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MY PARENTS WERE worried. I felt alive when I moved into this Black neighborhood. I felt I needed to live around Black people in order to study and uplift Black people. Not just any Black people: poor Black people. I considered poor Blacks to be the truest and most authentic representatives of Black people. I made urban poverty an entryway into the supposedly crime-riddled and impoverished house of authentic Blackness.
For Lerone Bennett Jr., the longtime executive editor of Ebony magazine, my identifying of poverty, hustling, criminality, sex, and gambling in the urban world as the most authentic Black world probably would have reminded him of the blaxploitation films of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The Black Power movement of the era, in shattering the White standard of assimilationist ideas, sent creative Black people on a mission to erect Black standards, a new Black aesthetic. Blaxploitation films arrived right on time, with Black casts, urban settings, and Black heroes and heroines: pimps, gangsters, prostitutes, and rapists.
Both of my parents saw Shaft (1971) and Super Fly (1972) upon their release. But their Christian theology, even in its liberational form, halted them from seeing Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song in 1971. It was a movie about a male brothel worker who is brutalized by LAPD officers but then beats them up in retaliation, eludes a police manhunt in impoverished communities, uses his sexual prowess to secure aid from women, and reaches freedom in Mexico. “I made this film for the Black aesthetic,” Melvin Van Peebles said. “White critics aren’t used to that. The movie is Black life, unpandered.”
I wanted to experience Black life, unpandered. I had moved to North Philadelphia in 2005 carrying dueling bags of Blackness: “Black is Beautiful” and “Black is Misery,” to use the phrase Lerone Bennett Jr. tendered in his Ebony review of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. Bennett blasted Van Peebles for his cinematic ode to the Black “cult of poverty,” for imagining poverty “as the incubator of wisdom and soul,” for “foolishly” identifying “the black aesthetic with empty bellies and big-bottomed prostitutes….To romanticize the tears and the agony of the people,” Bennett wrote, “is to play them cheap as human beings.”
I thought I was so real, so Black, in choosing this apartment in this neighborhood. In truth, I was being racist, playing poor Blacks cheap as human beings. While others had fled from poor Blacks in racist fear of their dangerous inferiority, I was fleeing to poor Blacks in racist assurance of the superiority conferred by their danger, their superior authenticity. I was the Black gentrifier, a distinct creature from the White gentrifier. If the White gentrifier moves to the poor Black neighborhood to be a developer, the Black gentrifier is moving back to the poor Black neighborhood to be developed.
To be antiracist is to recognize neither poor Blacks nor elite Blacks as the truest representative of Black people. But at the time I believed culture filtered upward, that Black elites, in all our materialism, individualism, and assimilationism, needed to go to the “bottom” to be civilized. I understood poor Blacks as simultaneously the bottom and the foundation of Blackness. I wanted their authenticity to rub off on me, a spoiled—in both senses—middle-income Black man. Rap music made by people from “the bottom” was no longer enough to keep me stuck on the realness.
I was in full agreement with E. Franklin Frazier’s Black Bourgeoisie, published in 1957. Situating White elites as the norm, Frazier dubbed Black elites as inferior: as quicker racial sellouts, as bigger conspicuous consumers, as more politically corrupt, as more exploitative, as more irrational for looking up to the very people oppressing them. This inverted class racism about inferior Black elites quickly became a religious belief, joining the religious belief about the Black masses being more pathological. In the bestselling Beyond the Melting Pot, written with Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1963, sociologist Nathan Glazer argued that, unlike the other middle classes, “the Negro middle class contributes very little…to the solution of Negro social programs.” Without any supporting data, Glazer positioned the Black bourgeoisie as inferior, in the scale of social responsibility, to other bourgeoisies. These racist ideas were wrong, of course—a decade earlier, Martin Luther King Jr. and a generation of elite Black youngsters from the Black bourgeoisie began the epic struggle for civil rights, economic justice, and desegregation. My generation of elite Black youngsters rushed into our own struggle—into Black studies, a Black space.
SPACE
SPACE RACISM: A powerful collection of racist policies that lead to resource inequity between racialized spaces or the elimination of certain racialized spaces, which are substantiated by racist ideas about racialized spaces.
SPACE ANTIRACISM: A powerful collection of antiracist policies that lead to racial equity between integrated and protected racialized spaces, which are substantiated by antiracist ideas about racialized spaces.
WE CALLED OUR African American studies space a Black space—it was, after all, governed primarily by Black bodies, Black thoughts, Black cultures, and Black histories. Of course, the spaces at Temple University governed primarily by White bodies, White thoughts, White cultures, and White histories were not labeled White. They hid the Whiteness of their spaces behind the veil of color blindness.
The most prominent person in our Black space at Temple had been piercing this unspoken veil since 1970, when he first printed the Journal of Black Studies. Molefi Kete Asante, who in 1980 would publish the seminal work Afrocentricity, railed against assimilationist ideas and called for Afrocentric Black people. There were multiple ways of seeing the world, he argued. But too many Black people were “looking out” at the world from a European “center,” which was taken as the only point from which to see the world—through European cultures masquerading as world cultures, European religions masquerading as world religions, European history masquerading as world history. Theories gleamed from European subjects masquerading as universal theories. “The rejection of European particularism as universal is the first stage of our coming intellectual struggle,” Professor Asante wrote. In 1987, he established the nation’s first African American studies doctoral program at Temple to wage the struggle, the program I entered twenty years later.
Asante’s right-hand woman in our department was Professor Ama Mazama. A product of Guadeloupe and recipient of a doctorate in linguistics from La Sorbonne in Paris, Professor Mazama may have been more well-known outside the United States. Not minding, she enjoyed bolting the States to speak on her research on the Afrocentric paradigm, African religion, Caribbean culture and languages, and African American homeschooling. She loved African traditions deep in her soul. That same soul hated to see African people worshipping European traditions. “Negroes,” she called them in disgust.
Professor Mazama spoke as softly as the African garb that draped her petite body. I remember her publicly debating an animated Maulana Karenga, the founder of Kwanzaa, with the same tranquility with which she spoke to her homeschooled children afterward. She taught me that the power of the spoken word is in the power of the word spoken.
Professor Mazama gave criticism the way she received it: unflappably. She almost welcomed ideological divergence from the people she held dear. We didn’t agree on everything, but we shared a deep love of African people and scholarly combat. Professor Mazama was as intellectually confident, fearless, and clear as anyone I had ever met. I asked her to be my dissertation adviser and she obliged. I hoped at least a few of her intellectual qualities would rub off on me.
In my first course with Mazama, she lectured on Asante’s contention that objectivity was really “collective subjectivity.” She concluded, “It is impossible to be objective.”
It was the sort of simple idea that shifted my view of the world immediately. It made so much sense to me as I recalled the subjective choices I’d made as an aspiring journalist and scholar. If objectivity was dead, though, I needed a replacement. I flung up my hand like an eighth-grader.
&
nbsp; “Yes?”
“If we can’t be objective, then what should we strive to do?” She stared at me as she gathered her words. Not a woman of many words, it did not take long.
“Just tell the truth. That’s what we should strive to do. Tell the truth.”
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AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES took up part of the eighth floor of Gladfelter Hall at Temple University, which stoically faced its equally imposing twin, Anderson Hall. The two skyscrapers filled with middle-income White faculty and students loomed over North Philadelphia blocks teeming with low-income Black people. Temple’s poorly paid security guards required anyone entering Gladfelter Hall or other campus buildings to show their university IDs to prevent those two worlds from meeting. Racist Whites saw danger in the “ghetto” walking on campus. They worried about safeguarding their White space inside North Philadelphia’s Black space. But they could not understand why we worried about safeguarding our Black space inside Temple’s White space. They branded Black studies a “ghetto,” like my neighborhood in North Philadelphia, but insisted it was a ghetto of our making.
The defining character of Harlem’s “dark ghetto,” where Kenneth Clark lived and studied during the early 1960s, and of the North Philadelphia where I lived and studied four decades later was “creeping blight,” according to Clark, “juvenile delinquency” and “widespread violence”—characteristics that exist in different forms in all racialized spaces. The idea of the dangerous Black neighborhood is the most dangerous racist idea. And it is powerfully misleading. For instance, people steer away from and stigmatize Black neighborhoods as crime-ridden streets where you might have your wallet stolen. But they aspire to move into upscale White neighborhoods, home to white-collar criminals and “banksters,” as Thom Hartmann calls them, who might steal your life savings. Americans lost trillions during the Great Recession, which was largely triggered by financial crimes of staggering enormity. Estimated losses from white-collar crimes are believed to be between $300 and $600 billion per year, according to the FBI. By comparison, near the height of violent crime in 1995, the FBI reported the combined costs of burglary and robbery to be $4 billion.
Racist Americans stigmatize entire Black neighborhoods as places of homicide and mortal violence but don’t similarly connect White neighborhoods to the disproportionate number of White males who engage in mass shootings. And they don’t even see the daily violence that unfolds on the highways that deliver mostly White suburbanites to their homes. In 1986, during the violent crack epidemic, 3,380 more Americans died from alcohol-related traffic deaths than from homicides. None of this is to say that White spaces or Black spaces are more or less violent—this isn’t about creating a hierarchy. The point is that when we unchain ourselves from the space racism that deracializes and normalizes and elevates elite White spaces, while doing the opposite to Black spaces, we will find good and bad, violence and nonviolence, in all spaces, no matter how poor or rich, Black or non-Black. No matter the effect of the conjoined twins.
Just as racist power racializes people, racist power racializes space. The ghetto. The inner city. The third world. A space is racialized when a racial group is known to either govern the space or make up the clear majority in the space. A Black space, for instance, is either a space publicly run by Black people or a space where Black people stand in the majority. Policies of space racism overresource White spaces and underresource non-White spaces. Ideas of space racism justify resource inequity through creating a racial hierarchy of space, lifting up White spaces as heaven, downgrading non-White spaces as hell. “We have a situation where we have our inner cities, African Americans, Hispanics, are living in hell, because it’s so dangerous,” candidate Donald Trump said during a presidential debate in 2016. In an Oval Office meeting in 2018 about Black and Latinx immigrants, President Trump asked: “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?”
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AFTER EXITING THE elevator onto Gladfelter’s eighth floor, no one could miss the glassed-in classroom known as the fishbowl. Inside the glass walls often sat, in a circle, a motley bunch of mostly Black fish—many of whom had swum into Philadelphia from historically Black colleges and universities and were still soaked in school pride. One day before class, a Jackson State alum had the audacity to announce the Sonic Boom as the best marching band in the land. He looked at me. I fell out laughing, a deep and long and booming laugh that said everything I needed to say. Almost all of us were boosting our school bands and academic feats and homecomings and histories and alumni. Even Ali from Fisk University. “There are more PhDs,” Ali declared one day, “walking around who went to Fisk for undergrad than any other HBCU.” We all knew Fisk used to be illustrious, but these days small private HBCUs like Fisk were hemorrhaging students and revenue and donations and respect. “This is 2006, not 1906!” someone blurted. “All of Fisk’s doctorates could easily fit in this fishbowl,” someone shouted. “What y’all got, two hundred students right now?”
Jokes aside, I respected Ali’s pride in Fisk and all my classmates’ HBCU pride, no matter how outlandish they sometimes sounded. I had no respect for those who hated their HBCUs. And no one hated their HBCU more than the only other FAMU alum in our graduate program.
Every time I lifted up FAMU’s examples of Black excellence, Nashay shot them down. She complained about the incompetence lurking on FAMU’s campus the way Temple students complained about the dangers lurking off campus. One day, as we awaited class in the fishbowl, I’d had enough. “Why you always dogging out FAMU?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
I pressed. She resisted. Finally, she opened.
“FAMU messed up my transcript!”
“What?” I asked, confused.
“I had them send my transcript and they messed it up. How can you have incompetent people working in the transcript office?”
She closed up. Class started, but I could not let it go. How could she use one horrible error from one person in one office to condemn the entire university—my university—as horrible? But I had said it all, heard it all before. I heard and heaped blame on HBCU administrators for the scarcity of resources. I heard Black students and faculty at historically White colleges and universities (HWCUs) say they could never go to HBCUs, those poorly run ghettos. I heard HBCU faculty and staff talk about escaping the dark ghettos and moving to HWCUs.
I heard my uncle say, like Dartmouth alum Aisha Tyler, that HBCUs do not represent “the real world.” The argument: Black students are better served learning how to operate in a majority-White nation by attending a majority-White university. The reality: A large percentage of—perhaps most—Black Americans live in majority-Black neighborhoods, work in majority-Black sites of employment, organize in majority-Black associations, socialize in majority-Black spaces, attend majority-Black churches, and send their children to majority-Black schools. When people contend that Black spaces do not represent reality, they are speaking from the White worldview of Black people in the minority. They are conceptualizing the real American world as White. To be antiracist is to recognize there is no such thing as the “real world,” only real worlds, multiple worldviews.
I heard people say, “Even the best black colleges and universities do not approach the standards of quality of respectable institutions,” as economist Thomas Sowell wrote in 1974. Sowell’s “description remains accurate,” Jason Riley wrote in The Wall Street Journal on September 28, 2010. Selective HBCUs lag behind “decent state schools like the University of Texas at Austin, never mind a Stanford or Yale.”
Riley had pulled out the familiar weapon safeguarding space racism and menacing Black spaces: unfairly comparing Black spaces to substantially richer White spaces. The endowment of the richest HBCU, Howard, was five times less than UT Austin’s endowment in 2016, never mind being thirty-six times less than the endowment of
a Stanford or Yale. The racial wealth gap produces a giving gap. For public HBCUs, the giving gap extends to state-funding gaps, as racist policies steer more funds to HWCUs, like the current “performance based” state models.
Resources define a space, resources the conjoined twins divvy up. People make spaces from resources. Comparing spaces across race-classes is like matching fighters of different weight classes, which fighting sports consider unfair. Poor Black neighborhoods should be compared to equally poor White neighborhoods, not to considerably richer White neighborhoods. Small Black businesses should be compared to equally small White businesses, not to wealthy White corporations. Indeed, when researchers compare HBCUs to HWCUs of similar means and makeup, HBCUs tend to have higher Black graduation rates. Not to mention, Black HBCU graduates are, on average, more likely than their Black peers from HWCUs to be thriving financially, socially, and physically.
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NASHAY FORCED ME to reckon with my own space racism, but I would learn there was more to her story.
A financial-aid officer had stolen thousands from her as an undergraduate student at a White university, but she still held that university in high regard. A botched transcript and she condemned her Black university. What hypocrisy. At the time, I could not be angry at her without being angrier at myself. How many times did I individualize the error in White spaces, blaming the individual and not the White space? How many times did I generalize the error in the Black space—in the Black church or at a Black gathering—and blame the Black space instead of the individual? How many times did I have a bad experience at a Black business and then walk away complaining about not the individuals involved but Black businesses as a whole?
How to Be an Antiracist Page 18