By all means, let there be “political” art and formalist art, populism and modernism, Baraka and Beckett, but let them jostle and collide in the cultural agora. There will be theatres that are black, and also Latino and Asian, and what you will; but, all told, it’s better that they not arise from the edicts of cultural commissioners. Despite all the rhetoric about inclusion, I was struck by the fact that many black playwrights told me they felt that their kind of work—usually more “experimental” than realist—was distinctly unwelcome in most black regional theatres. Suzan-Lori Parks reminds me that she didn’t grow up in the ’hood: “I’m not black according to a nationalist definition of black womanhood. . . . We discriminate in our own family.” As a working dramatist and director, George Wolfe—who, in the spirit of pluralism, says he welcomes all kinds of theatres, ethnically specific and otherwise—admits unease about the neatly color-coded cultural landscape that Wilson conjures up. “I don’t live in the world of absolutes,” Wolfe says. “I don’t think it’s a matter of a black theatre versus an American theatre, a black theatre versus a white theatre. I think we need an American theatre that is of, for, and by us—all of us.”
You may wonder, then, what happens to that self-divided creed of populist modernism: the dream of an art that combines aesthetic vanguardism with popular engagement—which is to say the elevated black theatre for which Wilson seeks patronage. “People are not busting their ass to go and see this stuff,” OyamO says bluntly, “and I keep thinking, if this stuff is so significant, why can’t it touch ordinary people?” There’s reason to believe that such impatience is beginning to spread. Indeed, maybe the most transgressive move for such black theatre would be to explore that sordid, sullying world of the truly demotic. Ed Bullins, the doyen of black revolutionary theatre, regales me with stories he’s heard about Chitlin Circuit entrepreneurs “rolling away at night with suitcases of money”—about the shadowy realm of cash-only transactions. But the challenge appeals to him, all the same.
So brace yourself: the Ed Bullins to whom Wilson paid tribute—as one whose dramatic art was hallowed with the blood of proud black warriors—now tells me he’s been thinking about entering the Chitlin Circuit himself. Call it populist postmodernism. Somehow, he relishes the idea of a theatre that would be self-supporting, one that didn’t just glorify the masses but actually appealed to them. Naturally, though, he’d try to do it a little better. “The idea is to upgrade the production a bit, but go after the same market,” he says eagerly. Now, that’s a radical thought.
SOURCE: The New Yorker, February 3, 1997.
CHANGING PLACES
“HOW DO YOU spell ‘rat,’” my father would ask me during a lull in one of his many bid whist card games with his buddies from the paper mill. “R-a-t,” I’d respond dutifully, with all of the preschool pride that I could muster. “Not that mousy kind of a rat,” he’d say. “I mean like ‘rat now.’” His buddies would howl as my perplexity grew.
Like many black people who came of age in the ’60s, I’ve always delighted in the mind-bending playfulness of the black vernacular. And jokes turning on malaprops and double-entendres are among the most vital aspects of black culture. The Kingfish’s quip, on “Amos ‘n’ Andy,” that he and Andy should “simonize our watches” is nearly canonical in many black households.
But all of us have our favorites. It’s said that Tim Moore, the actor who played Kingfish, once had to appear in court as a defendant. “Yo’ honor,” he told the judge, “not only does I resents the allegation, but I resents the alligator!”
Still, I have to confess that the use of “ax” for “ask” has always been, for me, the linguistic equivalent of fingernails’ scraping down a blackboard. The first time I heard the word “ask” pronounced that way was on a Bill Cosby album in the 60’s.
“I’m-o, I’m-o ax you a question,” his character stammers, and in my Appalachian hamlet we’d laugh at that, certain that nobody would really be foolish enough to say “ax” for “ask.”
Don’t get me wrong: it’s not as if the black citizens of Piedmont, W. Va., spoke the king’s English, but axing was something we did in the woods.
It was when I first visited Bermuda, where just about everyone I met says “ax,” that I began to suspect that this usage had deeper origins than I’d known. Sure enough, as William Labov, a linguist at the University of Pennsylvania, explained to me, “aks” is traceable to the Old English “acsian,” a nonstandard form of “ascian,” the root of “ask.”
Professor Labov argues that black Americans have become more monolingual since the 60’s—that fewer of them have a mastery of standard English. That’s the result of residential segregation, the fact that poor blacks tend to live with poor blacks. But it’s also compounded by desegregation, which ended up separating the black poor and the black middle class.
Because of these two factors, there’s now a large group of poor black people whose face-to-face conversations are almost entirely with people like themselves. As the cultural critic Greg Tate told me, black people are “segregated, landlocked and institutionalized between prison, the project and public institutions.” He added that “there’s a certain tribal caste to segregated African-American communities for that reason,” and that’s reflected in their increased monolingualism.
Writing in The Times 25 years ago, James Baldwin ventured that the black vernacular was one of self-defense. “There was a moment, in time, in this place,” he recalled, “when my brother, or my mother, or my father, or my sister, had to convey to me, for example, the danger in which I was standing from the white man standing just behind me, and to convey this with a speed and in a language, that the white man could not possibly understand, and that, indeed, he cannot understand, until today.”
Is that still true? The black vernacular seems to be everywhere these days, from Dave Chappelle’s show to Boost Mobile’s “Where you at?” ad campaign.
“It becomes part of the mainstream in a minute,” the poet Amiri Baraka told me, referring to the black vernacular. “We hear the rappers say, ‘I’m outta here’—the next thing you know, Clinton’s saying, ‘I’m outta here.’” And both Senator John Kerry and President Bush are calling out, “Bring it on,” like dueling mike-masters at a hip-hop slam.
Talk about changing places. Even as large numbers of black children struggle with standard English, hip-hop has become the recreational lingua franca of white suburban youth. Baldwin’s notion of using black English to encode messages seems almost romantic now.
Is it possible, after all these years, that white folk have come to speak “black” far better than blacks speak “white”? Just axing.
SOURCE: The New York Times, September 30, 2004.
FORTY ACRES AND A GAP IN WEALTH
LAST WEEK, THE Pew Research Center published the astonishing finding that 37 percent of African-Americans polled felt that “blacks today can no longer be thought of as a single race” because of a widening class divide. From Frederick Douglass to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., perhaps the most fundamental assumption in the history of the black community has been that Americans of African descent, the descendants of the slaves, either because of shared culture or shared oppression, constitute “a mighty race,” as Marcus Garvey often put it.
“By a ratio of 2 to 1,” the report says, “blacks say that the values of poor and middle-class blacks have grown more dissimilar over the past decade. In contrast, most blacks say that the values of blacks and whites have grown more alike.”
The message here is that it is time to examine the differences between black families on either side of the divide for clues about how to address an increasingly entrenched inequality. We can’t afford to wait any longer to address the causes of persistent poverty among most black families.
This class divide was predicted long ago, and nobody wanted to listen. At a conference marking the 40th anniversary of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s infamous report on the problems of the black family, I asked the
conservative scholar James Q. Wilson and the liberal scholar William Julius Wilson if ours was the generation presiding over an irreversible, self-perpetuating class divide within the African-American community.
“I have to believe that this is not the case,” the liberal Wilson responded with willed optimism. “Why go on with this work otherwise?” The conservative Wilson nodded. Yet, no one could imagine how to close the gap.
In 1965, when Moynihan published his report, suggesting that the out-of-wedlock birthrate and the number of families headed by single mothers, both about 24 percent, pointed to dissolution of the social fabric of the black community, black scholars and liberals dismissed it. They attacked its author as a right-wing bigot. Now we’d give just about anything to have those statistics back. Today, 69 percent of black babies are born out of wedlock, while 45 percent of black households with children are headed by women.
How did this happen? As many theories flourish as pundits—from slavery and segregation to the decline of factory jobs, crack cocaine, draconian drug laws and outsourcing. But nobody knows for sure.
I have been studying the family trees of 20 successful African-Americans, people in fields ranging from entertainment and sports (Oprah Winfrey, the track star Jackie Joyner-Kersee) to space travel and medicine (the astronaut Mae Jemison and Ben Carson, a pediatric neurosurgeon). And I’ve seen an astonishing pattern: 15 of the 20 descend from at least one line of former slaves who managed to obtain property by 1920—a time when only 25 percent of all African-American families owned property.
Ten years after slavery ended, Constantine Winfrey, Oprah’s great-grandfather, bartered eight bales of cleaned cotton (4,000 pounds) that he picked on his own time for 80 acres of prime bottomland in Mississippi. (He also learned to read and write while picking all that cotton.)
Sometimes the government helped: Whoopi Goldberg’s great-great-grandparents received their land through the Southern Homestead Act. “So my family got its 40 acres and a mule,” she exclaimed when I showed her the deed, referring to the rumor that freed slaves would receive land that had been owned by their masters.
Well, perhaps not the mule, but 104 acres in Florida. If there is a meaningful correlation between the success of accomplished African-Americans today and their ancestors’ property ownership, we can only imagine how different black-white relations would be had “40 acres and a mule” really been official government policy in the Reconstruction South.
The historical basis for the gap between the black middle class and underclass shows that ending discrimination, by itself, would not eradicate black poverty and dysfunction. We also need intervention to promulgate a middle-class ethic of success among the poor, while expanding opportunities for economic betterment.
Perhaps Margaret Thatcher, of all people, suggested a program that might help. In the 1980s, she turned 1.5 million residents of public housing projects in Britain into homeowners. It was certainly the most liberal thing Mrs. Thatcher did, and perhaps progressives should borrow a leaf from her playbook.
The telltale fact is that the biggest gap in black prosperity isn’t in income, but in wealth. According to a study by the economist Edward N. Wolff, the median net worth of non-Hispanic black households in 2004 was only $11,800—less than 10 percent that of non-Hispanic white households, $118,300. Perhaps a bold and innovative approach to the problem of black poverty—one floated during the Civil War but never fully put into practice—would be to look at ways to turn tenants into homeowners. Sadly, in the wake of the subprime mortgage debacle, an enormous number of houses are being repossessed. But for the black poor, real progress may come only once they have an ownership stake in American society.
People who own property feel a sense of ownership in their future and their society. They study, save, work, strive and vote. And people trapped in a culture of tenancy do not.
The sad truth is that the civil rights movement cannot be reborn until we identify the causes of black suffering, some of them self-inflicted. Why can’t black leaders organize rallies around responsible sexuality, birth within marriage, parents reading to their children and students staying in school and doing homework? Imagine Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson distributing free copies of Virginia Hamilton’s collection of folktales “The People Could Fly” or Dr. Seuss, and demanding that black parents sign pledges to read to their children. What would it take to make inner-city schools havens of learning?
John Kenneth Galbraith once told me that the first step in reversing the economic inequalities that blacks face is greater voter participation, and I think he was right. Politicians will not put forth programs aimed at the problems of poor blacks while their turnout remains so low.
If the correlation between land ownership and success of African-Americans argues that the chasm between classes in the black community is partly the result of social forces set in motion by the dismal failure of 40 acres and a mule, then we must act decisively. If we do not, ours will be remembered as the generation that presided over a permanent class divide, a slow but inevitable process that began with the failure to give property to the people who had once been defined as property.
SOURCE: The New York Times, November 18, 2007.
ENDING THE SLAVERY BLAME-GAME
THANKS TO AN unlikely confluence of history and genetics—the fact that he is African-American and president—Barack Obama has a unique opportunity to reshape the debate over one of the most contentious issues of America’s racial legacy: reparations, the idea that the descendants of American slaves should receive compensation for their ancestors’ unpaid labor and bondage.
There are many thorny issues to resolve before we can arrive at a judicious (if symbolic) gesture to match such a sustained, heinous crime. Perhaps the most vexing is how to parcel out blame to those directly involved in the capture and sale of human beings for immense economic gain.
While we are all familiar with the role played by the United States and the European colonial powers like Britain, France, Holland, Portugal and Spain, there is very little discussion of the role Africans themselves played. And that role, it turns out, was a considerable one, especially for the slave-trading kingdoms of western and central Africa. These included the Akan of the kingdom of Asante in what is now Ghana, the Fon of Dahomey (now Benin), the Mbundu of Ndongo in modern Angola and the Kongo of today’s Congo, among several others.
For centuries, Europeans in Africa kept close to their military and trading posts on the coast. Exploration of the interior, home to the bulk of Africans sold into bondage at the height of the slave trade, came only during the colonial conquests, which is why Henry Morton Stanley’s pursuit of Dr. David Livingstone in 1871 made for such compelling press: he was going where no (white) man had gone before.
How did slaves make it to these coastal forts? The historians John Thornton and Linda Heywood of Boston University estimate that 90 percent of those shipped to the New World were enslaved by Africans and then sold to European traders. The sad truth is that without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents, the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible, at least on the scale it occurred.
Advocates of reparations for the descendants of those slaves generally ignore this untidy problem of the significant role that Africans played in the trade, choosing to believe the romanticized version that our ancestors were all kidnapped unawares by evil white men, like Kunta Kinte was in “Roots.” The truth, however, is much more complex: slavery was a business, highly organized and lucrative for European buyers and African sellers alike.
The African role in the slave trade was fully understood and openly acknowledged by many African-Americans even before the Civil War. For Frederick Douglass, it was an argument against repatriation schemes for the freed slaves. “The savage chiefs of the western coasts of Africa, who for ages have been accustomed to selling their captives into bondage and pocketing the ready cash for them, will not more readily accept our moral
and economical ideas than the slave traders of Maryland and Virginia,” he warned, “We are, therefore, less inclined to go to Africa to work against the slave trade than to stay here to work against it.”
To be sure, the African role in the slave trade was greatly reduced after 1807, when abolitionists, first in Britain and then, a year later, in the United States, succeeded in banning the importation of slaves. Meanwhile, slaves continued to be bought and sold within the United States, and slavery as an institution would not be abolished until 1865. But the culpability of American plantation owners neither erases nor supplants that of the African slavers. In recent years, some African leaders have become more comfortable discussing this complicated past than African-Americans tend to be.
In 1999, for instance, President Mathieu Kerekou of Benin astonished an all-black congregation in Baltimore by falling to his knees and begging African-Americans’ forgiveness for the “shameful” and “abominable” role Africans played in the trade. Other African leaders, including Jerry Rawlings of Ghana, followed Mr. Kerekou’s bold example.
Our new understanding of the scope of African involvement in the slave trade is not historical guesswork. Thanks to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, directed by the historian David Eltis of Emory University, we now know the ports from which more than 450,000 of our African ancestors were shipped out to what is now the United States (the database has records of 12.5 million people shipped to all parts of the New World from 1514 to 1866). About 16 percent of United States slaves came from eastern Nigeria, while 24 percent came from the Congo and Angola.
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