A thoughtful reader asks:
Cobb do black people you know just care about getting on today or do
they just want to live in the past and draw a sense of self from
perceived injustices?
I grew up in a rural community where all the black males i knew were
working men, not tutored but dependable. Where are these men today?
When I drive by a work site I look to see how many apparent
undocumented aliens are working there. I do not see too many black
males. Do the young blacks you know know how to work?
I can't say with any certainty personally, because I'm not living in a black community now. The blackfolks I know are mostly friends and family and most of them, who do come in regular contact with blackfolks in the 'hood are doing so from a leadership perspective. That is to say I have a brother who's a cop. He's only interested in busting heads but he certainly as a black man knows the difference between who's a knucklehead and who's not. I have an aunt who is a special ed teacher and consultant. I have a cousin who is a high school principal, a brother who is a FedEx supervisor. Also many of my folks interact with blacks at church.
Suffice it to say that from our class and cultural position we are not pessimistic that folks like us are disappearing although we're certainly getting a lot more dispersed. None of us buys into any theories that the race is in trouble. There is nothing especially troubling about statistics we hear about. But we all do our share to do what's necessary, and I think it's the same motivation as anyone would have, with the additional clarity of recognizing racial fact from fiction. But it's all abstract. None of us are working anywhere near the communities we grew up in. You can't be a success in America and stay put. Only gangsta rappers talk about where they're from and can stick around.
I grew up with very clear expectations that I would be going to college and graduate school, and some of the pain of segregation was that such things didn't matter. You were black so you lived with all the other blackfolks no matter who they were. So there have always been subtle but telling differentiations between blacks that I don't think suburban whites think about. Very few blackfolks in my generation grew up in a class-homogenous black community. We're all a little ghetto. We could never be so up-front about class distinctions as we can now. So we learned a level of love-hate which is very sophisticated. It's the thing most people can't fathom who weren't born into it. So do working class blackfolks want to work? Sure, I guess. But I don't associate with them on the regular so I can't tell you what they're up against on a personal basis contemporarily. Seriously, I don't know any working class young black men in their teens or twenties. I'm in my mid 40s. The last time I lived in the 'hood was around '91 - that was Brooklyn.
I do know and can say with some certainty that the expectations of working class blackfolks are high. Much higher than that of immigrants. We're all a little bourgie too. Every black man I know or hung out with feels underemployed and under-appreciated. Very very few black men work for black men. I think I never have. There isn't much of a black network that I know of for working class jobs. People are now talking about forming a black equivalent of the Knights of Columbus. But this is very difficult too.. You have bourgie college men trying to organize ghetto working class boys?
I know institutionally blackfolks are out of luck when it comes to having access to decent jobs. You'll have ghettoes filled with those qualified to work without ready access to the kinds of jobs they might do. It's easy to see where a black neighborhood looks economically abandoned, someplace that looks like there's nobody in it that has any pride in their surroundings.. and they don't. There's nothing but storefront churches and barbershops and liquor stores. But the men who live there take the bus to work at FedEx way across town, or a supermarket in a white neighborhood.
I don't understand what has happened to blacks in the trades. What I believe is that racism there has been so sharp that there has been basically no expectation from black men that they would be accepted or do well. Mexicans have flooded that market in California with a vengeance. I've been in Mexican hardware stores. Home Depot is the most bilingual place around.
Where I grew up, the working class kids almost all went into the military, or auto repair, retail or nowhere. I can remember when the new Pep Boys opened up around the corner. New store. No black mechanics, in an all black neighborhood. It took a long time for that to change and basically friends of mine were hanging around the bays trying to hustle customers before they could pull up. Mexicans followed suit years later. You couldn't drive up to Pep Boys without somebody offering to pull a dent and bondo your car.
So I've always seen the problem with black working class employment in terms of the isolation of the 'hood, and the complete disconnect between high school skills and making a good living. There were ways opening up in civil service and affirmative action put a lot of hitters on first base in the 70s and 80s. But black neighborhoods.. I've never seen the potential for them to organically develop. And I think they won't until Mexicans with no further expectations than inner city life take over. I've seen where Mexicans will put a creche on their front lawn and think it's something to improve it. People who would dig up their porch walkway and put in bricks, and that's what they do for a living. The difference is that blacks didn't want to be there in the first place, to a lot of new immigrants, this is the promised land. You can't put pride into a black community that was created by segregation. All the pride goes into the people, not the place. All the college-bound families got out as soon as they could. Whites flew first. Working class kids had to hustle to get the good jobs or else run across town. What was left were the no-skilled people and gangbangers who were our associates and aped our style. They were never going to be satisfied with what was left behind, that's why they ended up ghetto fabulous instead of poor but happy like the immigrant Mexicans. The underground killed off what was left, leaving oldfolks, single mothers, baby brothers and the left behind. Brothers, but not brothers. From the same place with the same flavors, but vastly different prospects, ambitions and expectations.
Where I came from the cliff was around 1984. My neighborhood basically stopped producing full grown black men around that time. We have been meaning to go back as a family and find out what happened to a lot of our old neighbors. Maybe this summer.
But here's the whole dilemma in a nutshell. I want you to think of a white man, maybe an Irish guy who served in the military. He drinks, he curses and maybe he's beat his wife a couple times. It's 1950. Can you see him as a plumber? Maybe an electrician? Maybe a used car salesman? Could he be a success in America without fundamentally changing his personality? Yep. For a similar black man today, that is only true in professional sports or the rap trade. Is this a stereotype or is it reality?
Like I said elsewhere, Black Nationalism was powerful mojo. It overproduced. There are too many black men who don't know any better who believed or still do believe that Malcolm's path is their own, that they can transform a street hustle into a program of black power, and that jail is just part of the black man's path. Or it might be sports or it might be entertainment, but it's not anything.
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