Disintegration (9 page)

Richard and Mildred Loving had violated several Virginia laws, among them a statute that said: “If any white person intermarry with a colored person, or any colored person intermarry with a white person, he shall be guilty of a felony and shall be punished by confinement in the penitentiary for not less than one nor more than five years.”
⁸

The Lovings left Virginia to make their home in the District of Columbia. But in 1963, while U Street was beginning to hollow out and African Americans invaded the Maryland suburbs, the Lovings filed a court motion to vacate their felony sentences on grounds that the laws under which they were convicted were unconstitutional. In
Loving v. Virginia
, the Supreme Court ruled emphatically that no state had the right to restrict a citizen’s right to marry on the basis of race. Laws banning interracial marriage in seventeen states were invalidated. The practice that Southerners referred to as “miscegenation” was now legally protected by the Constitution.

Of course, liaisons between whites and blacks had been common—if unacknowledged—since slavery began. Studies of genetic markers indicate that roughly 20 percent of African Americans’ genes are of European origin
⁹
; the wide range of skin-color variation, not just among the black American population but within families, testifies to a long history of interracial congress. Primarily this consisted of forced or coerced sexual relations between white slave owners and black slaves. My wife, Avis, is a collector of African American historical artifacts and documents, and one of the items she found is a handbill announcing a slave auction in Charleston in 1833. Several of the women being sold are described as “likely”—not in the modern sense of “probable” but the archaic sense of “good-looking.” Perhaps that is what Thomas Jefferson saw
in his slave Sally Hemings, whose children, it is now generally agreed, Jefferson fathered.

In some other slave-owning countries, the mulatto offspring of such unions were recognized as a distinct intermediate racial class. In the United States, however, mulatto meant black. The mixed-race, lighter-skinned progeny of slave owners sometimes were assigned to work as house slaves rather than field slaves, but they were still slaves. Since house duties required a certain amount of education and acculturation, many of those best prepared to lead and prosper after emancipation were light-skinned; if you look at photographs of the most prominent black citizens of Atlanta during Reconstruction, for example, you see that they’re not actually very black. But Jim Crow put an end to any notion that blacks with obvious European ancestry were somehow “better” than blacks with no evident European genes. One drop of African blood was all it took to be consigned to the “colored” water fountain and the back of the bus.

The Jim Crow–era taboo against interracial relationships was never absolute—that would have been impossible—but it was powerful, even in the North. The proscription against mixed marriage, which conferred society’s official blessing, was stronger, even in states where it was not punishable by years in prison. There had been famous exceptions—the heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson scandalized the nation in the early years of the twentieth century by openly cavorting with a succession of white women. But until the late 1950s or early ’60s—around the time when the Lovings fell in love—the plot of
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner
would have qualified as science fiction.

The multiple social revolutions of the 1960s changed all
that. One early result was a baby boy named Barack Obama—born August 4, 1961, the son of a dashing Kenyan academic and a young white woman from Kansas, who, like so many of her peers, was opening her eyes to a dazzling array of new possibilities. By the end of the decade, American society’s views on race and sexuality were radically changed. Interracial relationships were not yet commonplace, but they had lost all power to shock. In a reversal of the historic pattern, a majority involved black men and white women. These unions, inevitably, produced issue: a growing number of biracial children. Like Obama, most came to self-identify as African American—the as-yet-unrepealed one-drop rule that applies in our society, categorizing anyone partly black as fully black, gives them no real choice in the matter. But their relationship with white America is necessarily different from, say, mine. I can harbor a kind of residual bitterness that would not be possible if one of my parents were white.

It is hard to pin down a number of black-white biracial Americans; the latest census figures count 6.8 million citizens who self-classify as multiracial,
¹⁰
but this includes any possible combination in the whole “American Indian or Alaska Native; Asian; Black or African American; Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander; and White” Census Bureau matrix—and also misses biracial men and women, such as President Obama, whose identification as African American is so strong that they simply classify themselves as “black.” But it is clear that this segment—one of two groups forming a new black American that I call the Emergent—is growing. It owes its increase not just to love but also to the Lovings.

* * *

If we fast-forward to the present day, return to U Street and walk to the intersection of Ninth, we can see—and hear—the other key Emergent group. The street sounds suddenly change. You overtake a group of men having an animated discussion, and you notice that the conversation isn’t in English, it’s in Amharic. You walk past a record store, and the music you hear isn’t hip-hop, it’s Ethiopian pop. You take a whiff outside one of the neighborhood’s busy restaurants and the smells are of
berbere, korerima
, and
mitmita
, spices used to prepare an exotic and ancient—but no less soulful—variety of soul food. Ninth and U is a focal point of Washington’s Ethiopian and Eritrean immigrant community, the biggest in the nation.

Roughly one of every ten black people living in the Washington metropolitan area is foreign-born.
¹¹
Ethiopians are the largest and most visible group, but the immigrants include Nigerians, Jamaicans, Liberians, Haitians—foot soldiers in the biggest influx of black people from Africa and the Caribbean since the importation of slaves was outlawed in 1807. These Emergent newcomers are making waves—in black America and beyond—far more impressive than their swelling numbers.

The impact is quiet and largely unheralded, but it is enormous. Africans are the best-educated group of immigrants coming to live in the United States—not Asians from China or India, not Europeans from Britain or France, not Latin Americans from Brazil or Argentina, but Africans from Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa, Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire. We don’t notice because African immigrants, following the traditional pattern, often have to start at the bottom, working at jobs that take advantage of only a fraction of these newcomers’ intelligence, experience, and ability.

A potent illustration of this came to me at the office. At
The Washington Post
, where I work, executives understandably became much more concerned about security after the September 11 terrorist attacks. New procedures were instituted, new radio-chip ID cards were issued, new rules were imposed limiting access to the alleys that ran along two sides of the building. The security guards, who worked for a contractor hired by the paper, were moved around according to some theory of how best to intercept and thwart a terrorist attack. One day, as I was navigating the new security gauntlet, I asked one of the guards—Mr. Massey, a middle-aged gentleman from Nigeria—whether any of this was making me safer. “Not at all,” he said, and then he proceeded to explain that the new barriers and guard posts had been put in places where they would do nobody any good. Mr. Massey pointed out the weaknesses that were not being addressed and the potential entrances not being patrolled or even monitored by cameras. I asked how he came to speak so authoritatively, and he explained that before coming to this country he had retired from a long career in the Nigerian military. He’d learned about defensive emplacements during a period of study at Sandhurst, the British military academy. Prince Charles had also been studying at Sandhurst at the time. Mr. Massey had tried to explain this to his bosses at the security firm, but they blew him off. “I’m just a Nigerian,” he said.

Ethiopian restaurateurs, Nigerian military officers, and most of the rest of today’s African and Caribbean immigrants wouldn’t be here if not for a series of laws beginning, coincidentally, about the same time that America began its process of disintegration. Immigrants from the Caribbean began to arrive in larger numbers after passage of the Hart-Cellar Act of 1965.
The law loosened restrictions on immigration based on geography—a system that favored Europeans over nonwhites—and shifted the emphasis to professional qualifications and family reunification. Subsequent measures in 1976 and 1980 made it easier for immigrants to come to the United States as students or refugees; an attempt at comprehensive immigration reform in 1986 allowed many undocumented immigrants to apply for legal status, including 135,000 from the Caribbean and Africa. For Africans, the key impetus was passage of the Immigration Act of 1990, which increased the number of immigrants admitted on the basis of their skills. The 1990 legislation also established a lottery system offering “diversity” visas to citizens of countries that were underrepresented in the immigrant population. The lottery was conceived—at a time when Latin Americans were arriving in droves—as a way to admit more Europeans who might not have relatives here to sponsor them. In other words, it was supposed to be a back door for more white folks to slip in. No one anticipated that the measure would open a major new pipeline for Africans, but it did: Between 1986 and 2006, more than one-quarter of all the available diversity visas went to sub-Saharan Africans.
¹²

Many African-born doctors, lawyers, engineers, and other professionals are working quietly and unnoticed as nurses, paralegals, draftsmen—and security guards. In Washington, Ethiopian immigrants have found a viable niche in the parking industry as garage attendants and cashiers. Drivers of the city’s huge fleet of taxicabs are as diverse and polyglot as the United Nations, but Africans form a major and perhaps dominant bloc. African immigrants aren’t making waves—but their children are a different story.

Right now, the immigrant community is best described
as Emergent. In ten years, more expansive language may be required.

* * *

In 1939, a tract of land in Washington’s northeast quadrant, near the Anacostia River, was transformed into the Langston Golf Course. It is the scruffiest of the city’s three public courses, the toughest to play, and in many ways it’s my favorite because of its history: Langston was established as a segregated facility. It was where black golfers, and only black golfers, were allowed to play. On any given Saturday, in the years before integration, out on the course you would have found doctors and lawyers, black celebrities who happened to be in town, and a few guys with swings so sweet that they might have been able to make a living on the professional tour, if blacks had been allowed. Lee Elder, one of the first African Americans who did get to play on the pro tour, managed the Langston course for a time after he retired from competition.

Things are different now. As I write this paragraph, I’m also watching a golf tournament on television. I ought to turn it off but I won’t, and the reason is simple: Tiger Woods is moving up the leaderboard. On the last hole, he made an impossible birdie putt from the fringe. Now, from a hundred yards, he’s just hit a wedge to within inches of the pin. It looks as if a Transcendent moment may be coming, and I don’t want to miss it.

Woods is part of the last of the four black Americas—the Transcendent elite that has climbed to the absolute pinnacle of American society. There have always been African Americans who had power, influence, or wealth, but they were a comparative elite, rich and powerful within the context of black
American society. The new Transcendent black elite is rich and powerful within any context, by any conceivable standard. Forty years ago, which would have seemed more likely: that a black man would be elected president of the United States, or that a black man would become absolute lord and master of golf—
golf!
—a pastime redolent of wealth, influence, and long afternoons at the whites-only country club.

For that matter, what were the odds that a black woman, born into poverty in rural Mississippi, would become a billionaire who wields immense power, not just in television but in book and magazine publishing, theater, philanthropy, and apparently whatever new world she decides to conquer? That a black man from Philadelphia who began his entertainment career as a rapper would become the biggest movie star in Hollywood? That a black woman from Birmingham, a childhood friend of one of the four girls killed in the 1963 terrorist bombing at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, would chart the nation’s foreign policy as secretary of state?