On Cos, Du Bois and Booker T

A lot of folks have e-mailed me recently about the Cosby piece. I would say they fall into two camps--black followers of Booker T. Washington, or white people who believe that black folks have consigned themselves to the demographic basement. Better, smarter, more literate folks than me have hit this one out the park. Kenneth Jackson's incredible Crabgrass Frontier includes some devastating chapters on how black folks were essentially excluded from FDR's housing programs. Ira Katznelson's book, When Affirmative Action Was White, does a fine job showing how FDR was forced by Southern Democrats to exclude black people from many of the other programs which basically subsidized the middle class in this country.

There are reams of stats showing blacks lagging behind whites. I think virtually all of them are irrelevant save one--the difference in wealth between black and white America. The great Dalton Conley (who I had the chance to interview, but regrettably, not quote) has written movingly about how many of the differences between blacks and whites are actually differences in wealth. Social scientists who simply try to control for income, and then wonder why blacks still lag are missing the point. As arguably the greatest black intellectual of our time, Chris Rock, once noted, "Shaq is rich, the white man who signs his check is wealthy...Wealth is passed down from generation to generation, you can't get rid of wealth. Rich is some shit you can loose with a crazy summer and a drug habit."

That was the message of Booker T, and from that perspective he was right. The Du Bois faction overlooked the great power of economics, and how wealth allows you to bend society and--if your cause is just--make things right. But, equally, Booker T took an incredibly pollyannish view of America at large, and the white South in particular.

Nothing else so soon brings about right relations between the two races in the South as the industrial progress of the negro. Friction between the races will pass away in proportion as the black man, by reason of his skill, intelligence, and character, can produce something that the white man wants or respects in the commercial world.

The logic of that works fine--except one thing. Booker T wrote that in 1896, just as whites were terrorizing black folks throughout the South and attempting to running them off of land which they owned. It wasn't like Southern whites were willing to stand by and let blacks cultivate themselves and eventually compete with them. As the great cry of the day went, Would you want one of em marryin yer daughter? People who say that black folks screwed up by not following Booker T miss the point--black folks did try to follow Booker T--and in rather in large numbers. The history on this isn't even debatable. Check out this series done by the AP some seven years ago, which documents years of land theft from black folks attempting to cast down their buckets, as Booker T advised. Dig the history of black Wall-Street in Tulsa, Oklahoma where prominent black folks who, again, were following the lead of Booker T were burnt-out and scattered by angry whites. The entire Great Migration was fueled by black people fleeing the South in the hopes of--not enrolling at Ivy League schools--but securing jobs doing manual labor, just as Booker T suggested.

This isn't just theoretical for me. My spouse's great-grandfather was ran off his land in Tennessee after he got into an altercation with some local whites, and feared being lynched. He fled to Chicago and lost his farm. That's wealth that would have gone to my son and his cousins. To say that black haven't tried the boot-strap method requires an incredibly literal ignorance of American history.

Where does that put us now? The greatest challenge we face lay in not perpetrating the foolishness of black leadership past, by adopting an either/or approach which doesn't grapple with the complexity of America. We have to stop the dumb formula of, either it's us or it's the white man. In fact, no actual black person thinks that simplistically. But our intellectual dialouge has been frozen in this cartoonish pattern. We have to learn to insist on the best from ourselves, while at the same time not speaking like the sins of the past have absolutely no effect on the problems of today. The black/white wealth gap is a DIRECT result of this government either knowingly attempting to suppress black attempts to create wealth, or simply looking the other way while racist thugs did it for them.

But here is where Cosby is right--it now falls to us to fix this thing. It's important that Chris Rock ends that monologue with a critique of black spending habits.In a perfect world, steps would be taken to heal what was done to us. But this is a country, like all country's, which is flawed. We're the great blind-spot. The sooner we accept that. The sooner we can change it--not by protest and pleading, but through the only means anything ever really changes anything when dealing with human beings--through power.