In “Black Men and Public Space,” journalist Brent Staples
(1992) wrote of his habit of whistling
Vivaldi's Four Seasons when walking outside at night to
signal that he is an educated, middle-class African American and not, as
some might fear, out to snatch purses. For his part, in the first few
pages of The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois described how,
throughout his life, he dreamed of demonstrating his equality with Whites
“by reading law, by healing the sick, by telling the wonderful tales
that swam in our head” (1903
[1969], p. 44). Although living in very different worlds,
these two men point to a common challenge faced by many Blacks—that
of escaping White contempt and of countering racist stereotypes. How
African Americans cope in everyday life with the stigma of Blackness is a
topic that has been largely neglected to date. Drawing on in-depth
interviews with members of the African American national elite, this
article explores the particular tactics used by Blacks to rebut White
racism. It advances our understanding of everyday antiracism by drawing on
the distinctive analytical tools of cultural analysis to examine the
salience of religion and competence as elite African American antiracist
strategies. These are examined against the strategies used by African
American workers documented elsewhere (Lamont
2000).2
I define “everyday
antiracism” as the rhetoric and strategic resources deployed by
individual members of stigmatized groups to rebut the notion of their
inferiority in the course of their daily life. This notion is inspired by
Essed's (1990) notion of everyday racism.
It also expands on Aptheker's (1992)
definition of antiracism as rhetoric aimed at disproving racial
inferiority. For other studies of everyday antiracism, see Lamont et al.,
2002 and Lamont and Molnàr, 2001. Kindred studies include Mansbridge 1999 and Pollock 2004.
The main analytical purpose of this exploratory study is to examine
the range of repertoires that Blacks use to counter the ideology of White
supremacy by demonstrating to themselves and to others that they are on
equal footing with Whites.3
Drawing on David
Goldberg (1993, p. 98), we define racism as a
rhetoric aimed at promoting exclusion based on racial membership and
produced by a dominant group against a dominated group.
More
specifically, what do Blacks identify as common denominators across races?
What principles do they invoke in order to demonstrate the similarity,
commonality, or compatibility of racial groups? Drawing on the writings of
Bruno Latour (
1987) on how to make facts
“resistant,” we examine precisely what kinds of evidence or
“proofs” Blacks use to establish the legitimacy of their
antiracist ideology.
Our purposes are best specified by considering the questions we asked
members of the African American elites. We probed whether they believe
that Blacks and Whites are equal, and if so, what are the bases upon which
they justify their antiracist perspective. Further, we examine how they
have coped with racism in their personal and professional life, what they
view as the most and least successful strategies, what they have taught
their children concerning how to cope with racism, and what advice would
they give to Black youth concerning this challenge. After identifying
inductively the categories that are most salient in response to open-ended
questions, we asked more specific queries regarding respondents'
evaluation of religion, competence, education, and the display of faith as
antiracist strategies. We also questioned them concerning whether they
would encourage specific tactics such as promoting colorblindness versus
affirming cultural differences.4
We exclude
from our analysis self-protective strategies to maintain positive
self-views used by stigmatized groups (e.g., attributing negative
evaluation to prejudice, comparing themselves only with ingroup members
and devaluing domains in which the group does not fair well (Crocker and Major, 1989)).
Finally, we aim to assess whether the antiracism of elite African
Americans favors particularism or universalism. We examine this by asking
whether “it is natural to help your own kind”, whether they
believe that Blacks should help Black people first, and how they
understand the relationship between racial and human solidarity. We also
probed whether they believe that they share something essential with other
Blacks and what this consists of. This line of questioning is designed to
unpack who is included within the community of reference toward which they
express solidarity (Blacks only, humanity as a whole, or other categories
such as “American”). We also ask whether they believe that
racism is intrinsic to human nature (for Blacks and for other racial
groups) with the goal again of testing the limit of their commitment to
universalism. We then explore whether their criteria of cultural
membership within American mainstream society are particularistic and
largely limited to specific subsets of the population—the middle
class for instance—or expansive and available to all.
These questions provide points of entry for unpacking the cultural
categories through which everyday antiracism is experienced and practiced
by extraordinarily successful African Americans.5
For the purpose of this paper, we draw exclusively on post-hoc
accounts of experience of racism, and of how respondents went about
dealing with them, as opposed to observed responses to racism.
This topic has been largely neglected to date, in favor of examining
broader, macro-level antiracist practices within organizations or social
movements—those strategies implemented during the Black power era or
in contemporary antiracist NGOs for instance.
6 The work on the organizational and intellectual aspects of the
struggle against racism as manifested in the abolitionist, Civil Rights,
and Black Power movements includes Aptheker (1992) and McPherson (1975).
Studies on contemporary antiracist organizations includes Omi (1993) and Lentin (2004). A
voluminous literature has studied antiracism at the level of conflicts,
i.e., by observing episodes where Blacks decry discrimination and mobilize
against it. Although often not framed as research on antiracism, such
studies point to the kinds of arguments Blacks use to denounce
discrimination, disconfirm stereotypes, or show that they do not apply to
them.
A study of everyday antiracism helps us understand how
people
bridge boundaries—the frequently neglected
counterpoint to the more often studied topic of social exclusion. This
inquiry is informed by an overall research agenda centered on the study of
commensurability, that is, of how units that are constructed as different
from one another are made comparable.
7 Our focus here is properly phenomenological since we center our
attention on the criteria that underlie the comparative evaluations of
groups. Instead of analyzing racism per se, we frame this project
within a general sociology of processes of classification and
ordering.8
Brubaker et al. (2004) offer an overview of cognitive approaches to
ethnicity, within which our work can be located.
This sociology
of classification involves focusing on ordinary thinking about what
constitutes heterogeneity and similarity within and between groups. Our
larger research agenda takes inspiration from Erving Goffman (
1963) who shows how individuals with discredited or
“spoiled” identities take on the responsibility of managing
interaction to prevent discomfort in others.
9 Our study also draws on the work on stigma management among
the handicapped and gay people. It complements the social psychological
literature that focuses on “stigma consciousness” (Pinel 1999) and on how Blacks cope psychologically
with the “perceived stressor” of racism (Clark et al., 1999). Finally, it also complements the
work of social psychologists who have proposed the concept of group
identity to refer to the extent to which people perceive themselves as
being similar and linked in some ways to their group members (Gurin and Townsend, 1986), but have yet to put flesh
on what defines group identity in the case of African Americans.
Note that we do not presume that Blacks are constantly engaged in managing
the stigma of race or that they are obsessed with demonstrating their
equality to Whites. We simply focus on this aspect of their identity work
for the purpose of this research while acknowledging that often Blacks
“don't give a hoot” about what White folks think of
them.
It should be noted that, but for a few exceptions, the vast
sociological literature on American racism has not considered fully the
ways in which Blacks experience, understand, and subvert White contempt.
Sociologists interested in Blacks' experience with racism have often
been more concerned with denouncing injustice than with uncovering the
cultural frameworks through which African Americans understand and deal
with racism. The tools of cultural sociology present us with a unique
opportunity to move the discussion in a more analytical direction, as we
hope this article demonstrates convincingly. This task is particularly
urgent at the present juncture. In the age of affirmative action, when
racial barriers to achievement have been ostensibly removed, post-civil
rights African Americans are, more than ever, confronted with the
challenge of producing an inclusive discourse that can foster greater
cultural membership for all people of color—not only the college
educated.
We define antiracist strategies as the micro-level responses that
individuals use to counter racist ideology in their daily life. For
African Americans, education and professional competence have both been
critical tools for racial uplift—particularly among the Black middle
class (Hine 1989). For these upwardly mobile
individuals, demonstrating competence and ability is a central strategy
for combating racism. Alternatively, religion is also an important
strategy in managing racial stigma. Much has been written on the ways in
which the Black church has helped African Americans cope with racism
(Frederick 2003; Higginbotham
1993). Providing a network of solidarity as well as the promise of
happiness in the afterlife, the church acted as a cultural buffer against
the stigma of race and, in some cases, worked to mobilize Blacks against
discrimination. Significantly, this institution supplied the Civil Rights
Movement with an ideology, resources, members, and a rhetorical style
(McAdam 1998). Black theologians such as James
Cone and Albert Cleage played an important role in diffusing an
understanding of the Gospel that recognized and affirmed Black humanity
(Wilmore 1972). More generally, over the past
century, the Black church has rooted the principle of racial equality in
the moral authority of God's words, thus providing Blacks with tools
for spiritual empowerment and presenting a nonracist version of the
Christian faith (Long 1997; Paris 1985; Wills 1997).
Lamont's (2000) work on the African
American working class showed that this group is likely to use a wide
range of strategies to justify its antiracist claims to equality, which
includes pointing to their common characteristics as “children of
God,” to their common physiology, or to the universality of human
nature, as we will see in the next sections. Religion does not have a
privileged place within this broad tool-kit of equalization. A similar
diversity of arguments is found in interviews conducted with members of
the African American elite such as Nikki Giovanni, Congresswoman Eleanor
Holmes Norton, and Chancellor Julius Chamber, to which we turn afterward.
The prime antiracist strategy they say they use consists in demonstrating
their intelligence and competence, which involves showing that racist
stereotypes do not apply to them and/or that they are unfounded, and
that they personally (and/or Blacks more generally) can outperform
Whites. In short, this group establishes its cultural membership (or
racial equality) by giving evidence of conformity with norms of American
individualism, particularly that of work ethic and competence. We conclude
with a discussion of whether this class-based strategy implicitly denies
membership in mainstream America to the Black working and lower classes.
We argue in favor of a more universalist strategy that would ground
cultural membership in the most inclusive standards.
AFRICAN AMERICAN WORKERS
The way in which Blacks and Whites define personal merit and
worthiness plays an important role in how they perceive boundaries between
racial groups and justify their antiracist ideology. Lamont (2000) examined the role of religion in the antiracism
of African American workers. This research drew on 150 in-depth interviews
conducted with randomly sampled blue-collar workers and low-status,
white-collar workers living in the New York and Paris suburbs. In the
American case, interviews we conducted with thirty Blacks and forty-five
Whites concerned a range of topics, but most centrally, the criteria they
use to decide whom they associate with. This study explored inductively
how workers concretely define the boundaries between “us” and
“them” and draw the lines between the worthy and the less
worthy, thus mapping concrete manifestations of particularism and
universalism. The interviews showed that workers, Black and White,
emphasize morality as a criteria of worth, and that Black workers more
readily use religion as a proxy of moral character than do White
workers.10
Along these lines, recent surveys
find that Blacks embrace religious commitments more than Whites (Smith and
Seltzer, 1992, p. 30).
For instance,
John Robinson, a union representative who works at a GM plant in Rahway,
expresses this succinctly when he says “[r]eligious people
is people that got a heart, that care for people, regardless of what color
you are, they care for what's going on around them…. Religious
people is people that believe in the family, don't believe in bad
things…. If you're not a religion person, you believe in
anything, good things and bad things.”
Similarly, Abe Lind, a plumber on Long Island, chooses his friends on
the basis of whether they “believe in God, to a large extent,
[because] that's who they answer to, and they treat people
fairly.” For these men, being able to use clear signals to
distinguish between good and bad people is a crucial survival skill in the
dangerous world in which they live, as pointed out by John Lamb, a
recycling technician from Georgia who recently moved to the North. He
describes his friends in the following terms: “We basically have the
same background…. Baptists who have a lot of respect for people,
believe in just doing the right thing…. They are
‘family-going people,’ people you can trust….
That's not like the average person you meet in the street, that you
gotta second guess.”
If working-class African Americans often use religious or spiritual
participation to establish people's value, they also use it to
explain similarities and differences between Whites and
Blacks—pointing to the fact that Blacks “feel the
spirit” differently, for instance. But there are other, much more
salient differences. White workers define people's worth by
emphasizing what Lamont (2000) called the
“disciplined self,” i.e., one's ability to work hard and
uphold one's responsibilities. Black workers also stress this
disciplined self, but they place more value upon the “caring
self” and a collectivist conception of morality that centers on
egalitarianism and giving back to the community. While many Whites see
Blacks as lazy and contrast their work ethic to that of this group, Blacks
see Whites as domineering and contrast them with their own solidarity and
warmth. Each group perceives the other as lacking with respect to the
specific universal moral rules they embody and privilege most. Hence,
disciplined and caring selves are the moral grounds on which racist
beliefs obtain their legitimacy.
ANTIRACISM AMONG THE BLACK AND WHITE WORKING
CLASS
As they drew the line between the worthy and the less worthy, there
were, to be sure, White workers who expressed antiracist positions: they
privileged two types of arguments to demonstrate that Whites and Blacks
are equal, and these relate directly to earning ability and human nature.
Just as racists use work ethic and self-reliance to criticize Blacks,
antiracists suggest that earning capacity acts as an equalizing force
(i.e., “if you can buy a house and I can buy a house, we are
equal”). Thus they view market mechanisms as being the ultimate
arbitrator of the personal value and worth. Antiracist Whites also argue
that good and bad people are found in all racial groups. In the words of
Billy Taylor, a White foreman employed in a cosmetic company:
I could have a problem with you as a Black but I could have
the same problem if you were White, or green, or yellow, or whatever.
People are people. There's good cops, there's bad cops.
There's good Whites, there's bad Whites… .
These criteria—earning ability and the universality of human
nature—are also central to African American antiracism. However, in
contrast to Whites, Blacks also mobilize a large range of
“proofs” that are not used by Whites. Most important, they
point to their ability to consume to demonstrate their equality with
Whites (see also Lamont and Molnàr,
2001). They also emphasize their competence, as evidenced by John,
a Black recycling plant worker in New Jersey. He says:
Basically it comes down to, once you prove yourself that
you're just as good as [your White coworkers] … that
you can do anything they do just as well as them, and you carry yourself
with that weight, then people respect you, they kinda back away from you.
I'm kind of quiet, I just go there, I don't miss a day on the
job, I do what I gotta do, and I'm one of the best throughout the
whole plant at what I do.
Black workers also rebut racism by adopting a number of universalistic
strategies that are available to all, independent of level of education,
income, or civil status. They provide evidence having to do with
Whites' and Blacks' shared status as children of God, common
physiology, and similar human needs. The constant reminder of the stigma
of race in their daily life can most likely account for the more expansive
character of their repertoire of antiracist arguments, especially when
compared with that of Whites.
Antiracist Arguments and Religion
Working class Blacks do use evidence drawn from the Bible to
demonstrate that we all share something fundamental.11
Lincoln and Mamiya (1990, p. 4)
describe differences in emphasis on Black and White worship by pointing to
“the greater weight given [by Blacks] to the biblical view
of the importance of human personality and human equality implicit in
‘children of God.’ The trauma of being officially defined by
the U.S. Constitution as ‘three-fifths’ human and treated in
terms of that understanding, the struggle of the African-American people
to affirm and establish their humanity and their worth as persons has a
long history.”
For instance, Abe, the plumber, points to
the diversity of creation to demonstrate that the races are equal. He
wishes that “people would realize that we have one creator, and not
many creators, and as there are many different colors of birds, and trees,
and fishes, and everything that cross this globe [there are different
types of people].”
12 Lincoln and
Mamiya (1990, p. 4) suggest that Blacks consider
their Christianity to be more Christian than that of Whites, because it is
based on “the rock of antidiscrimination” and oriented toward
the search for freedom.
Similarly a Black Jehovah's Witness
draws on Biblical themes when he says: “Where has a man come from,
but the dust of the earth? If we look at the dust of the earth, we're
all of color.”
Unexpectedly, the Black workers who were interviewed do not ground
racial equality in the view that as human beings we are equal before
God—that divine grace is in all of us.13
In pristine Christianity, “the divinity of each person
makes evident not only his or her worth but makes it necessary to treat
each human being as an end in himself or herself” (Patterson 1977, p. 226).
Moreover, like Whites, Blacks
do not suggest that racial inequality results from God's will,
although this view remained popular during a good part of the twentieth
century.
14 Racist readings of the Bible were
widely used to justify White racism by feeding the notion that Americans
are chosen people especially favored by God (Smith 1997, p. 24).
Nevertheless, religious
arguments are appealing to them in part because they offer a useful
counterpoint to racist evolutionary accounts, according to which Blacks
would be lower on the scale of human development. The best evidence for
this is provided by a photo technician who combines evidence regarding
God's creation (“we all come from Adam and Eve”),
physiology (“we all come out one way”) and lineage that
stresses common descent (“family of man”
15 Robert Miles (1989, chapter 1)
suggests that this account gained in popularity between the sixteenth and
nineteenth centuries, after which it was superseded by scientific racism
viewing the human species as divided into permanent and discrete
groups.
) to refute racist, evolutionary views. His strategy of
antiracism aims at demonstrating that he, as a Black person, is no closer
to apes than are Whites (saying that there is no ape in his family tree).
Note that pointing to our common physiology adds
“incontestable”—empirically grounded—proof of the
wrong-headedness of racism.
Other Black workers point to similarly uncontestable facts when they
note that “we all spend nine months in our mother's
womb,” that we all have the same red blood running in our veins, or
that we all have ten fingers.16
The use of
“uncontestable” evidence grounded in naturally occurring
phenomena is also frequent in the antiracist repertoires of North African
immigrants living in France. See Lamont et al. (2002).
Yet others point to common needs (we
all need to eat and work) and American citizenship to demonstrate their
cultural membership, and implicitly, equality between the races within our
territorial confines. This view was not expressed among Whites and goes
unmentioned in survey-based studies of antiracism, which focus on
structural and individual explanations of inequality (
Apostle et al., 1983). In this plethora of antiracist
arguments, religion is present, but not particularly prominent, especially
when compared with market arguments (“money makes us equal”),
arguments about competence, and human nature arguments. This in itself is
an interesting finding given prominent stereotypes about the cultural
distinctiveness of African Americans, particularly concerning the salience
of religion in their worldviews.
By looking specifically at how workers define similarities and
differences, including racial ones, we are able to identify the presence
and absence of different arguments that have gone unnoticed to date. For
instance, we find that Whites and Blacks alike use evidence drawn from
everyday experience—such as the common-sensical view that human
nature is universal—to rebut the notion of racial inequality. Their
rhetoric is in stark contrast with that produced in academia, and
popularized by school curriculum debates, which stresses multiculturalism
or cultural diversity—arguments never used by workers. Perhaps the
latter appeals less to workers than to professionals due to their desire
to keep the world in moral order and to distinguish clearly the boundaries
between what is permissible and “normal” and what is not. By
producing increasingly sophisticated criticisms of essentialism and of
available universalistic assumptions about human nature, the social
sciences may be moving further and further away from the forms of
antiracism that are most widely available to, and used by, the population
at large.
The National Elite
We turn our attention to the antiracist strategies of the African
American elite. Using sociometric measures, Howard Taylor and colleagues
constructed a sample of 167 Black leaders who were identified by other
elite members as belonging to this highly selective group in the mid-1980s
(for details, see Jackson et al., 1995). These
individuals represent a wide range of professional and successful elites,
including executives, politicians, military officers, heads of
philanthropic organizations, media, entertainment and sports figures, as
well as leaders in the field of higher education. We conducted phone
interviews with ten of these individuals, including the poet Nikki
Giovani, the congressional delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, the civil
rights lawyer Julius Chambers, the former United States Ambassador to
South Africa, James Joseph, and Thirman Miller from Hartford, Connecticut,
who was the first Black mayor of a New England town.17
Prospective respondents were first sent a letter (written on
Princeton University stationery, where the first author taught at the
time. This letter provided background information on the project and
informed them that they would be contacted for an interview in the
following weeks. The stated purpose of the interview was to gather
information on what they perceive to be successful antiracist strategies
for African Americans. Prospective respondents were also informed that
their names had been obtained from the sociometric study conducted by
Howard Taylor and his colleagues. Interviews were set up by a research
assistant. The first author conducted the phone interviews, which lasted
approximately an hour. Interviews were recorded with the permission of the
respondents, and transcribed. While some respondents asked that we protect
their anonymity, others authorized us to reveal their identity, which
explains why some participants are identified by name while others are
not. Interviews were coded thematically by the first author. She
systematically looked for counter-evidence and used matrix displays (see
Miles and Huberman, 1994) to reveal patterns in
the use of antiracist arguments. For details, see Lamont (2000), Appendix A.
We draw on their accounts
to develop an understanding of the antiracist strategies adopted by highly
successful African Americans. We explore how they go about establishing
their cultural membership in mainstream America. Here we briefly discuss
early findings in an exploratory way.
A first striking observation is that this group rarely grounds human
equality in religion. Only one of the leaders we talked to did so: Thirman
Miller, who drew on Biblical themes when he said:
We're all God's children as one…. It was
only Adam and Eve to begin with and all generations came from that
beginning. And I think if you look at the way we're spread out
… it's basically where we landed that made the difference in
our complexion and our color and our hair texture and all those other
things … We talk about the differences between, you know, Latinos
and West Indians, whereas we all basically came from the same groups in
Africa. We could be interrelated by blood.
Interestingly, Miller is the only elite respondent who is not college
educated. Other interviewees in this group are more likely to ground
racial similarity in standards supported by scientific knowledge. It was
the case notably for a federal judge who, when asked what is the
difference between Blacks and Whites, sternly and simply answered:
“phenotype.” Also implicitly drawing on scientific knowledge,
the poet Nikki Giovanni points to our status as members of a common
species. Combining this theme with that of social justice, she explains
that “the species is one” by which she means:
Life is equal, and if you lose it, you want to lose it to
accident…. You don't want to lose it through hatred because
somebody doesn't like the way you look. You don't want to lose
it because somebody has an uncle who needs a job and they decide to kill
you to get it…. You have an equal right to your life, as do all
living things.
Even William Howard, a pastor, framed his antiracist arguments in
scientific, rather than religious, language. Noting his belief that Blacks
and Whites are “equal by nature”, he mentions in passing that
“Professor Cohen, the paleontologist from Harvard, says that there
was more difference within a racial group than there was among racial
groups.”
Several respondents are highly critical of using religion as a means
of combating racism. Eleanor Holmes Norton derides “praying oneself
out of segregation” and advocates instead litigation as a more
effective strategy, as does Julius Chambers—in his words, “you
try to communicate, and if it does not work, you sue.” Betty Lou
Dodson suggests that religious appeals risk “preaching to the
choir” and may ultimately be ineffective antiracist strategies:
“Unless that message is being delivered in a religious forum which
consists of Whites, it doesn't matter.” Others, such as Nikki
Giovanni, emphasize the shortcomings of religious institutions as
facilitators of antiracist ideology in the civil rights movements. She
reminds us: “The church was a big bulwark, the church was a part of
the leadership, but some of the preachers were cowardly, you know that
too. Some of the preachers hid behind the fact, “Well I'm a
preacher and I don't want to upset the apple cart…
.”
These exploratory interviews clearly suggest that religion is not
particularly salient in framing how members of the African American elite
conceive of successful antiracist strategies.
COMPETENCE AS AN ANTIRACIST STRATEGY OF THE
AFRICAN AMERICAN ELITE
Generally, elite African Americans emphasize intelligence, competence,
and education as the most effective antiracist strategies, frequently
identifying these qualities as their “ticket” out of social
exclusion. This common theme animates the responses of both Delegate
Norton, who coped with racism by showing that “you can out-do them,
you can outlearn them, you can be smarter than them” and of James
Joseph, an ambassador, who took to heart his mother's warning that
“you have to be twice as smart to get half as good a job.”
Elaborating on this theme, Eleanor Norton says she would offer this advice
for young African Americans coping with racism:
I would say ignore White people … that will help you
lose your race consciousness and concentrate on yourself and on
excellence…. There's a way in which people become intimidated
by thinking that they have to prepare themselves for racism. It's
there, much of it you can't do anything about, except what our
forefathers always told us, outdo them….
Betty Lou Dodson suggests a similar strategy of competency,
saying:
I think the first thing that you do is to make sure that you
know what you're doing…. I always used to say to my staff,
knowledge is power…. So you try to learn as much as you can about
whatever it is you're doing…. you master as much knowledge as
you possibly can, whatever situation you find yourself in.
THE CHALLENGES OF CLASS-BASED RACIAL
EQUALITY
Given the centrality of demonstrating intelligence and competence and
gaining knowledge as strategies of equalization, the main challenge for
reaching the most inclusive definition of cultural membership possible for
the greatest majority of Blacks is not to ground the latter in
class-specific characteristics such as the college degree. References to
the importance of intelligence and knowledge may suggest that racial
equality is more readily achieved for African Americans who are
college-educated than for those who are not. And indeed, several
interviewees point to their college education as a crucial resource in
their strategies to disprove racist stereotypes. Significantly, some also
expressed sharp class-based distinctions in their discussion of race
relations. They may more readily stress class distinctions across all
racial groups than inequalities and differences between racial groups. For
instance, when asked if he thought there were differences between Blacks
and Whites, a prominent Black judge offered the following response:
“I mean are you talking about people in the same classes, are you
talking about people in the same location, vocation, or [level
of] education? I'm not clear about meaningful predictable
differences predicated on race.”
Similarly, Betty Lou Dodson, who emerged from a solidly middle-class
family states, “I see more of a class distinction between people in
the sense than I do a racial distinction. I always have.” For
Dodson, who attended an all Black university, this sensitivity to class
and her strategic commitment to education and professional competence
translate into a feeling of superiority toward lower-class Whites.
Remembering the days when she was growing up, she says:
There was Howard University … and there was a sense of
Blacks that they really were well-educated people with a tremendous race
consciousness. Many of the White people were from Maryland and
Virginia—hillbillies—we didn't think a lot of their
intelligence. They didn't give us any sense of inferiority, despite
the segregation of the schools… .
These interviews suggest an overall tension between equalization
strategies (or more specifically, antiracist strategies) grounded in a
class-based individualism and strategies that posit universalistic
principles for equality available to all. College education, knowledge,
and the cultural capital of the elite are not, of course, universally
attainable. These are standards of cultural membership that can be more
easily met by middle-class people than by members of any other groups, as
sociologists of education studying social reproduction have clearly
established (e.g., Fischer et al., 1996).
Members of the African American elite face the challenge of
reconciling the lessons they learned from their own success in dealing
with racism with that of developing equalization strategies that do not
leave behind African Americans who do not belong to the middle class.
Anchoring their own cultural membership in their capacity to achieve by
the standards of American individualism (most often measured in terms of
academic achievement and professional mobility), Black elites risk
reinforcing boundaries that put the African American working class and
poor outside the bounds of “people like us” toward whom most
Americans share feelings of obligations and collective responsibilities. A
broadening of our collective definitions of cultural membership may be a
challenge not easily met, given the stereotypes about ability and work
ethic that are associated with the African American phenotype in our
society.
Lamont and Molnàr (2001) interviewed
African American marketing executives who believe that they are equal to
Whites because they can buy luxury goods, i.e., drink Rémy Martin,
wear Brooks Brothers, and drive Cadillacs.18
This paper showed that marketing specialists believe that
Blacks use consumption to signify and acquire equality, respect,
acceptance, and status. They prioritize a market-driven notion of equality
that equates social membership with high socioeconomic status. They
believe Blacks display visible signals of high status (e.g., expensive
clothes) in order to counteract racism, to distance themselves
conspicuously from the “ghetto Black” stereotype, and, as one
respondent put it, to disconfirm the view that Blacks are
“uninteresting,” i.e., unlikely to bring benefits through
networking.
These marketing executives believe that money, not
competence, acts as a passport to gain cultural membership in American
society: “Money is green,” as one of them puts it. Similar to
several elite members we interviewed, these marketing specialists
implicitly sustain the notion that not all Blacks (nor all Americans for
that matter) can achieve cultural membership, since it is primarily
available to “successful people.” This is at odds with the
goal of fighting racism for all Blacks and of working toward the
improvement of the race. While scholars are attempting to provide answers
to this challenge, the tension remains.
19 For instance, Wilkins (2004)
explores whether members of the African American elite, such as lawyers,
can “do well by doing good.”
UNIVERSALISTIC AND PARTICULARISTIC VISIONS
OF CULTURAL MEMBERSHIP
Incidentally, a similar tension between a commitment to universalism
qua antiracism, and a particularistic vision of cultural membership was
also present in responses to the question about whether “it is
natural to help your own kind.” Some respondents provide a very
universalistic answer to this question. According to Nikki Giovanni:
It depends on what you're calling your own kind.
We're all our own kind. Most likely, if I was at the zoo and a kid
fell over into the rhino pen, I might reach down and help him. I
wouldn't say, oh it's a White kid, let the rhino eat him,
I'd try to help. But if the kid fell into the lion's pit,
it's going to be, oh damn, that kid's going to get eaten because
I'm not going to jump in the lion's pit! If it's my kid, I
will, but not anybody else's. But our kind is, I mean that's
what it's all about, our kind. I think you help who you can, who you
believe in…. But if you're saying, oh my God, I really
don't think that girl can sing, but I should hire her for my
nightclub because she's Black, that's crazy.
In contrast, Thirman Miller says that it is natural for Black
people—for people of color in fact—to want to help one
another:
just as natural as it is for the Irish, Jews and anybody else
to, … People ask me why is it necessary to have an NAACP or a Black
Mayor's Conference or all these things…. I say
[it's] because we have unique situations that we have to
deal with…. The people of color have gone through some very
particular struggles that others did not face. The Jews had the Holocaust,
but that lasted and was ended and everything went fine. Racism has not
ended for people of color…. And the same basically with the
Latinos. These things that bring us together are common things that sort
of segregate us from the world as a whole because we had simple issues
that we face just based on the color of our skin, regardless of where we
go—we find it in Europe, we find in the United States—wherever
there's a large White community we still face racism.
This particularistic stance also contrasts with Congresswoman
Norton's more nuanced position. When asked whether “it's
natural to want to help your own kind,” she said:
If you live among people, it's like your own family. You
naturally help your own family. [But] the Greeks believed that
the highest form of morality was to help a neighbor, so that's not so
natural. To help somebody who is outside of the group, there you get to
really civilizing notions…. White people found Black people way
away from them, certainly didn't want to help them, wanted to hurt
them.
However, Norton believes that Blacks should help Black people first
because “there is a racial obligation that is first and foremost,
when you have the outstanding problems we have in our community.”
From this it does not follow that Whites should help White people first.
She views racial solidarity among Blacks as well as racial solidarity of
Whites toward Blacks as two forms of universalisms, based on the
principles of need and altruism.
Whites are not in a group in need of help in the same way. I
don't think that White people should help White people first because
I don't believe there's any mirror image of the experience of
White people and Black people. I think that, in some way, White people
ought to help Black people first, given that they live in communities
where there are virtually no problems. You know, Black people have special
problems that are inherited from slave status and from discrimination;
they have an obligation to get rid of their own problems. Therefore,
they've got to help their own people get rid of their own problems
first. White people have no such inheritance, have no such legacy. So I
wouldn't think they have any obligation to look around for some White
people to help. Look around for some Americans who have been less
fortunate to help, those might be poor White people, they might well be
Black people.
We see that the impulse of racial justice leads members of the African
American elite toward more or less encompassing communities of
“people like us,” and toward various understandings of
cultural membership and collective responsibility. Here again, there is a
tension between an impulse toward universal equality and the need to
address the problems distinctive to African Americans—just as the
challenge of a universal African American antiracism butts against the
behavioral standards prescribed by the American ideals of individual
achievements. It remains to be seen how frequently these tensions are
found, and how they are felt, by other members of the African American
elite. Further interviews will bring answers to these questions and may
perhaps inform the moral quandary they raise.
CONCLUSION
Drawing on the analytical tools described at the beginning of the
paper, our first aim was to enrich our understanding of the forms taken by
the everyday antiracism of the African American elite. We hope to have
shown convincingly the heuristic payoffs of our inductive approach, which
consists in documenting the categories through which members of
stigmatized groups go about rebutting the stereotypes they encounter as
they demonstrate their equality by mobilizing various standards of worth.
We also wanted to bring attention to the problematic articulation between
universal strategies of equalization and class-specific attributes. Our
analysis raises the question of whether the norms of individualism
dominating American culture ineluctably constrain African American
antiracist rhetoric. Perhaps the positions taken by Norton, Miller, and
Giovanni reveal only a small segment of the spectrum of the existing
repertoire of antiracist evidence used by the African American elite.
Their positions correspond to those identified in an analysis of ten
autobiographies of prominent Black academics, athletes, entertainers,
political figures, and religious leaders. These were surveyed to identify
how individuals thought about, and have dealt with, the problem of
establishing equality with Whites. We found that the most popular
strategies used by individuals such as Frederick Douglass, Zora Neale
Hurston, Paul Robeson, Henri Louis Gates, Jr., Arthur Ashe, and Jackie
Joyner-Kersee, combine universalistic arguments that point to religion or
the universality of human nature, with particularistic arguments having to
do with the use of class and education as strategies of
equalization—and these particularistic arguments were more
frequently used by those who came of age after the Civil Rights
Movement.
This exploratory article probably opens more questions than it
answers. Much more thought needs to be given to the conditions under which
the most inclusive definitions of cultural membership can be promoted, so
that disconfirming anti-Black prejudices does not come at the price of
drawing stronger boundaries against African Americans who do not meet the
usual American standards of success. If highly successful Blacks use
antiracist strategies based on competence in ways that marginalize the
lower classes, it may be that they themselves face difficulties in gaining
cultural membership under any other terms. The role of latent
discrimination and the constraining forces of American individualism could
intersect in ways that make more inclusive strategies of equalization both
ineffectual and dysfunctional for successful African Americans seeking
entrée into the mainstream. If Whites refuse to accept Blacks as
their equals except under the “burden of proof” provided by
competence and achievement, then African Americans will continue to be
faced with the prospects of affirming their equality in ways that are
detrimental to the working class and poor.
To the extent that group solidarity remains an important goal for
Black Americans, this exploratory study suggests that the repertoires
successful African Americans use to combat racial stigma could have
contradictory and dysfunctional effects. The challenge of promoting
inclusive membership is one that should be met by every member of our
society, but it is perhaps particularly acute for the members of the
African American elite.
