America Behind the Color Line

by Henry Louis Gates

  To get in, you have to have a sponsor and someone who will second the sponsor’s recommendation. You have to have six or eight people write letters on your behalf. Then you have to know about fifteen or twenty people from the club on a social basis. You get to know people in your community and you decide you want to go out and golf with them. The club doesn’t do a financial profile. Your sponsor wouldn’t sponsor you if he thought you didn’t have the means, because it would reflect badly on him. You only sponsor people who you feel can afford to join. When I joined the club, the initiation fee was $25,000. The bond was $5,000 a year, which is like your equity stake in the club, and then dues were around $3,000 a year.

  I think the initiation fee now is $50,000, the bond is about $12,000, and yearly dues are around $7,000 or $8,000. By club standards it’s still not bad. There are a lot of clubs sprouting out on Long Island that could cost you between $100,000 and $200,000 just to join. So for what you get here, it’s reasonable. It’s a lot of money, but it’s also a place you can feel proud about belonging to. And it’s good for business. Clients like to come out here and play. It’s a walking course, so you’re out with somebody for four hours. You can learn a lot about a person in four hours. A golf course is a great place to establish relationships and lay the foundation for deals. By being excluded from networking mechanisms like these clubs, African Americans were excluded from deal making and deprived of access to capital. We were out of the flow and had no idea what goes on.

  There are times when I feel like I’m under a microscope at the golf club and organizations I belong to. But that’s also what I put in the black tax category. I just take it as a given. Is it taxing? Yes. That’s why I came up with the term “black tax.” You just do it. If you believe in what our struggle has been, it’s part of what you have to bring so that it becomes easier on the generations behind us. We really have to think very long term.

  My son’s experience has been very different. Having grown up in Summit, he feels totally accepted by the white community. I have to constantly say, you’ve got to be careful. I tell him racism is alive and well. It’s not that I want you to walk around with a chip on your shoulder, I say, but I clearly want you to be aware that some of the things that may happen to your African-American peers will happen to you. Have you ever noticed, when you’re with a group of your white friends doing something, that you’re always the one who seems to get caught or in trouble? It’s not coincidental.

  Initially, my son grew up blind to racism. But he experienced class isolation. Because of the neighborhood where we live, many of the African Americans here who are of different economic means felt prejudiced against him. They associated the middle class, or the upper middle class, with being white. They thought he was acting white. And that caused him a fair number of problems. So if you live in an upper-middle-class neighborhood, or if you talk differently, if you speak standard English, then you’re not a member of the group. He never really talked about it much. He kept a lot of it in and masked it well. It’s only recently that some of this has come out. But it was painful. And now he’s beginning to come to grips with the right and proper balance.

  I don’t think there will ever come a time when either my generation or my children’s generation will have more in common with the upper-middle-class white woman living next door than with the black people back in the inner city. In our soul, we’ll always have more in common with our people. But I’d put the odds at fifty-fifty that one of my three children will marry outside our race. And if that happens, I won’t look back and think that I did anything wrong. I may feel I did something right. In any case, how I feel about it will be a function of what that other person is about, rather than their race. It’ll be about what’s inside that person, what makes them tick. That’s what I’m hoping my kids really get, the ability to choose a good person they can click with for a long time.

  For my daughters in particular, I think the pool will be limited. We live in a society where you can be married two or three times. People marry for a couple of years and then divorce and marry someone else, which was pretty alien in my family. My grandparents and my parents took marriage as a very serious, lifelong commitment. Now, people like returns on class and education, relative to what they have or grew up with. But I’ll be happy if my daughter marries someone she’s happy with. If it’s a black person of a different class, that’s okay as long as she’s happy. I would probably be upset if she married a white person from a lower class, so to speak. Perhaps I need to question myself here a little bit. Whatever would make her happy would be okay with me.

  In terms of the behavior of black youth today, I’d say that when kids go wrong in the early years it’s kind of our fault. You think about black kids who went to Harvard University as well as kids who grew up in black neighborhoods, went to all-black schools and an all-black college, and then became very successful. So somewhere it’s our fault when kids get into trouble.

  Now if you’re talking about a kid who focused on his education and went all the way through college and then tries to get into corporate America and can’t, even though he got his M.B.A. from Harvard, clearly that smacks of racism. I think it’s our fault early on in the game. It gets less clear as kids start to approach their teenage years and then move out into the system. But whose fault is it that our schools are the way they are? Some of that could be the state. But who is responsible when kids in projects drop out of school and get into trouble? I grew up in a project for four or five years, and it wasn’t all that bad. We lived right next to the Polo Grounds. Now that project is in horrible condition, and I do not understand why. It disturbs me not just that the project’s in bad shape, but that I don’t clearly understand all the things that went wrong.

  My wife and I have talked about going back into our community in the inner city. Melody wanted to call up everyone and say, let’s start buying up blocks in the inner city and let’s live there. We send our kids to private school anyway, so what difference does it make? It could be a smart move economically. If all the yuppies move back to the inner city, the values are going to go straight up. If we don’t do it, in twenty years our people could be sitting around asking, why didn’t we think of that?

  I think that to most blacks, the notion of being successful means that you’re becoming white. Some of that perception is driven by the fact that a lot of blacks who are successful, at least on a corporate level, have moved out of what have traditionally been their communities. You could say that if you’re successful and you grew up in Newark or Paterson or Jersey City or Harlem or the West Side of Chicago and you haven’t stayed there, then that community feels a loss of one of its people. And the only way they can describe that loss is by saying, well I guess they’re becoming white.

  The South Side of Chicago has done a pretty good job of embracing its leaders. There are many success stories on the South Side. I don’t buy the perception that if you’ve made a determination you’re going to live in Summit, New Jersey, or send your kids to a private school, that all of a sudden you’ve become white. I’m looking at Summit as real estate. Quite frankly, it’s been one of the best investments we’ve made. So if you say you want to begin to think about creating wealth, is that being white? White people have done a pretty good job of creating wealth. We were looking for a community where we could begin to create wealth, and Summit was one of them.

  One way to look at it is, my wife and I are creating wealth and we are in industries that create wealth for other people. The question then becomes, how do we increase the pipeline within the black community in terms of wealth creation, in terms of integrating Wall Street, in terms of integrating the financial world? First, it has to begin with education. I think you can make youngsters aware of the investment process in high school as well as in college. They can be taught in high school what it means to buy a stock or a bond, or perhaps more important at that age, the significance of owning a savings bond or a BMW. In our own community, I think, we sometimes los
e sight of the importance of investing. The most successful kinds of investing start early on. I think that in other communities the notion of savings is huge in comparison to what it is in our community, yet as a community, we’re still probably one of the greatest exporters of capital.

  Even when we spend in the community, we don’t save enough and we’re not producing enough for our future. We need to begin to educate our young about capitalism and investment. Wall Street is trying. It’s a big supporter of an organization called Sponsors for Educational Opportunity. The number of summer internships offered to undergraduate students of color through the SEO Career Program has reached nearly three hundred. I would estimate that between 60 and 70 percent of the professionals of color on Wall Street have come through SEO.

  Education is the key, and there’s an onus on those who have already made it to make sure they are helping to open up the pipeline. It’s very important that we have Frank Raines, Dick Parsons, Stan O’Neal, and Ken Chenault because they show that it can be done. And there are other African Americans on Wall Street who may not be CEOs but who are working as managing directors, as chairmen, and as executive directors and are doing extremely well. The pipeline is slowly filling.

  Some people distrust the notion that a handful of black CEOs could mean anything positive for the black community overall. They say these people are just a few tokens scattered around Wall Street. There is such a thing as people of color that come into your organization to fulfill a diversity count. We have to reject the mind-set that this is tokenism and ensure that the young people we bring into these businesses have the tools and support they need to ascend the ladder. But when you’re talking about the Frank Raineses, the Ken Chenaults, and the Dick Parsons of the world, it’s about money. They would not be in those seats if the board did not think they were going to get their return. Some of these exceptional men have been nurtured. Harvey Golub at AmEx took a liking to Ken Chenault and made it happen. All of us who are successful have been nurtured by somebody. What was traditionally missing in corporate America was the CEO who was going to be willing to nurture that African American to make him a CEO.

  When you have Stanley O’Neal at Merrill Lynch, Dick Parsons at AOL Time Warner, Franklin Raines at Fannie Mae, and Ken Chenault at American Express all coming from various diversity initiatives, suddenly there’s more than one agenda, and that’s good. I think it allows young people to understand that they can make it. When everyone’s in the same place, it’s almost like, well, if I’m not Harvard caliber, I’ll never be a scholar. People are reading about these guys who are black CEOs and seeing them dispersed across different kinds of companies, and I feel that you get a lot of mileage out of that.

  The notion that you’re somehow less black if you’re upper middle class and comfortable with yourself and with your accomplishments makes no sense to me. I’m not less black. I have white friends, I have African-American friends, I have Hispanic friends, and I have Asian friends. I enjoy people, and I accept them for who they are and what they bring to the table. I don’t know what the phrase “less black” means. I am who I am, and it took me a little while to come to grips with it. I’ve worked hard. My father worked two jobs, a sixteen-hour day, just to make sure that I could get a decent education and that I understood who I was as a person. He’s a much smarter person intellectually than I am, and the way I followed in his footsteps was just by achieving those things he was unable to achieve.

  I am of African-American descent. I’ve worked very hard for everything I’ve gotten. I am a product of the Civil Rights Movement, and I do believe in affirmative action. Anybody in our peer group that doesn’t believe in affirmative action is not as good as they think they are, in my opinion. We needed some breaks. All people have to do is look back at their parents. Are you going to tell me your parents weren’t smart and that’s why they didn’t get to X, Y, Z school? They were just excluded. It took some affirming action for us to get the opportunity to prove that we could do the same as our white peers.

  At my firm, there’s a handful of black people at my level. Not enough, let’s put it that way. But there’s a reasonable handful. I think the firm recognizes that it has to do more, and we’ve had David Thomas from the Harvard Business School meet with our board, a meeting I was able to put in place. So I think that the company understands it as an issue. But to David Thomas, it’s a global workforce issue.

  I don’t say I feel vulnerable as a black man in my firm. I think that in the investment banking business, everybody is vulnerable. So while they make it hard to achieve in that business, if you can begin to achieve, they understand that more than anything. If you are really bringing some value added, that goes a long way. Your peers may be running the low hurdles and you’re running the high hurdles and you’re in the same race. But if you get to the finish line, you get rewarded. That’s how I would put it. I think they make the hurdles high. They still question you about that. But if you go through that maze, once again it’s the black tax. If you can’t figure out the black tax, then you have a different dialogue. And I think that what we as a people have to get better at is just embracing that in its totality. Our kids don’t have to pay the same black tax, but there’s still that notion of “prove it to me.” They still have to pay a tax.

  In essence, what we have to do as a people is just continue to move forward. We have to put ourselves in a position where we’re comfortable and we can make our kids comfortable, but to a certain extent we still have to be pioneers. Everything comes back to the black tax, at least for our generation. The Talented Tenth has not been able to carry us as a people. We’re seeing a Talented Tenth, but most of the agenda is still dominated by 90 percent of the people, which is what you’d expect. It’s all a continuation of the Civil Rights Movement. Economic empowerment is a part of it. It’s what we’re building now.

  So you can look at it in a couple of ways. You can look at African Americans and major institutions moving forward in terms of the Talented Tenth, and you can look at the issue of economic empowerment for the remaining 90 percent of our people. Progress for both the top 10 percent and the rest of our people should be evolving in parallel directions. As a member of the community in which I live, as an African American working in a primarily white organization, and as an individual who has integrated two country clubs in the town of Summit, I do feel that I am part of the African-American movement for economic empowerment.

  I’m optimistic about the long-term prospects. In the short term, I’m disappointed that members of my peer group are having so few kids. So many of my friends haven’t had any kids, and many have had only one kid. And yet African Americans in urban centers, in places like the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago, are having so many kids at such a young age, and then their kids are doing the same. I think it will take a generation before we fully understand the implications of that.

  We may be unable to reach the current generation of urban blacks who are having so many children so young. Ultimately, we’ve got to get rid of the projects and build town homes. That’s already starting to happen. If you can improve the housing situation and get more focused on the economic issues, and get people like Walt Pearson and other successful blacks to take an interest in a community, then I think there’d be reason to believe we could begin to see change. And I think when our children realize what an easy road they have, compared to us and our parents, they’ll start thinking about giving back more. They still don’t necessarily relate to what happened in the Civil Rights Movement. But it will dawn on them one day that they had an easy road, and all of a sudden they’ll have this feeling that they have to give back.

  I’ve had some success, but I’m not on the front cover of magazines and newspapers like Ken Chenault, Dick Parsons, Stanley O’Neal, or Franklin Raines. I consider myself an average individual who has done well with the tools I had to work with. And I hope that young people who are reading this book or watching the PBS series will understand that you can be a Ken Chenau
lt but you can also be a Milton Irvin and have a good life and contribute to society.

  Melody Irvin

  When we first moved to Summit and our son was three or four, I thought it was absolutely great. Everybody was open. When the kids are young, they have a nice base of friends. Everybody plays. There’s no big deal. All the parents get their kids together. You have huge birthday parties and whatnot. But once you get to middle school, kids start to be a little more selective. And in the teen years, they get to be more picky and cruel, and as black students in a mostly white school, the kids get isolated a little bit more. They lose some of the fun they had in primary school.

  I think we imported most of our friends. We provided a base of support for our children that was not dependent upon Summit, or at least we tried to. The reality is that as middle-class or upper-middle-class blacks, we cross two worlds, and I think we cross them very well.

  I like Summit. I told my husband that my preference would be to renovate a townhouse in Newark or a home in Newark. But if we were to move to Newark, we’d have to buy a whole block with other African Americans. We’ve talked about this with some of our friends, and we need to go out there and just buy the block and be together and make it happen.

  My kids are in private school already, so we don’t have the benefit of going through the public school system right now. We chose not to have our daughters attend public school. It’s hard for me to explain why. There’s a problem, and it’s hard to articulate. My children just didn’t fit in. I think the economics piece is part of it, as far as relating to the black children in this environment is concerned. It’s almost like our children were discriminated against by black children who weren’t from middle-class homes.