America Behind the Color Line

by Henry Louis Gates

  In downtown Summit, there’s a housing project that’s pretty much all people of color. Every day when I got off the train, especially in the summertime, I used to see the brothers who live there hanging out, and I was reminded of where I come from. My kids saw the project all the time when we went downtown. They realize that there is a significant African-American community out there, some not as blessed as they are.

  Nowadays there are programs to help bright and motivated African-American kids get out of the ’hood—whether it’s ABC or Prep for Prep or private schools that offer some students full scholarships. However, if you come home to little or no family structure, you need something to keep you going, and that’s the tough part. Beyond that, the playing field is far from level in terms of the ability to make connections in a white world. I’ve worked with young entrepreneurs of color in a program called the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship, and they complain all the time about insufficient access to circles of people who could help them get connected in business, or even get funding for their projects. They don’t have the opportunity to be where those conversations happen.

  Black-on-black crime is one of our biggest problems, and we can’t simply blame white people for it. It comes back again to the family and the family structure. In my household, the last thing on my mind was joining a gang. I came home from school and my mom said, you’re not going outside until you finish your homework. We had a structure. My father came home every night, and we had supper together and a routine. We went to church often. We had values put into us, strong, powerful values, so we never thought about gangs or sticking someone up. When we saw somebody’s mother wheeling a shopping cart, we ran over to help her with the groceries. That’s just the way we were brought up.

  Savoy magazine recently published a disturbing article about a beautiful girl who was killed in Chicago. She was raised by her white grandparents, and her black grandmother always sent for her to come up to Milwaukee for the summer. She enjoyed spending the summer in Milwaukee seeing the black side of her family and learning about that part of her heritage. When her black grandmother died, her white family would not pay for her to go back to Milwaukee to see her other black relatives in the summer. So she started feeling she was missing something, and she ran away from Texas with a couple of friends and went to Chicago, where she hooked up with some friends on the South Side.

  She was invited to a party on the West Side of Chicago. I lived in Chicago for four years, and I know it well. This beautiful mulatto child went to a party on the West Side, in one of the most treacherous neighborhoods. She went with two other girls, sat down at the bar, and was immediately approached by a bunch of cool, slick-on-a-curb brothers. The other two girls say, let’s get out of here, and they leave. The mulatto girl gets in a car with three young black men, not knowing anything about these guys from the ’hood. It turns out that one of them has sex in the backseat of the car with the girl, later claiming it was consensual sex, and when she doesn’t want to perform anal sex, he rapes her and then kills her.

  If the girl had been able to see the black side of her family, she wouldn’t have been so intrigued with being seen at the rough side of black life in Chicago. If her family had just kept letting her go to Milwaukee in the summer, the West Side of Chicago wouldn’t have been something exotic for her, the forbidden fruit.

  The two pillars of family and education must be in place if African Americans are to make further progress. If we can stabilize those two structures, then I think we can bring up most of our people. I’m optimistic. I see the glass half full. That’s just my nature. When I see Ken Chenault, Stan O’Neal, Richard Parsons, and Franklin Raines, I see the barriers being broken down and the glass ceiling being cracked. I hope they bring along others with them. Realistically, you can’t capture everybody. Even in the Jewish culture, which does a great job, there are some Jews that are lagging; there are white people that are lagging. I don’t think we can get everybody. But those of us who are successful owe it to our community to go back and help as many people as we can. Furthermore, I encourage bright African Americans to seek out the investment management profession, because it is one of the few endeavors that has a scorecard on your performance every day. It’s about as close to a meritocracy as one can get. Of course, it isn’t perfect.

  Lack of access to capital has deterred the movement and progress of all African Americans. But as a people, we are starting to gain that access. We had the late Reginald Lewis, the financier and entrepreneur who owned TLC Beatrice International. We have Bob Johnson, founder and CEO of BET. I just read in Savoy magazine about a brother I’d never heard of who’s a billionaire out of Birmingham, Alabama, and I was like, wow! One of my classmates, Keith Clinkscales, founded Vanguarde Media, which owns Savoy and Honey and Heart & Soul. Catherine Hughes, a black woman, is doing great things in the radio/media world.

  There was a group of brothers and sisters in my generation at Harvard Business School. A lot of them came through a program called ABC—A Better Chance—which helps young people from low-income households. Several, like me, come from modest means, but from a family that stressed education. We’ve all done well, and now we’re pulling for each other, while helping each other out. We all try to support African-American dentists, doctors, and accountants. We try to patronize each other’s businesses and keep it in the community. That’s key. And the kids see that too. We live a bicultural life. We have a black base and a black nurturing environment; we live part of our lives in the white world; and then we come on home.

  Donna Pearson

  I’m very happy living in the Boston area now, and I also loved living in Summit. I like a family-oriented town. I’m always involved with the girls’ schools. Before we moved to Summit, and then west of Boston, we lived in a similar kind of town in California.

  I worry about our kids being in a mainly white upper-middle-class town. It was that way in Summit, and it’s the same in the town we recently moved to. The girls go to school with a majority of white kids. So we try to keep a balance. We make sure our children are aware of being black. They’re surrounded in our home with works of art by blacks, and they read a lot of books by and about African Americans. We’re in Jack & Jill, and that’s good. In Summit, there was an African-American teacher at the school and we asked, make sure our children get that teacher. And we kept our kids in touch with their friends in other communities, as we will do when they have had time to make new friends in the Boston area.

  Racism still exists, but it’s more quiet. It’s kept behind closed doors. In Summit I saw instances, sometimes subtle, sometimes not, particularly at the school. Because I’m so fair-skinned, people sometimes think I’m white, and they’ll say things and I’ll say, excuse me, I’m African American too. And all of a sudden their face gets red.

  They don’t say the “n” word, but one time someone said to me, oh, that black person, they don’t know what they’re doing. And I said, excuse me? Or they’ll think that the way I’m doing something is inferior to what they’re doing and that I can’t do a job like they do. I happened to be working as someone’s partner in a club at one time, handling the organizing of something, and you have to let them know right away that you can take the lead just as well as they can.

  We had a dinner club for residents of Hobart Avenue, and I was the only African American. They welcomed me very nicely, but it’s questionable whether people realized at first that I’m black. In fact, shortly after moving to Summit, Walt and I heard someone say, well, there’s an interracial couple on Hobart Avenue. And we said, really? Where? A taxi service that our friends the Irvins use told Milton about an interracial couple on Hobart Avenue, and he was scratching his head trying to figure out who it was. It’s funny. A lot of them thought we’re an interracial couple. I say, we come in all colors, shapes, and sizes.

  When we first moved to Summit, all the neighbors were welcoming except for one. The property needed a lot of work. We had no grass in the ba
ckyard, so we cut down trees because we wanted to grow grass and make it friendly for the kids. I went over and said, hi, I’m your new neighbor; I want to introduce myself. And she said, you cut down trees, and you’re going to destroy this property. Not long after, my husband, Walt, and I heard she’d said that some people moved in next door and the property value had gone down.

  We renovated for close to four years in our home there. It was nonstop. I like interior decorating; it’s my hobby. So we said the property value was going to go up, because we were doing things to make it nice. Every time we did something, we got the unfriendly neighbor standing there watching us. But every other neighbor, I must say, was very nice.

  Our daughter Taylor, who is eight, had a difficult situation at school. A friend of hers told her she couldn’t be in a club she was starting because it was just for white people. This was someone Taylor was having play dates with, so I was a little confused. I called the girl’s mom and told her what happened, and her mom said, I think something’s wrong, because Grace likes to play with Taylor. So I had a discussion with Taylor. I told her that sometimes kids say things and they’re mean about African-American children. I told her how beautiful she is. Her skin color is so pretty.

  In pre-K, I found out, they had all these clubs. The girl’s mom called me back and said, Grace doesn’t remember saying that, and she enjoys playing with Taylor. Then she invited Taylor over for a play date. Walt’s response was to tell Taylor to start her own club.

  I think we’re losing a generation, because there’s such a disparity between the black underclass and then people like our children in the black middle class. We have to do something to educate the children. Otherwise, I think there are going to be two classes of African Americans permanently. The problem has grown. It’s more visible now than it has been in the past. I hear all the time about grandmothers in their early thirties, and it’s scary. Walt’s involved in an organization that’s turning young kids into entrepreneurs. He works with really young kids, in the seventh, eighth, and ninth grades, who come from neighborhoods where they thought they were going to be dead at nineteen. It’s just amazing the minds of these children nowadays.

  Some people assume that black people aren’t educated because of the hiphop and their appearance. I think some of the kids are just learning that these are very educated people who come from good schools, like Princeton, Yale, and Harvard. They’re showing their creativity through their hip-hop. They’re educated people, and that’s key. The kids need to understand that better. Everyone out there is not just singing these songs. They’re not gangsters. You have to be smart also.

  Some of the hip-hop is fine for my kids to listen to. Not the ones with all the curses in them, but some of it, yes. My older daughter loves music and wants to know all about the hip-hop artists. She said, one day I’m going to win an Oscar.

  If my daughter brought home a white boyfriend, it wouldn’t put me through major changes, but I would have a talk with her and see how serious this was. I would prefer she marry an African American, but I love my children, and whatever makes them happy is okay. And I have a saying: If you go back across the years, probably everybody has a little bit of a story to tell.

  Taylor Pearson

  When I was in pre-K, something happened with me and my friend. My friend was making a club and I wanted to be in it and she said no, it’s only for white people, and that made me sad.

  I cried. And I wanted to go home, and then I wanted to tell my mom and dad, and they said they were going to call her parents and discuss it with her parents. She didn’t ask me to be in the club after that either.

  And that’s what I wanted to say.

  LENORA FULANI

  Résumé Stories

  Political activist and educator Lenora Fulani teaches kids how to be successful in the business world. Her premise is that the workplace is a performance space, the world is a theater, and our kids have to learn how to perform. “A lot of performances black kids currently have, they think of as the essence of themselves as black people,” she told me. “But they can learn a different way to perform, like they learn anything else. Because of the poverty they live in, what the kids know about the world is very narrow, and they know it from the street corner. Part of what it means to learn is that you have to be worldly in ways that a lot of our kids aren’t. So our educational approach puts them in situations where they have to learn to be more sophisticated.”

  I grew up in Chester, Pennsylvania, a poor suburb of Philadelphia. It was very much a working-class town. Many people who live in Chester came up from down South and settled there because it had a lot of industry at one time. My father worked as a baggage carrier for the Pennsylvania Railroad. My grandfather used to work in the steel mill. My uncles worked for a linoleum company and for the Scott Paper Company. Chester was predominantly black and poor, and still is.

  My father died when I was twelve, and my mother kept us going. She was my principal role model, which is interesting because she was working class and pretty much uneducated until she became a nurse. I think people don’t see themselves as possible role models, but my mother was quite something. She’s one of my heroes. Having worked as a domestic until she was around thirty-five years old, she decided to become a licensed practical nurse and did that until she retired. She had to drop out of school in the sixth grade, and she was always very ashamed of that because she couldn’t spell. She would write me letters and apologize for her spelling in the midst of them. But she was a real go-getter.

  I knew that my nephews and nieces were poor even when I was little. One of my sister’s kids used to come to our house and eat nonstop. All the things that happen to people in poor families happened in mine. But I wasn’t particularly self-conscious about our circumstances. I didn’t walk around thinking, I am poor. Being the youngest in my family, I got everything they had to offer. My closest sister was eight years older than me. It was almost like being an only child.

  I was aware that I had privileges my siblings didn’t have, and I spent part of my childhood trying to be giving to people. That was always very important to me. I used to play the piano for youth choir in our church, from the time I was twelve until I left to attend undergraduate school. My mother had bought me a piano. She rented it for a year, and when she realized I was going to keep playing it, she began to pay for it. She used to do things that were pretty huge for us.

  One of the reasons I feel so close to black communities and black kids is I think it was a miracle that I got out of Chester as a young woman not pregnant. I watched what happened to my sisters and cousins and I was scared to death. I was like, I don’t want this to happen to me. But that wasn’t because I was brilliant. Circumstances impacted me; I learned from things I saw. It was almost a miracle. People always say to me, there’s something about you that made you different. I think a lot of what made me different was outside of my control, such as being the last kid of five. Many circumstances go into the choices people make.

  By the time I left high school, I knew things were not going well for many of those around me. I made a list of all the people I was going to go back to Chester and save after I got my degree. When I really discovered that I too was poor, I was in therapy. I was in my late twenties and had separated from my husband. I was in graduate school, studying psychology. My husband and I broke up when my kids were five years old and two and a half. Because he tied his fatherhood to our marriage, I think he just disappeared when he recognized that I had really left the marriage.

  I had my two kids. My mother used to always tell us that we should have a savings account. So every time I got paid, I would put money in the savings account. But by the end of the month, I would have to take it out to spend it, and I thought there was something wrong with me because I didn’t have a savings account. I finally raised it as an issue in therapy, and my therapist said to me, do you know that you’re poor? And I felt two things almost simultaneously: totally humiliated and extremely relieved. I f
elt like, I don’t have enough money to have a savings account; this is not a character flaw. It was magnificent; it was liberating. I was working with a white Jewish therapist whom I’d also worked with politically. His name is Dr. Fred Newman. He’s been a mentor, and we’ve worked together now in the All Stars Project for more than twenty years.

  I was not raised to think I could become anything I wanted to be, or that I would end up with a Ph.D. My family was almost completely nonacademic. I’m the first person in my immediate family who went to college. I don’t know if I ever saw my father read a book. I assume my mother read some, because she had to pass tests to become an LPN. My parents bought me The World Book Encyclopedia, with the red covers. I think that if I had just completed high school, it would have been fine with them. In some ways, what I’ve done with my life is incomprehensible to my family.

  Two of my sisters work—one is a nurse, and another works for the post office. A third sister died when I was fifteen. My brother worked for the Ford Motor Company in Chester and followed the job when the company moved to Mahwah, New Jersey. He finished his career and retired, and lives in New Jersey now.

  Kids in the inner city today are just as poor as those of us were who grew up poor in small towns in the 1950s. In some ways, they’re poorer. Inner-city poverty has a particular look to it. It’s become so chronic that the poor accept it as a way of life, as do people who aren’t so poor. We grew up during the Civil Rights Movement. There was a sense of having someplace to go. Growth was possible. The Brown v. Board of Education ruling, in 1954, paved the way for increased opportunity for us. More funding became available to state colleges. Individuals were bringing cases against state schools saying they had to admit black students because the colleges were paid for by tax dollars. In the 1950s and 1960s, Historically Black Colleges and Universities were supporting black kids who got into college by offering them the secondary-level preparation they had missed because the schools they attended were so inadequate. All this had a huge impact on me and on many others who grew up at that time. And the HBCU became even more important in the 1970s and 1980s, with the tremendous increase in the number of blacks attending college in those years.