The African Americans

by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

  Grandmaster Flash, DJ Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, and Chuck D at Columbia University’s Rap Summit, November 1993. Photograph. Kevin Mazuir/WireImage, Getty Images.

  As hip-hop was hungrily devoured by black and white listeners, it also became a platform for African American artists to give voice to the social conditions afflicting the inner cities. Bambaataa’s Bronx compatriots, Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five, put out a record in 1982 that exemplified that potential. It was called “The Message,” and it became an anthem for a generation, graphically describing the dreadful buildings where so many black youth were living in an urban wasteland, buildings that might provide four walls for the residents but offered no shelter to speak of.

  Some hip-hop artists embraced the mission of conveying political messages through music. Melle Mel (b. 1961) exhorted voters to support the Reverend Jesse Jackson, Sr., in his 1984 bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in the single “Jesse.” Bambaataa, Kurtis Blow (b. 1959), and DJ Kool Herc (b. 1955) joined the international effort to end apartheid in South Africa. MC Lyte (b. 1970) provided a woman’s perspective (a woefully underrepresented point of view at that time, and still is to a large extent today) about drug addiction, domestic violence, and the frightening new HIV epidemic. And at a time when civil rights gains had stalled, Chuck D (b. 1960) and Public Enemy evoked the spirit of black nationalism on their album Fear of a Black Planet, in songs like “Power to the People.”

  Hip-hop had catapulted a purely African American art form to the fore, and it quickly evolved into a political and economic force with which to be reckoned. But two generations earlier, the Harlem Renaissance visionaries, and one generation before, the participants in the Black Arts Movement, had also idealistically hoped that their production of black art and popular culture would lead to African American advancement throughout society, the former in a sort of artistic or cultural version of trickle-down economics, the latter in terms of a genuine psychological revolution. But neither had happened—at least not in the ways that the creators of those movements had hoped. Could hip-hop succeed in this idealistic goal where the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement had failed?

  After all, hip-hop had never been just about politics. As it became more popular, its growing multiracial audience responded enthusiastically to its other aspects, especially the bragging, signifying, and macho posturing that glorified violence, misogyny, and materialism. Mainstream celebrities like Bill Cosby (b. 1937) and conservatives like Thomas Sowell (b. 1930) complained that hip-hop perpetuated old racial stereotypes, which might thrill white listeners but offered lamentable role models to black youth. The cultural critic Kevin Powell worried that hip-hop was turning into “a cultural safari for white people,” especially for those more comfortable with images of black gangbangers than of black engineers or administrators.26 Did hip-hop’s popularity speed the emergence of two distinct black Americas or simply reflect it—or could hip-hop be the symbolic bridge between the classes within the black community?

  THE GREATEST IRONY WAS THAT YOUNG BLACK MEN FROM THE UNDERCLASS WERE FINALLY JOINING the pantheon of national cultural icons at the very moment that their brothers and sisters were being incarcerated in ever greater numbers thanks to a new urban problem: crack cocaine.

  On the eve of crack’s arrival, the decline in employment opportunities for young black men had already led to an increase of street crime like muggings and robberies. Cheap, available, and highly addictive, crack cocaine offered a new opportunity to get rich quickly, albeit at the expense of those whose lives would be ruined by their new habit. Violence increased as gangs and dealers battled over control of markets. Once again, many feared the black community was destroying itself from within.

  Crack appeared just as the black middle class was itself fleeing to the suburbs, depriving inner cities of the moderating influence of people working “normal” jobs, as William Julius Wilson points out. By the late 1980s, low-income black neighborhoods like the Bronx and South Central Los Angeles had become virtual war zones, in which the police employed military-style tactics like helicopters, high-tech surveillance systems, SWAT teams, and even tanks to patrol and control. But selling crack was simply the best economic option for many young men in poverty—even though the consequences of getting arrested could be much more serious for them than for white drug dealers. While both black and white people were using and selling crack, black street dealers were much more likely to be arrested and much more likely to be convicted if charged. The racial disparity in drug-law enforcement and the very different penalties for crack versus powder cocaine laid the foundation for a new phenomenon: mass incarceration of African American men, the basis of a new racial caste system, which the legal scholar Michelle Alexander named “the new Jim Crow.”

  Sadly, the story of a young man named Reynolds Wintersmith (b. 1977) is not an isolated case, but it is a representative one. Wintersmith received a life sentence for conspiracy to sell crack in 1994, although he was just a teenager at the time of his first and only conviction. Wintersmith grew up with drug-addled parents—his mother died of a heroin overdose when he was 11—and he was raised by a grandmother who made and sold drugs out of their home. He started selling crack for a gang in Rockford, Illinois, when he was 16, unaware that new laws made the punishment for this crime a mandatory life sentence, and judges were given no discretion in imposing it. The judge who sentenced Wintersmith expressed regret: “You were 17 years old when you got involved in this thing…. Usually a life sentence is imposed in state courts when somebody has been killed or severely hurt, or you’ve got a recidivist; that is, a defendant who’s been convicted time and again…. This is your first conviction, and here you face life imprisonment…. It gives me pause to think that that was the intent of Congress, to put somebody away for the rest of their life.”27 Wintersmith has spent his entire adult life in prison. Now in his mid-30s, he has been recommended for a federal pardon, but at the moment he continues to sit in jail for selling drugs as a teenager, his only offense. He had the misfortune to break a law that many believe is too harsh and that is enforced against black men more frequently than white.

  Although the civil rights movement had vanquished the old Jim Crow years before, African Americans still received unfair treatment in the nation’s criminal courts. Black defendants received harsher sentences; black jurors were less likely to be chosen to hear their cases. The list goes on. New sentencing laws increased the national incarceration rate across the board, but the percentage of black inmates, as we saw in those distressing statistics listed at the beginning of this chapter, also skyrocketed.

  Once individuals served their time, they faced a huge list of collateral civil consequences that had an even larger impact on their lives and future. In many ways, facing freedom was as difficult as facing jail time. The list of rights denied to felons was long, and the consequences so delimiting that the end of a sentence hardly guaranteed a new beginning. Convicted felons, for example, were not allowed to receive food stamps and were ineligible for public housing, which could make day-to-day survival on the outside a harrowing prospect. Educational opportunities—certainly a way up and out—were essentially nil; a convicted felon could not receive federal financial aid for school. For many people, especially the poor, the military—like a college education—offered the promise of both professional and financial stability; for convicted felons, enlisting in the military was forbidden. Ironically enough, also lost was the right to vote and to serve on a jury, rights that African Americans had fought so hard to secure after Reconstruction and again during the civil rights movement.

  Civil rights lawyers tried to fight what they recognized as a gross imbalance in sentencing laws and other race-based inequities throughout the justice system. In 1978, Warren McCleskey, an African American man in Fulton County, Georgia, was tried and convicted on two counts of armed robbery and one count of murder. His victim: the white police officer responding to the robbery call. McCleskey was s
entenced to death. In 1987, the case McCleskey v. Kemp, in which the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDP) argued that the application of the death penalty in Georgia was tied to race and thus unconstitutional, made it all the way to the Supreme Court. But the court ruled that racial disparities within our criminal justice system were “inevitable” and thus did not count as discrimination.28 According to the American Constitution Society:

  Because of McCleskey, there is no remedy for—and, indeed, no constitutional problem with—the fact that Blacks are disproportionately stopped, searched, arrested, held on bail, charged with serious crimes (including death-eligible offenses), denied plea bargains, convicted, and sentenced to prison or execution. There is no constitutional basis for challenging the fact that one in three African American males will enter state or federal prison at some point in his lifetime; and that although African Americans make up only 12 percent of the U.S. population, they amount to 44 percent of sentenced inmates—the largest group behind bars.29

  The NYU professor and civil rights lawyer Anthony Amsterdam, who worked on the McCleskey case, has called the verdict “the Dred Scott decision of our times.”30

  As the War on Drugs turned into a war on young African American men, anger seethed in inner cities across the country. By the late 1980s, gangsta rap dominated the hip-hop scene, with lyrics that glorified guns, money, and violence. But the gangsta rappers weren’t creating social problems, as some critics charged; they merely reflected existing economic conditions and social tensions, particularly racial profiling and police harassment. Perhaps no group did this more vocally, and more controversially, than the Los Angeles rappers N.W.A. in their 1988 song “Fuck tha Police.”

  IN 1991, ONE OF THE COUNTLESS MUNDANE CONFRONTATIONS BETWEEN A YOUNG BLACK MAN and the Los Angeles police became the match that would ignite a massive social explosion with deep national implications. On March 3, 1991, the black motorist Rodney King (1965–2012) was pulled over for evading a traffic stop. It seemed routine enough. But the four LAPD officers on the scene pulled him from his car and kicked him in the head, used a Taser on him, and beat him with batons as he writhed in pain on the ground. King ended up with a broken cheekbone, nine skull fractures, a shattered eye socket, a broken ankle, and 20 stitches in his face. A white man who lived nearby, George Holliday, recorded the brutal beating with a home video camera. Once he sold the videotape to a local television station, there was no containing it. The story went national, and then international. As shocking as the images were to the mainstream media and the nation, neither the L.A. hip-hop community nor ordinary residents were surprised by what they saw—police brutality this severe was nothing new to them. The rapper Ice Cube (b. 1969) remarked on Rodney King’s treatment at the hands of the LAPD: “It’s been happening to us for years. It’s just that we didn’t have a camcorder every time it happened.”31 Just as innovations like the cotton gin and television had shaped the course of African American history, now the technological advance of inexpensive, readily available home video cameras revolutionized national awareness of the reality of police brutality against young black men.

  Across the country, and especially in Los Angeles, people waited to see how justice would be served. When an all-white jury acquitted all four LAPD officers on April 29, 1992, the city erupted in an outpouring of rage that became the most devastating urban uprising in the history of the United States. More than 5,000 buildings burned from West Los Angeles and Watts to Long Beach and Santa Monica, amassing around $785 million in property damage. There were 2,300 people injured, and at least 55 were killed.

  Los Angeles’s African American mayor, Tom Bradley, a son of sharecroppers who had been elected to office almost 20 years earlier, was powerless to stop the violence. Many black Los Angeles residents felt that Bradley had broken too many promises to their community, leaving South Central Los Angeles mired in poverty, gang violence, and crack while catering to downtown developers. Ultimately, having an African American mayor had not been enough to save black Los Angeles, and Bradley’s timid calls for peace were ignored. He left office the following year.

  Once again thanks to television, images of the L.A. riots were seared into the national consciousness. Just as the savage beating of Rodney King by white police officers had shocked and sickened the nation, now audiences were witness to another episode of horrific abuse: that of a white truck driver named Reginald Denny, pulled from his truck by a group of young black men who beat him until he was unconscious. That race relations were broken was evident night after night on news programs. Or were they? An image that few people saw was the courageous rescue of Denny by four black neighbors who came out of their homes and drove the injured man to the hospital.

  When the flames died down, African Americans faced a dilemma: How could they move toward racial equality when, after the sacrifices of the civil rights movement and the demands for Black Power, black people could still be vulnerable to mistreatment and injustice or driven to the senseless violence of Denny’s attackers? While some African American intellectuals and cultural icons (including the popular and influential talk show host Oprah Winfrey) tried to initiate a national debate on race in America, others looked inward to their own community.

  In 1995, the Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan (b. 1933) summoned African American men to convene in the nation’s capital for what he declared would be a “Million Man March.” Farrakhan and his co-organizer, Ben Chavis (b. 1948), called on black men to reaffirm their commitment to family values and “personal responsibility” instead of dependence on government handouts. Yet neither self-help efforts like the Million Man March nor the efforts of the black elite could provide a solution for the “truly disadvantaged” black underclass defined by William Julius Wilson.

  THE CARDS SEEMED STACKED AGAINST THE BLACK UNDERCLASS ALREADY, but a natural disaster in August 2005 cast a harsh light on the glaring economic inequalities that seemed to have become permanently entrenched in 21st-century America. Before Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans was a predominantly African American city, with more than a quarter of its population living in poverty. As the hurricane approached, the city’s black mayor, Ray Nagin (b. 1956), issued an evacuation order, but many of the city’s residents, who lacked transportation or any way out, had no choice but to ride out the storm in their homes. Katrina actually bypassed New Orleans, aside from several hours of fierce wind and rain. But a few hours later, the levees broke, and lake waters flooded the city. Those who had remained in New Orleans—who were disproportionately black and poor—waited agonizing days for relief and rescue without power, food, clean water, or government assistance.

  The news footage of mostly black people—living and dead, displaced and devastated—reminded the nation that the African American underclass was worse off than ever, from the many black residents who had no car to use to flee, to the thousands of people turned away at gunpoint when they tried crossing to white suburbs on foot. Stories about poor black people being sheltered in dirty and demeaning conditions in the New Orleans Superdome made many Americans question what exactly the government was doing to help.

  And if the images that were played and replayed on people’s television screens weren’t shocking enough, the callousness of some in power—or those close to it—was jaw-dropping. Upon touring the Houston Astrodome, where many New Orleanians had been evacuated for shelter, the former first lady and current president’s mother, Barbara Bush, said, “So many of the people in the arena here were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them.”32 Her son, President George W. Bush, did not visit New Orleans for a full 17 days after the flood. By the time two and a half weeks had passed, however, President Bush did seem to have absorbed the damning message of Katrina, commenting that the disaster exposed “deep, persistent poverty” with “roots in a history of racial discrimination, which cut off generations from the opportunities of America.”33

  The disaster also exposed a shocking disparity between how black a
nd white Americans saw their nation. The political scientist Melissa Harris-Perry conducted research for the Katrina Disaster Study and discovered that “while most white Americans saw the hurricane’s aftermath as tragic, they understood it primarily as a natural disaster followed by technical and bureaucratic failures. Most black Americans saw it as a racial disaster…. The lack of coordinated response was itself an indication that black people did not matter to the government.”34 Of African Americans surveyed for the study, 66 percent believed that the response to the disaster would have been faster if the victims had been white, whereas 77 percent of white Americans believed that race made no difference.35

  This shared understanding united an incredibly diverse range of African Americans. Congressman John Lewis was one of the first to point out that race was a critical factor in both the depiction of Katrina’s victims and the government’s response to the disaster. And on September 2, 2005, while speaking at a benefit concert for the victims of the hurricane, the hip-hop artist Kanye West (b. 1977) went off script to address the president’s behavior directly: “I hate the way they portray us in the media. You see a black family, it says, ‘They’re looting.’ You see a white family, it says, ‘They’re looking for food.’ And you know, it’s been five days [waiting for federal help] because most of the people are black,” he said spontaneously. “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”36

  And indeed, as rebuilding efforts got under way, African Americans, who had once made up 67 percent of the city’s population, began to feel that they were not welcome to return to their hometown.37 Public housing projects that had suffered little or no flood damage were torn down, the struggling public school system was shuttered for good, and labor contracts to rebuild the city were given to out-of-town companies rather than to local residents desperate for work. Some white New Orleanians promoted measures to ensure a new, “smaller” (which many understood to mean “less black”) New Orleans. In 2006, the city’s population dropped temporarily to only 46 percent black, which may well have been a factor in the election of New Orleans’s first white mayor since the 1970s.38