An African-American Man That Gets It

Maggie e-mailed me this article from Opinion Journal regarding black America. Many of you know that I have been posting on this battle, and with much help from her we are witnessing the victories and losses. Despite this affecting mostly black Americans this is something that affects us all.

I have also placed the article in the extended entry just in case you have a hard time getting to it.

From Opinion Journal

Shall We Overcome?
The black American condition today.

BY CHARLES JOHNSON
Friday, October 14, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

As Louis Farrakhan, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton prepare for yet another symbolic and substanceless "Million Man March" in Washington, all three have managed to dodge the joke about the first such rally a decade ago (the one in which Mr. Farrakhan dazzled the world with his knowledge of numerology): namely, that black men in America are the only group ever to march in protest of themselves. I'm guessing that the rationale for this weekend's gathering is identical to that of the initial march. It is a lament we have heard in one guise or another for 3 1/2 decades: Our family is in crisis; black men are an endangered species.

As tired as one might be of hearing this, the crisis can be seen as possibly terminal for a considerable portion of black Americans at the dawn of the 21st century. Furthermore, it is not merely an economic or political problem but also a cultural, spiritual and moral one that has at its center behavior and attitudes that make far too many black men noncompetitive (except in sports and entertainment) and, perhaps, irrelevant in an increasingly complex multicultural and knowledge-based global economy.

Messrs. Farrakhan, Jackson and Sharpton are no doubt responding to the inevitably contradictory profiles offered by black America in the post-civil rights period. Like the subatomic entity that can be either a wave or a particle, depending on when (and where) you glimpse it, one portrait of blacks today discloses that we are, as Reginald McKnight once wrote, "as polymorphous as the dance of Shiva."

On the one hand, we are CEOs at AOL Time Warner, American Express and Merrill Lynch; we have served as secretary of state and White House national security adviser; we are mayors, police chiefs, best-selling novelists, MacArthur fellows, Nobel laureates, professors, billionaires, scientists, stockbrokers, engineers, toymakers, inventors, astronauts, chess grandmasters, dot-com millionaires, talk show hosts, actors and film directors; Protestants, Catholics, Muslims, Jews and Buddhists (as is yours truly). We are inescapable in the fabric of America's lived experience and defy easy categorization. The GDP of black America is $631 billion. Homeownership is close to 50%. The number living in poverty is 25%, which is too high, of course, but a vast improvement over indigence of the past.

But there is a second, disturbing profile that reveals too high a percentage of black men being AWOL as fathers and husbands; as disappearing from our colleges (UC Berkeley's 2004-05 freshman class had only 108 African-Americans out of 3,600 students, with less than 40 males, and not one black among the 800 entering students in engineering); as graduating from high school with an eighth-grade level of proficiency in math and reading; in prison, on probation or on parole (a third of black men in their 20s). With the HIV infection rate doubling for blacks in the past decade, as well as urban violence, hypertension, social stress and heart disease, the number of black men now trails black women by two million. And it is not as if black women are thriving; the HIV infection rate for black women is 20 times that for white women (possibly because of "down low" bisexual black males who hide the fact of their homosexuality).

It seems that after decades of supporting and building up our daughters, sisters and wives, we are finally willing to acknowledge a national "boy problem" in general, one with devastating consequences for black males in particular. That belated recognition, our "leaders" seem to be saying with yet another media-courting march, might be too little too late. We have already allowed the talent, resources and genius of two generations of young black men who might have enriched this republic to be squandered by gang violence, by poor academic preparation, by the lack of good parenting and by the celebration of an irresponsible "thug life" that is ethically infantile and, predictably, embraced by a notoriously values-challenged entertainment industry.
Two things could not be more clear in 2005: First, without strong, self-sacrificing, frugal and industrious fathers as role models, our boys go astray, never learn how to be parents (or men), and perpetuate the dismal situation of single-parent homes run by tired and overworked black women. The black family as a survival unit fails, which leads to the ever-fragile community collapsing along with it. Second, our black predecessors (particularly Booker T. Washington with his corny but unfailingly correct "gospel of the toothbrush") understood from the era of Reconstruction until the late 1960s how indispensable was the black family for sustaining a fight against racism that by its very nature can only be measured in centuries, and for ensuring that our progress toward liberation, personal and political, would not be lost in but a single generation as it now threatens to be.

The columnist William Raspberry has lately urged black people to resist becoming trapped and limited by antique narratives about their lives. "For the first time in black American history," he wrote, "what we do is a greater determinant of our future than what is done to us. We need to teach that and preach that and shout that--to our young people and ourselves. We need to take note of the immigrants--including those from Africa and the Caribbean--who see opportunity where too many born here see only disparity."

Some of our black celebrity athletes, many of whom had their education cut short by their careers, seem to be bellwethers for a possible black male renaissance, which our most insightful intellectuals have quietly bolstered by presenting as role models our geeks and boffins rather than our rappers, our "Hip Hop culture," and those mired in what Thomas Sowell calls "black redneck" behavior. Observe Shaquille O'Neal, pursuing a master's degree in criminal justice; or Washington Wizards player Kwame Brown, who is studying business courses online, and who believes that "you gain respect with an education"; or former University of Nebraska football star Bobby Newcombe, at work on a master's degree in business administration, who sees how "education is a means for something else--whether it's developing yourself to better serve people, to support your family, or for marketability."

These individuals, so highly competitive on the court, understand that the responsibility for the breadth of their skills, the depths of their intellects, the daring of their imaginative pursuits, and the quality of their lives rests--just like their athletic prowess--only on themselves. This is hardly a fresh idea in black American life, but what is new and exciting--the opportunity tucked away inside this "crisis"--is the radical, perhaps even revolutionary, proposition that in the 21st century, if we are willing to give up the "soft bigotry of low expectations," we can reshape the cultural profile of the black American male so that it embodies what our predecessors and ancestors valued most: literacy and a love of learning; the wide-ranging intellectual curiosity and catholicity represented by a W.E.B. Du Bois or a Mark Deans (an IBM research-center director who holds 40 patents); personal discipline, delayed gratification, a commitment to creating wealth and passing that along to our children, and the very hard truth that, despite our appreciation of modernity, people of color do not have the luxury of half-stepping, failure and indiscretions in a very white, unabashedly Eurocentric society.

If, instead of denial and avoidance, our graying leaders and opinion-makers--who have dismally failed to address the serious problem of black male culture for almost half a century because it is so much easier to apologize for black underperformance or arm-wrestle with Mexican president Vicente Fox over a slip during one of his speeches--tell the men in their audience that each and every one of them must become the intellectual and spiritual leader they have been looking for, then perhaps this latest racial spectacle in our nation's capital will not be staged in vain.

Mr. Johnson, a professor of English at the University of Washington in Seattle, is the author of "Middle Passage" and, most recently, of "Dr. King's Refrigerator and Other Bedtime Stories" (Scribner, 2005).

Posted by Stacy at October 14, 2005 04:45 PM | TrackBack