neighborhood disputes over speed bumps, as opposed to neighborhood disputes about drug gangs.

There are black college professors who spend their professional lives studying international relations, but they aren’t the experts that newspaper reporters and television producers keep on speed dial to offer wisdom about the latest crisis in Honduras or East Timor. There are black scuba clubs that jet off to explore the coast of Belize or the Great Barrier Reef, but their members aren’t featured in stories about the impact of climate change on sensitive coral populations. There are African American motorcycle clubs that occasionally get written about, but only in a look-at-this, man-bites-dog sort of way; the president of Atlanta’s biggest organized group of
black Harley-Davidson riders would be quoted in a story whose point was how interesting it is that such a club exists but almost surely wouldn’t be called for comment about a new mandatory helmet law.

In part, this is because society finds it so difficult to see the black experience as universal. For that matter, society has a hard time seeing anything other than what is considered the majority experience as universal. It caused not a ripple when Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito, in his Senate confirmation hearings, spoke of how his heritage as a descendant of Italian immigrants had a positive impact on the way he approached cases as an appellate judge. “Old country” roots, family passage through Ellis Island, hard-won assimilation, a sense of ethnic solidarity—that story, specific to only a minority of citizens, is seen as a quintessentially American narrative. But Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in her confirmation hearings, was scolded, excoriated, and accused of un-American bias over a years-old speech in which she mused about how her heritage as a “wise Latina” might make her a better judge. The Nuyorican narrative is one that the nation seems to have more trouble accepting as legitimately American, for some reason. Imagine the uproar that would have ensued if Barack Obama, during the campaign, had claimed that his African American heritage would make him a better president. Remember the uproar that
did
ensue when videotapes surfaced of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, in flowing robes and full rhetorical flight, presenting an Afrocentric narrative of the country he had served honorably as a U.S. Marine.

This societal chauvinism is absurd, frustrating, at times even infuriating. I’ve appeared dozens of times on television with the conservative commentator Pat Buchanan and managed
to keep my cool, but the one time I lost it—my eyes got round and crazy, friends say, and apparently I looked as if I were about to smack him—was when he adamantly, even aggressively refused to acknowledge my point that Sotomayor’s personal history was every bit as American as his own. He’s an intelligent man who reads books and knows history, but he could not bring himself to admit that a Puerto Rican girl’s childhood in the Bronx was just as red, white, and blue as an Irish American boy’s childhood in Washington. What made me berserk was that Buchanan wasn’t just taking an extreme position for the sake of debate. He genuinely didn’t get it.

The notion that there’s something privileged and somehow sacred about the many variations of the Euro-Caucasian experience in America is destined to fade away. By 2045 or perhaps earlier, depending on which projection you believe, there will be no racial or ethnic majority in the United States.
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We will be a huge and varied collection of minorities. This is already the case in our most populous states, California and Texas, and soon may be true in New York as well. White is right as a fundamental assumption, with or without racist intent, cannot possibly be long for this nation—or for this world, if you consider reasonable projections about the rise of China, India, Brazil, and other fast-developing nations that are not European or Anglo-American. But chauvinism is only one reason why the black middle-class experience is so seldom recognized as universal.

The other is the “two worlds” reality—the fact that we tend to keep so much of the black Mainstream experience to ourselves.

At the SCSU homecoming, a man who was selling Obama paraphernalia recognized me from my television appearances
and called me over. He offered to give me a T-shirt, my choice of color. “I might give you two if you’re a Q,” he said.

“I didn’t pledge,” I told him, “but my father’s an Alpha.”

“Well, then, I don’t know about this whole thing,” he said playfully. “I always liked what you had to say when you were up there with Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann, but I might have to do a reevaluation.”

Translation: By asking about my being a Q, he was inquiring whether I was a member of the African American fraternity Omega Psi Phi. The Greek letter omega looks a bit like a capital Q that someone neglected to close at the bottom. Members often have the letter branded on one shoulder—literally burned into the skin with a branding iron, leaving a raised omega-shaped scar. Omega Psi Phi is one of the two most prominent black fraternities; the other is Alpha Phi Alpha, to which my late father belonged. Wherever you find a critical mass of college-educated black men, and I mean
wherever
, you’ll find some Qs and some Alphas—and they’ll be engaged in friendly, trash-talking rivalry. If your father was a Q, and you decide to pledge, then you naturally become a Q as well. The fraternity system is stronger on historically black campuses, but it’s alive and well at white-majority schools as well. Alpha Phi Alpha was founded in 1906 at Cornell, and my father pledged while he was at the University of Michigan. If I hadn’t arrived in Ann Arbor in 1970—a moment when the whole Greek thing seemed hopelessly out of touch with the social, cultural, and political revolution that was taking place—I’d surely have become an Alpha, too.

Similarly, sororities are an important lifelong affiliation for many college-educated black women. My mother is a member of Delta Sigma Theta, and naturally my sister, Ellen, when she
arrived at Spelman College and decided to pledge, became a Delta, too. The trash-talking between Delta Sigma Theta and Alpha Kappa Alpha—which, truth be told, is the oldest black sorority, predating the Deltas by three years—is more demure than what you hear among the guys, but the rivalry is there just the same. Deltas have a thing about the color red. Whenever you’re at an event with a lot of middle-class black women and you notice a statistically significant overabundance of red dresses, you’re almost surely among a bunch of Deltas.

Aretha Franklin and Nikki Giovanni are Deltas. Dionne Warwick belongs to another sorority, Zeta Phi Beta. Toni Morrison is an Alpha Kappa Alpha, as was Marian Anderson. Martin Luther King Jr. and W. E. B. DuBois were Alphas. Bill Cosby, Vernon Jordan, and Michael Jordan are Qs, as were Langston Hughes and Roy Wilkins. These are lifelong affiliations, and while some men and women take them more seriously than others, few who have pledged a black fraternity or sorority take the commitment lightly. When African Americans speak of someone as “my fraternity brother” or “my sorority sister,” a connection and even an obligation are implied.

There is nothing secretive or sinister, nothing skull-and-bones-ish about any of these organizations. They were established, beginning about a hundred years ago, to provide mutual support and encouragement among blacks who knew that when they graduated from college they would be taking their hard-won learning into a cruel, openly racist world. Obviously the world today is a different place. But the black fraternities and sororities have endured—and they have remained black.