America Behind the Color Line

by Henry Louis Gates

  We have a pretty wide demographic. Culturally, the show reaches across racial lines, both black and white. My goal was to represent the generational tensions of a family, not the generational tensions of a black man. On the other hand, I love the fact that it’s from a black perspective and that it’s seasoned with that underneath it, because to me that’s what gives it the richness and the texture. And it’s funny—it reaches across generational lines, which I’m really the most proud of. Old people love our show. We get white-haired Jewish women from Palm Beach talking about it as well as young urban kids, and the black audience is really huge. What I love about the feeling from the black audience is that there’s a sense of pride about the show, which is great. People are proud to say, oh, yeah, The Bernie Mac Show, yeah! That’s nice; it’s a nice feeling. And yet, just from the mainstream audience too, they really respond to the fact that it is different and that it has the universal theme about parenting and how hard it is. People really love to laugh at Bernie too—he’s so relatable. When he puts the weight of the world on his shoulders, that’s the funniest thing—“America, you know what I’m talking about . . . y’all wanna beat those kids too.” I channel Bernie. That’s how I write. I just try to think like him.

  This whole segregation in television is a really recent phenomenon. Shows like Good Times had no problem crossing over. The Jeffersons had no problem because they were on the major networks. When the shows are on the major networks, they have no problem crossing over. Fresh Prince of Bel-Air is the most recent example. But it was on NBC. If you’re on a big channel and you don’t cross over, you don’t stay. If a show’s on some channel that’s like sixty-eight and a half in some markets, and people try to find it, most people are just gonna watch the big channels. Now I always joke, the black people are still gonna find the black shows: Honey, we gonna find some niggers on TV tonight! Keep clickin’. There’s a Burger King commercial. Wait! Wait! So you’ll seek it out if that’s what you want, but if you have to work to find it, what’s the point? If I was Japanese and I knew there was a Japanese show on Channel 38, I’d look for it because I know it’s there, but otherwise I’m just gonna watch what’s in front of me. TV’s a passive medium. People turn it on, they’re tired. They’ve eaten, they’re almost half asleep, and then, uh, hey, look at that! Uh, funny—huh! Simpsons! Huh. Funny! I think that’s how people watch TV, basically.

  I guess sociologically, you could say Bernie is first generation. If he had kids, they would be a lot different than he is. And in some ways, his wife is a little bit in the middle there. Her parents were probably very successful and passed that on to her. She’s very subtle, very particular. She’s confident with what she is. She doesn’t have to prove anything, which was also a very important trait. I wanted a black couple that were supportive of each other and didn’t bicker. You know, that when they had conflicts, they were real conflicts, and they loved each other and they were best friends. I really wanted that. It was very important to me. That’s Bernie’s relationship with his wife—they’ve been together for twenty-six years or so, and they’re best friends. I put a lot of thought into all that stuff; all of it was very important to me. But the kids thing was more of an emotional thing, more than a social commentary—absolutely.

  In our show, people are incidentally black. I mean they’re black, but people can identify. We bring out their humanness. It’s 2002. I’m trying, baby. We have done it, almost to death. We have killed it. I want to show the human side of us, man. It’s good to be upper middle class. We are that now, would you know; we still got our rooks. There’s a time and a place for everything.

  I’m really proud of the set, the inner sanctum. I wanted a set that felt like another character. I wanted the house to really be a character too. I didn’t want that typical sitcom house that had the two stories and was flat. I was searching for something where we could move the camera in the space, because I always imagine Bernie chasing the kids down a long hall and the camera being at different angles and watching it. And I also wanted the house to have a real warm feeling, more earth tones and that kind of stuff, and for that to jump off the screen and to seem like it was Bernie and Wanda’s, like, married single house. And like the stuff they had in there was from being married for years, and collecting stuff from around the world. Even the room the kids are in feels more like a bed and breakfast than a kids’ room. I mean, it’s not set up for kids to be in it, which helps the conflict, the theme of the show, to be real.

  We have a whole area of the set we call the basement. It was supposed to be a parking garage or something, but since we’re a single-camera show, we don’t need to bring an audience in, so we can use all of this space. So it’s Bernie on the bottom. See how they do us, man! Always putting the black people in the basement! Put us down here. We got ducks—anybody else got ducks down here? And the white people are upstairs, right above us! For us, it was kind of our escape. We felt like, fine, we’re down here, we’ll get away with things! And we built sets all over the basement. We did a lot of the Chicago episode down there—we didn’t even go to Chicago. In fact, we used the neighbor’s façade there for the Chicago episode. And our little girl on the show, played by Dee Dee Davis, her schoolroom is there too. We have costumes there. It’s full of life. If you’re down there when we’re doing it, there’s so much going on—it’s just amazing.

  I hope the success of the program will help black people in Hollywood. That’d be great, especially in terms of just being able to do original things, and being able to do anything. I hope more black writers get jobs on more mainstream shows. That’s more important than just hoping a show like this comes out so they can get a job. I would hope that other shows would say, hey, you know, there are some really good black writers. Let’s put ’em on Raymond or Friends or Frasier, and all those shows.

  It reminds me of that Godfrey Cambridge joke. He said that if we ever redo Birth of a Nation, y’all gonna have a job again! Oh boy. We can’t wait! Godfrey Cambridge was very funny. Bernie and I—I speak for Bernie in this sense—we both know what came before. We can talk about Godfrey Cambridge, Skillet Leroy, people like that, as well as Redd Foxx. All those people. We have a respect for it, we really have a healthy respect for it. We know what came before, so we know where we wanna go and where we wanna take it. We respect all those performers, black and white. We’re both fans of Jack Benny and Groucho Marx and Buster Keaton. Bernie’s a huge Red Skelton fan too. He had great timing and a great face. He’d do funny faces, and that’s what Bernie does too— he makes all those faces. In fact, he went to clown college, I think, or something like that. He was a clown for a while, and that’s how he makes all those kind of clown faces. But I almost see Bernie as a silent comedian, like Buster Keaton. I always say, if you can turn down the sound and still laugh, then that’s great. I think Bernie would have been a classic comedian in any area, you know.

  The thing is, I think what you are makes you what you are. I mean, those great Jewish comedians are great because they had a Jewish point of view. They were outsiders, they were immigrants, and they brought that to their sense of humor. I think that’s part of what makes you funny. It’s being an outsider; you have that point of view. It’s part of what Jewish comedy and black comedy really share, more than anything else, is the outsider commenting on everything else. That’s why they always said, write Yiddish, cast British. It’s like, write it from that point of view, but let’s put Robert Redford in the role! We don’t want it too Jewish.

  Too black—now that’s a little different, because it’s hard to write black and cast something else. I don’t know if that’s so much anymore. I think people don’t know what they really mean when they say “too black.” I think they mean too specific, maybe, like too much hip-hop. And people have to realize that hip-hop’s just one part of a culture. It’s not the whole thing. But sometimes people think it is, because of popular culture, like black culture is hiphop culture—ghetto culture, street culture. And it’s just not
true. The culture of our people is much more complex. And I think that’s what makes it rich. It would be a shame to all be the same! You know, it would be a crime. That’s why people need to go back and read James Baldwin and read all the great black writers, as well as great white ones too, and broaden your horizons a bit, you know. That kind of thing.

  If somebody says, Larry, do you know who so-and-so is? And I say, I never heard of ’em. And they say, you never heard of ’em? What’s wrong with you? I say, well, did Martin Luther King say, yo, wassup, man? He wasn’t like that. But it doesn’t matter. You don’t have to be ensconced in a certain popular culture to add something of value to the culture, or to value the culture or where you came from.

  PART FOUR

  Streets of Heaven:

  Chicago’s South Side

  The city of Chicago is tearing down the largest black community in the country. It’s not just bricks and mortar that the city wants to destroy, but the negative aspects of the culture that the Robert Taylor Homes represent for too many people. It is a culture that, for most Americans, is synonymous with poverty, crime, hopelessness, and despair, in which one in five black men in their twenties is in jail or prison or on parole; in which 69 percent of all black children are raised in single-parent households; in which the average life span for an African-American man is fifty-nine; and in which only 45 percent of black adults are working in a given week.

  These statistics call to mind a Third World country, not a neighborhood in America. How could this have happened? If the million-dollar mansions rising in Atlanta’s new black neighborhoods are today’s equivalent of the Big House, the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago’s South Side are the equivalent of the slave quarters.

  Chicago’s sublime skyline symbolizes the wealth and stability of America’s midwestern city. The lure of this property has drawn African Americans to Chicago since the beginning of the twentieth century. Three decades ago— when Dr. King was killed—most blacks in America were poor, the middle class tiny. Since then, the middle class has tripled. But like a parallel universe, extreme black poverty persists, seething in the shadows. The Taylor Homes high-rises, a world away from downtown on the city’s South Side, were home to many of the African Americans in Chicago, 29 percent of whom officially live below the poverty line. How could this be?

  Scholars on the left say that the system is to blame: a legacy grandfathered by slavery, fathered by Jim Crow racism, and nurtured by de facto segregation and job discrimination. Scholars on the right say it’s their own fault: they are too dependent on government handouts; they are lazy and irresponsible and have no self-reliance. They have decided to be poor. Stay in school, get a job, go to work. Stop blaming the white man.

  Neither argument satisfies me. Both ignore the human face and voice of poverty that lie behind the statistics we all know too well. I wanted to find some answers from the people who live here. I want to learn from them about the difficult choices their environment forces them to make, and the irresponsible choices they make themselves.

  I began my journey at 4946 South State Street, one of the few remaining high-rises of the infamous Robert Taylor Homes. This is one of the poorest neighborhoods in the United States, a microcosm of the worst social ills of America’s urban poor. Unable to fix it, the city has decided to tear it down. On my way to visit a resident, I encounter some graffiti—gang signs, children tell me. A six-pointed star and upward-pointing pitchforks mark the turf of the Gangster Disciples. In this community, gangs are a law unto themselves, instilling terror and controlling the drug trade and even a few legitimate businesses.

  Two elevators serve about a thousand people. One of them has been down for several weeks. We have no choice but to wait. With temperatures in the high nineties, it’s like standing in a crowded oven. I’m claustrophobic in elevators anyway. After fifteen minutes, thinking about the heat inside the electric casket, I head for the stairs. I’d rather walk up eleven flights of stairs than get trapped in that thing. This is routine for people here. The views from the eleventh floor would be priceless . . . if you could see past the heavy-gauged wire balcony, installed after some teenagers dropped a five-year-old boy off the fourteenth floor.

  I visited the home of Mrs. Carolyn Massenberg, who has lived here since the seventies with her daughter, Patrice, and now resides here with her grandchildren. What’s life like for these three generations?

  No statistics can convey Mrs. Massenberg’s pain, the poignancy of her awareness of her dilemma, her sensitive articulation of it, her powerlessness in the face of so many forces that keep life from being normal, despite all her good intentions and hard work.

  “My oldest grandson was killed six years ago by a gunshot wound to the head. He was seventeen years old,” she told me. “Violence is everywhere, but it’s congested in the projects. There are people on top of one another. Drugs have turned a lot of good people I knew into someone you don’t even want in your house anymore, one of the reasons being they take items, money, and so on. They get so they don’t care about their children—whether they eat, have clothing, or just being there for them. These kids are left to raise themselves and are at the mercy of the situation. It’s unthinkable unless you’ve heard it before.”

  It’s hard for Mrs. Massenberg to keep optimism alive in this looking-glass nightmare of fear and instability, this vertigo of constantly shifting ground. The challenges that the Massenbergs face are the norm, despite their best efforts. In the coming years, tens of thousands of South Side residents like them will be rehoused in new buildings all over the city. But the doubts linger. Where will the guns, the drugs, and the gangs go? Will our families be any safer?

  Home is our last refuge from the world, the place where we feel safe. Which is worse—coping with the living conditions inside or with the social chaos of the streets outside? As the spiritual says, “Went down to the rock to hide my face, the rock yells out ‘No hiding place.’”

  I next visited the Ida B. Wells Homes, named for a famous black journalist and completed in 1941. Built for black Southern migrants searching for the Promised Land during the Depression, these homes were once a model of public housing, worthy of Ida B. Wells’s great name. Streets were swept clean, gardens well tended. People here worked and were poor, but they didn’t know they were poor. Today it’s more of a war zone than a neighborhood.

  Twenty-year-old Lyndell Newman has lived here most of his life, but he’s determined to escape. I wondered about his chances, especially after he told me he’s making $600 a month in a restaurant when he could be making $6,000 a day selling drugs. “You can’t get a better job?” I asked him.

  “It’s hard. Most of the jobs I see, you got to have training already.” “Have you ever sold drugs?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, why did you get out? How did you get out? Took the $6,000, banked it, invested in the stock market?”

  “No. It just wasn’t me. Selling drugs didn’t click with me. It wasn’t something I wanted to do. I don’t like quick cash basically. I like to work hard for my money.”

  I recognize this ethic. I grew up in Piedmont, West Virginia, in the 1950s. My father worked two jobs to support my mother, my brother, and me. I guess you could call us members of the working poor, but the country working poor, not the city working poor. The difference is huge, which I realized only after visiting my parents’ friends in a Pittsburgh ghetto in 1957. Crime—city crime—simply didn’t exist where we lived. We were poor but safe. We also attended school, and most of my father’s friends had jobs; those who didn’t were supported fairly adequately by the welfare system. I couldn’t imagine why anyone in their right mind would want to live poor in a city like Pittsburgh, in crowded, hot, stifling tenements, surrounded by the constant threat of crime. Or so it seemed to me. Had my same family been transported whole to these tenements, even with all of my parents’ energy and determination I do not know if I would have made it. My parents’ friends migrated north for economic opport
unities; what they encountered instead was largely a cycle of despair.

  What happened to the city of refuge my grandfather’s generation sought in the North—the North, where “the streets of Heaven were paved with gold”? What happened to this street in Chicago which St. Clair Drake and Horace Clayton in Black Metropolis once called Little Harlem: “Around you swirls a continuous eddy of faces—black, brown, olive, yellow and white— in most of the . . . stores there are colored salespeople . . . In the offices around you, colored doctors, dentists and lawyers . . . There is continuous and colorful movement . . .”

  The roots of Chicago’s decline can be traced to the Great Migration of the 1920s and 1930s. Fleeing poverty and the repression of white racism and Jim Crow, blacks from the South flocked to Chicago. They built homes, claimed entire neighborhoods, and constructed businesses. Hope was palpable. A new Black America was born, a new culture, a rural Southern and urban Northern blend reflected in Chicago’s blues and jazz . . . and in the modern urban ghetto.

  City historian and activist Timuel D. Black knows this story firsthand. These first migrants, like Mr. Black’s family, aspired to a middle-class life, pursuing education and adapting well to Chicago’s dynamic clash of cultures and ethnicities. But division within the black community began to appear when a new wave of migrants arrived during World War II.