Disintegration - The Splintering Of Black America Part 4

The critical ma.s.s that makes Transcendent black America real and important is a direct consequence of the successes of the 1960s-civil rights, desegregation, affirmative action, black political empowerment. These achievements pushed open long-sealed doors, just a crack, and exceptional individuals bulled their way through. It was a natural process: First a few individuals managed to poke their heads above the Mainstream, and then a few more, and eventually there were enough to have real impact-not just on black America but on the nation and the world.

I watched the process happen. I was hired by The Washington Post The Washington Post in 1980 to cover the city's charismatic mayor Marion Barry during his first term. This was long before Barry's crack-smoking downfall and eventual semi-redemption. He had been elected with the support of const.i.tuencies that eventually became disillusioned and bitter foes-liberal whites, the growing gay population, young and highly educated black professionals, the editorial board of the in 1980 to cover the city's charismatic mayor Marion Barry during his first term. This was long before Barry's crack-smoking downfall and eventual semi-redemption. He had been elected with the support of const.i.tuencies that eventually became disillusioned and bitter foes-liberal whites, the growing gay population, young and highly educated black professionals, the editorial board of the Post Post-and he promised new competence and efficiency.

And believe it or not, he delivered: Under Barry, the city government had the first clean audit of its finances and floated its first bond issue. This was a big step, since the books had been such a mess, and to get it done Barry hired the investment bank Lazard Freres. The adviser that Lazard sent was a razor-sharp young black man named Franklin Raines-the same man who, nearly three decades later, would be accused of helping create the subprime mortgage mess as the Transcendent chairman and CEO of Fannie Mae.

When I met him, Raines was in his early thirties. Born in Seattle, he had humble, working-cla.s.s origins; his father was a janitor. I remember a story he told me at the time: His mother had decided that he would be called "Frank Delno Raines" in honor of family members with those names. But when she wrote that down at the hospital, a white clerk a.s.sumed that she was an ignorant black woman who didn't know how to spell the name of the thirty-second president properly. The baby's name was recorded as "Franklin Delano Raines" instead.

Raines was born in 1949. Had he been born in, say, 1929, he still would certainly have been a success-he's too smart and driven not to have made a mark. But his life surely would have been different.

Two decades earlier, it would have been much less likely for even a young black man as bright as Raines to attend Harvard College-black students didn't arrive on Ivy League campuses in substantial numbers until the late 1960s. It would have been unlikely for him to study at Oxford's Magdalen College as a Rhodes scholar, since there were no black American Rhodes Scholars for five decades, between in 1907 and 1963. It's highly unlikely that he would have been able to graduate from Harvard Law.

Raines got his credentials just in time to join the first sizable group of black professionals who were allowed to climb the well-trod ladder that zigzags between government and high finance. He started in the Carter administration, then took refuge at Lazard, then was recruited through his Democratic Party connections to jump to Fannie Mae, then was lured back into government under the Clinton administration as director of the Office of Management and Budget-one of the most powerful jobs in a city that worships power the way other cities worship money-and then finally went back to Fannie Mae in 1999 as the first black CEO of a Fortune 500 company. Other African Americans would soon follow him in that distinction-Kenneth Chenault at American Express, Stanley O'Neal at Merrill Lynch-but Raines was the one who planted the flag.

The Fannie Mae job did not end well. In December 2004, Raines took what he called "early retirement" after Fannie Mae was accused of overstating its profits over several years by more than $6 billion. Four years later, Fannie Mae's aggressive expansion on Raines's watch was blamed as a major cause of the subprime mortgage meltdown. O'Neal, too, was cited for his role in the financial collapse-of all the large investment banks, Merrill had made the biggest and most irresponsible bet on subprimes. It was a milestone, albeit not one that would be universally celebrated: For the first time, two African Americans had become big enough players in the financial world to have major roles-I should say allegedly-in triggering a global economic crisis. Genuine ent.i.tlement includes the privilege to fail.

Another Marion Barry initiative was to bring the new technology called cable television to the District of Columbia. This required awarding a lucrative contract for cable service in the city, and groups of well-connected insiders were formed to compete for the concession. Most big-city African American mayors have tried to foster African American economic development through the awarding of munic.i.p.al contracts and concessions; few have done this as effectively as Barry. When he took office, Washington's business community was old, white, established, clubby, and complacent. Barry used his power over city contracts to create a new cla.s.s of millionaire black developers, lawyers, and consultants. Among them was Robert Johnson.

Johnson was born in Mississippi in 1946-the ninth of ten children-and grew up mostly in Illinois, graduating from the University of Illinois and later earning a master's degree from Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. While Raines bounced back and forth between money and politics, Johnson went straight for the intersection of the two: lobbying. More specifically, he worked for the National Cable & Telecommunications a.s.sociation, where he gained the knowledge and contacts that he would eventually put to spectacularly lucrative use. Like all great salesmen, he is unnaturally persistent and persuasive. And like few human beings I've ever met, he has an amazing ability to quickly and effortlessly manipulate numbers in his head.

When I first met him in 1980, Johnson was a smart young entrepreneur hanging around the mayor's office and the press room, trying to land a contract that would make his company Washington's first cable-television provider. He had no chance-other groups bidding on the lucrative contract had better connections and more juice-but somehow he prevailed. He told anyone who would listen that the cable franchise would be just a start, that he intended to use it as a launching pad for a national cable network aimed at African American viewers. A colleague of mine in the city hall press corps pulled him aside, with genuine concern, and soberly advised him to forget the Don Quixote routine and get a real job. Fortunately, Johnson ignored him. He and his wife, Sheila, built District Cablevision into BET and BET into an empire, ultimately selling it to Viacom in 2001 for a reported $3 billion.

Johnson lost his billionaire status when he and Sheila divorced in 2002, splitting the fortune into roughly half-billion-dollar chunks. The separation had the effect of making Sheila Johnson a Transcendent figure in her own right. And it was thanks to her that I saw for the first time what Transcendent status looks like in the social world.

Before the split, the Johnsons bought a two-hundred-acre estate near Middleburg in the Virginia hunt country west of Washington. Gatsby-esque doesn't do justice to the night in December 2001 when Sheila, a cafe-au-lait-skinned woman with a disarmingly sweet smile, hosted a little fund-raiser for her favorite cause: preventing Washington's rapacious suburban sprawl from encroaching on the bucolic Johnson spread, which they had named Salamander Farm. The event took place after Bob had already moved out.

Arriving guests were relieved of their car keys by an army of valet-parking attendants and welcomed into what looked at first like a wing of a great mansion. It turned out, though, that this wasn't the big house, which was out of sight on the other side of a hill. We were being herded into the stables, which had stalls made of a wood that looked like cherry. An antique clock hung on the wall. The stalls were occupied, and fellow guests who knew about such things p.r.o.nounced the horses magnificent.

The stables led to an indoor equestrian ring that the Johnsons had built for their daughter, Paige, a talented rider who had her eye on the Olympics. What should have been a muddy, smelly place had been transformed for the evening. At the door, each guest was dusted with an individual sprinkling of artificial snow-a way of announcing the "winter wonderland" theme. Each table had an elaborate, towering centerpiece that looked like a bare branch of a s...o...b..und tree. A performance stage had been erected and an enormous dance floor laid: the entertainment was Ashford and Simpson, complete with their full band, sound and lighting technicians, the works. We had reached the day when a black woman could throw the biggest, flashiest party of the year in a town of millionaires.

A few years later, Sheila Johnson was an early believer in the proposition that we had reached the day when a black man could be elected president. But many of her fellow Transcendents vehemently disagreed.

Bob Johnson, as we've seen, scoffed at the early rumors of an Obama candidacy and told friends he didn't think the country was "ready" for a black president. Johnson was an old friend of the Clintons, and perhaps that friendship meant there was never any real question of which camp he would join. But I believe there was more to it than that. Ever since I met Johnson all those years ago at the District Building, his business model had always been explicitly race-conscious. He didn't just start a television network; he started a black black television network. As a CEO, he always kept a sharp eye on the bottom line; one reason BET became so valuable was that it resisted the temptation to produce lots of expensive original programming that the potential audience-limited by the African American focus-might not be able to support. Yet on the frequent occasions when Johnson was criticized by African Americans for the dearth of news and public affairs on BET's schedule, and the lavish overabundance of booty-shaking hip-hop videos, he seemed genuinely hurt. After he sold the network, as his "second act" he established a conglomerate, RLJ Companies, that invested in banking, finance, hotels-an oddly diverse a.s.sortment of businesses. I once asked him how he decided where to invest his money, and he answered with a maxim: "I like to look for business sectors where African Americans are not represented, and I go there." television network. As a CEO, he always kept a sharp eye on the bottom line; one reason BET became so valuable was that it resisted the temptation to produce lots of expensive original programming that the potential audience-limited by the African American focus-might not be able to support. Yet on the frequent occasions when Johnson was criticized by African Americans for the dearth of news and public affairs on BET's schedule, and the lavish overabundance of booty-shaking hip-hop videos, he seemed genuinely hurt. After he sold the network, as his "second act" he established a conglomerate, RLJ Companies, that invested in banking, finance, hotels-an oddly diverse a.s.sortment of businesses. I once asked him how he decided where to invest his money, and he answered with a maxim: "I like to look for business sectors where African Americans are not represented, and I go there."

In short, he is what used to be called a "race man"-ever mindful of being African American, of serving African American interests, and of making breakthroughs on behalf of African Americans. It was striking, and on the surface somewhat puzzling, that such a race-conscious man would so ardently oppose the first serious attempt by an African American to win the presidency.

But in a way, that was the point. I dwell on Obama's candidacy because it was such a Rorschach test for the Transcendent cla.s.s. Bob Johnson's mind-set was broadly representative of those who stuck with the Clintons, in my view, and it was characterized above all by a certain rock-hard wariness. The elder Transcendents were used to surviving in terra incognita. They got where they are by being the "first black" this and the "first black" that, by taking on responsibilities that no African American had ever shouldered before, and by enduring the intense and unrelenting scrutiny that "first black" status always entails. They knew the experience of being the only black person around a boardroom table and always a.s.suming-always knowing, they would say-that all eyes were on the one person who wasn't like the others, who didn't belong. They saw in Obama a man who gave no outward sign of harboring within him that hard nugget of suspicion-who seemed as if he were not artfully concealing the chip on his shoulder but in fact did not have one. They saw a man who seemed to glide through life on a cushion of good fortune. Never mind that this wasn't true, as evidenced by Obama's well-corroborated account of his hardly privileged childhood. Never mind that despite Obama's not having had a "typical" African American upbringing, he had come to fully embrace his ident.i.ty as African American-witness his marriage to Mich.e.l.le, his work in Chicago's black community, his membership in Jeremiah Wright's church. Never mind that his tastes and mannerisms were indisputably African American, down to the way he walked. To some Transcendents, he wasn't black enough.

Indeed, soon after Obama announced his candidacy in 2007, the media zeitgeist became briefly preoccupied with that very question-whether Obama was "black enough." It was all the buzz in February when Obama visited my hometown of Orangeburg for a rally. I flew down to cover the event, and it was amusing to watch the reporters from national media outlets fan out into the crowd at Claflin University's Tullis Arena and b.u.t.tonhole my old friends and neighbors with the "black enough" question. From Mainstream black Americans, I never heard concern or even speculation about the degree of Obama's blackness. Yes, he was biracial-but anyone could see that he was black. Case closed. Plus, he was married to a black woman who radiated black pride, even without saying a word. Case definitively closed. I never heard the "black enough" question from Abandoned black Americans, either. All you had to do was look at him. What else was he going to be?

From a few Transcendents, however, I did hear that question. They phrased it differently, though. They asked about his political history, his relationship with the African American leadership, his air of calm and reserve. They observed the "post-racial" tone of his campaign-basically, don't talk about race unless an uproar over Reverend Wright forces you to-and while they understood that this approach was politically necessary, they were unsettled. Transcendents I talked to worried that in all the ways that Bob Johnson is a "race man," Barack Obama isn't.

They worried that he was naive about the power of race in American society. They worried that if he somehow managed to win the nomination, he would surely lose a general election that Clinton probably would have won-which would mean at least four more years in which issues vital to black Americans were ignored. A couple of people I talked to even looked ahead to a possible Obama victory, and worried that as the first black president, he would have to bend over backward to avoid being seen as favoring African Americans-which could mean less attention to the plight of Abandoned black Americans than under a Clinton administration. They worried that the question that had driven and guided black leadership for more than a century-What is best for the race?-was not central enough for Obama. It wasn't that Obama's Transcendent black critics believed he was indifferent to the needs of African Americans, or that they believed Hillary Clinton was somehow more of a "race man" than Obama was. It was more that they saw the whole Obama phenomenon as a self-indulgent fantasy-one for which black Americans had no time, and for which these Transcendents had no patience.

With rare exceptions, Transcendents who are old enough to have lived through segregation don't just remember the experience but cling to it. They use it to give them motivation, to inspire caution, to remind them how hard-won their success was and how radically the world can change within a human lifetime. Anyone who lived through Jim Crow knows firsthand that other people can reject you, even despise you, based on nothing but the color of your skin. This knowledge can be crippling, even paralyzing, or it can provide a reservoir of strength and defiance. But with that strength comes an indelible wariness and the knowledge that however meaningless race might be, it does matter.

The Obamas know that, too. But they have been clever enough to "code" their major initiatives in such a way that they are designed to provide sorely needed benefits to African American and other disadvantaged communities-without explicitly being aimed at any one group.

Mich.e.l.le Obama's most high-profile cause, fighting childhood obesity, is a case in point. The problem is serious among all segments of American society, as a walk through any shopping mall will demonstrate. Among whites, about 31 percent of children are obese. But among African American children, the obesity rate is 35 percent; and among the children of Mexican Americans, an alarming 38 percent.4 Any success the First Lady's campaign has will be beneficial to the health and well-being of all the nation's children, but the need is more acute-and the impact will be greater-among minorities. Any success the First Lady's campaign has will be beneficial to the health and well-being of all the nation's children, but the need is more acute-and the impact will be greater-among minorities.

Likewise, President Obama's signature legislative accomplishment, won at the price of tons of his political capital, will also disproportionately benefit minorities. About 18 percent of black Americans lack health insurance, and while that figure is only marginally higher than the 16 percent of whites who are uninsured, the gap among black children and white children is greater. Among Latino Americans, a striking 33 percent are without insurance.5 Race-neutral policies, it turns out, do not always have race-neutral impacts. Race-neutral policies, it turns out, do not always have race-neutral impacts.

One of my favorite episodes of the long campaign, at least in terms of entertainment value, occurred in February 2008 after reporters noticed that parts of an Obama speech were strikingly similar to pa.s.sages of a speech given by one of his campaign chairmen. On Fox News, commentator Geraldo Rivera sputtered with outrage through his famous mustache: "When I saw that they were the same words that Deval Patrick, the black guy who won as Ma.s.sachusetts mayor-as Ma.s.sachusetts governor-had used, I said to myself, it seems so premeditated. It's almost as if they went to a camp where these black geniuses got together and figured out how to beat the political system...What's the other formula that they're going to use?"6 "Black Genius Camp" was a delightful image to play with-you could imagine Denzel Washington and Maya Angelou sitting around the campfire, listening to Condi Rice tell corny jokes in Russian. But there was actually a germ of truth in what Rivera said.

Obama represents a next-generation cohort of black political and economic leaders whose experience of being black in America is radically different from that of their elders. In that Oval Office interview after his NAACP speech, Obama told me: "If we haven't already reached this point we're getting close to reaching it, where there are going to be more African Americans in this country who never experienced anything remotely close to Jim Crow than those who lived under Jim Crow. That, obviously, changes perspectives."7 That change is especially pertinent when the perspectives in question are those of African Americans with Transcendent power, influence, or wealth. In the political realm, this younger group includes Deval Patrick, the first black governor of Ma.s.sachusetts and only the second African American elected governor of any state (after Virginia's Douglas Wilder); Newark mayor Cory Booker; D.C. mayor Adrian Fenty; Alabama congressman Artur Davis; and a host of other rising young officeholders, or aspiring officeholders, around the country. There is no evidence that they actually attended a genius camp together, but there are so many connections among them that they do const.i.tute a network. They tend to have attended the same elite schools, and they have been instrumental in getting one another elected. They are surrounded and supported by a much larger group of black professionals-the friends from college or law school who decided not to go into politics and instead became partners in big law firms or rose through the ranks in the corporate world.

These young Transcendents, generally in their forties, are indeed too young to have lived through Jim Crow. They are not too young to know what it was, and certainly not too young to believe as pa.s.sionately as their elders in the need to keep fighting to advance the unfinished project of black uplift. But there is a difference between knowing what it is like to face racism and discrimination, which this next-generation black elite does, and knowing what it is like to be consigned by law and police authority to second-cla.s.s citizenship, which it does not. In that sense, the post-segregation Transcendents carry less baggage through life.

And perhaps, having just missed the epochal civil rights triumph, this generation of Transcendents feels it has something to prove-that it is time for the aging lions of the civil rights struggle to step aside, and that new strategies and tactics are required for a new era.

It is also true, however, that for some young Transcendents, maintaining or developing any sort of common touch is a challenge. A case in point is Harold Ford Jr., the former Tennessee congressman who is one of the best and brightest of his generation. The scion of the most powerful black family in Tennessee politics, Ford was born in 1970 and grew up mostly in Washington while his father served in Congress. He graduated from St. Albans, the most prestigious boys' prep school in the capital, and went on to the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Michigan Law School before winning the congressional seat his father had long held.8 Political handicappers saw Ford as handsome, charming, and bright enough to be a kind of Southern-fried Obama. In 2006, Ford came close to duplicating Obama's feat and winning a seat in the U.S. Senate. He ran in his home state of Tennessee, and the contest became infamous because of a last-minute attack ad by his opponent that had clear racial overtones: It ended with a ditzy-seeming blonde pantomiming a telephone and asking Ford to "call me," and seemed designed to stoke the primal Southern fear of black men consorting with white women. Dispa.s.sionate a.n.a.lysis of the election returns suggest, however, that Ford probably would have lost even if the ad had never aired. Political handicappers saw Ford as handsome, charming, and bright enough to be a kind of Southern-fried Obama. In 2006, Ford came close to duplicating Obama's feat and winning a seat in the U.S. Senate. He ran in his home state of Tennessee, and the contest became infamous because of a last-minute attack ad by his opponent that had clear racial overtones: It ended with a ditzy-seeming blonde pantomiming a telephone and asking Ford to "call me," and seemed designed to stoke the primal Southern fear of black men consorting with white women. Dispa.s.sionate a.n.a.lysis of the election returns suggest, however, that Ford probably would have lost even if the ad had never aired.

Ford moved to New York and joined Merrill Lynch as a senior adviser-a "rainmaker," basically. He prepared to run for the Senate again, but this time from New York, where being labeled a "carpetbagger" is hardly the kiss of death-witness Hillary Clinton's election as a senator from New York, and Robert Kennedy's before her. Ford seemed to be well-positioned, but then he gave what came to be seen as a disastrous interview to The New York Times The New York Times in which he talked about his life as a New Yorker-but not a regular New Yorker, a Master of the Universe New Yorker. He mentioned a flight he had taken to Palm Beach. He disclosed that he had only visited Staten Island once, and that was by helicopter. He let slip that he has breakfast most mornings at the Regency Hotel, which is on Park Avenue. And, as a kind of coup de grace, he revealed that he gets frequent pedicures. in which he talked about his life as a New Yorker-but not a regular New Yorker, a Master of the Universe New Yorker. He mentioned a flight he had taken to Palm Beach. He disclosed that he had only visited Staten Island once, and that was by helicopter. He let slip that he has breakfast most mornings at the Regency Hotel, which is on Park Avenue. And, as a kind of coup de grace, he revealed that he gets frequent pedicures.9 Ford soon announced that he would not be running for the New York Senate seat after all. It is a measure of how far we've come that an African American man has breakfast at the Regency and a regular pedicure appointment-and that, like so many privileged white politicians before him, he can be so tone-deaf.

When I asked Obama about generational succession and its impact on African Americans, this is what he said: "I think now young people growing up realize, you know what, being African American can mean a whole range of things. There's a whole bunch of possibilities out there for how you want to live your life, what values you want to express, who you choose to interact with. I would say that the downside of this is you don't have the same unifying experience, even though it was a negative experience, of discrimination that let people, at least in the early '60s, all to be on the same page, or to be largely on the same page in terms of how to make progress as a group.

"And I do think it is important for the African American community, in its diversity, to stay true to one core aspect of the African American experience, which is we know what it's like to be on the outside, we know what it's like to be discriminated against, or at least to have family members who have been discriminated against. And if we ever lose that, then I think we're in trouble. Then I think we've lost our way."

Coming from almost anyone else, that would make perfect sense. But it rings somewhat false to hear the president of the United States-the ultimate insider-talk about staying true to the feeling of being "on the outside." Obama lays out the essential contradiction that Transcendent black Americans struggle constantly to resolve: not being outside anymore. For the younger Transcendents, this means holding on to experiences they never actually had-not an act of remembering but of imagining.

7.

THE EMERGENT (PART 1):.

COMING TO AMERICA.

In May 2009, Bemnet Faris, a junior at Albert Einstein High School in Maryland, wrote a letter to President Obama. Her hope was "to illuminate the ma.s.sive economic, political, and social chaos the Ethiopian dictator Prime Minister Meles Zenawi is inflicting on the innocent Ethiopian people." Bemnet wrote that she feared Meles Zenawi was leading the nation "into complete anarchy and an inevitable genocide." The letter went on to describe the situation in Ethiopia in specific and exhaustive detail, highlighting opponents of the regime who had been jailed or killed and building a strong case against Meles Zenawi's rule. In the name of human rights and regional stability, Bemnet argued for action by the U.S. president. Her manifesto read as if it had been written by an exiled Ethiopian scholar or opposition leader, or perhaps a think tank's resident expert on the region. Coming from a high-school student, it was remarkable-even from a girl who has an unblemished record of straight A's, hopes to go to Harvard, and intends to become a pediatric neurosurgeon.

I came to read this letter because Bemnet's father handed me a copy in exchange for a used towel.

At that time, Bemnet's proud papa, Sentayu, was the locker-room attendant at the gym where I exercise. He picked up the dirty laundry, cleaned the sinks, made sure there was enough soap and toilet paper. His English was rudimentary, heavily accented, and somewhat improvisational, which is one reason why few of the members even tried to converse with him beyond "Good morning." Many didn't seem to notice him at all. Sentayu was, for all intents and purposes, invisible.

But his daughter won't be.

With little fanfare, the United States is experiencing the biggest wave of black immigration the nation has seen since the importation of slaves was outlawed in 1808. These newcomers from Africa and the Caribbean const.i.tute one of two distinct segments of an Emergent black America that is beginning to challenge traditional notions of what being "black" even means.

According to the Census Bureau, about 8 percent of U.S. citizens and legal residents who identify themselves as black are foreign-born-roughly one out of twelve. This figure is somewhat misleading, however, because it masks the fact that black immigration is a regional phenomenon. In much of the South, which is still home to the majority of African Americans, black immigration is negligible; not even 1 percent of black people in Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, South Carolina, or Arkansas are foreign-born. But in the states where African and Caribbean immigrants do settle-and where black people are a smaller percentage of the overall population-the numbers give a different sense of the newcomers' impact. In New York, Ma.s.sachusetts, and Minnesota, one of every four black people is foreign-born; in Florida and Washington State, it's one of every five.1 Well over half of these new black Americans come from the Caribbean, with the biggest contingents coming from Jamaica, Haiti, and Trinidad, but with all the islands substantially represented. In historical terms, this is no surprise. Caribbean immigrants have long played major roles in black America. Jamaica-born Marcus Garvey, the would-be Moses who tried to lead his people back to Africa, was one of the most prominent and influential black voices of the early part of the twentieth century. Everyone is familiar with the contributions of such second-generation overachievers as Colin Powell, the first black secretary of state, whose parents are from Jamaica, and Eric Holder, the first black attorney general, who is the son of immigrants from Barbados. Going back much further, many thousands of African slaves were "cured" on Caribbean islands-acclimated to the New World environment and "broken" to their new masters' will-before being brought to America to work on the plantations. Oral history in my family says that a distant ancestor arrived, as did many other Africans, via a long-established route from Barbados to the teeming port of Charleston.

What is something of a surprise is the stunning increase in the flow of immigrants from the African continent, with the biggest national groups being Nigerians, Ethiopians, and Ghanaians. These newcomers, many of them as invisible as my friend Sentayu, defy expectations. Here is a supreme historical irony: For nearly two hundred years, Africans were kidnapped, brought here in chains, forced to work without pay, bought and sold like pieces of property, and deliberately kept untutored and illiterate for fear that knowledge would make them uncontrollable and dangerous. Today, Africans coming here voluntarily on wide-body jets are the best-educated immigrants in the United States-better-educated than Asians, Europeans, Latin Americans, or any other regional group.

The Little Ethiopia business district in Washington's U Street corridor is also a Little Eritrea, and the grievances between the two countries, historically one nation, have survived the journey. If you take a taxicab in the capital, see from the ID tag that your driver has a name like Ghebresela.s.sie, and decide to make small talk by saying something nice about Ethiopia, you risk spending the rest of your ride being subjected to a stern lecture-from the Eritrean point of view-about geopolitics on the Horn of Africa.

In most U.S. metropolitan areas, Nigerians const.i.tute by far the biggest national group of African immigrants, which makes sense because Nigeria is by far the most populous nation in black Africa. The cultural norms that dominate in most African immigrant communities are West African. In Washington, uniquely, the Ethiopians and Eritreans predominate. They provide the African immigrant community's flavor and set its Abyssinian tone.

The restaurants, record stores, and other businesses near Howard University are the most visible manifestation of the Ethiopian presence in Washington, but actually the community is widely dispersed, living mostly in the Maryland suburbs of Montgomery and Prince George's counties. Throughout American history, immigrant groups have tended to cl.u.s.ter around particular occupations or industries; once you would find a disproportionate number of Irish police officers, just as now you will find a disproportionate number of Korean dry cleaners. In the Washington area, Ethiopian immigrants have gravitated toward livelihoods involving automobiles.

As anyone who visits the city can see, quite a few are making a living as taxi drivers-one of the quintessential just-off-the-boat jobs. What is not immediately apparent is that D.C. cab companies with names like Action, Alert, Amba.s.sador, and Atlantic-and that's just the A's-are owned by Ethiopian immigrant entrepreneurs.2 It's no exaggeration to say that Ethiopian immigrants are becoming Washington's taxicab kingpins. As proof, in 2009 two Ethiopian cab-company owners were implicated in a scandal involving alleged kickbacks paid to a city official. Having the juice to be accused of pay-to-play munic.i.p.al corruption is perhaps the surest sign that an immigrant community has arrived. It's no exaggeration to say that Ethiopian immigrants are becoming Washington's taxicab kingpins. As proof, in 2009 two Ethiopian cab-company owners were implicated in a scandal involving alleged kickbacks paid to a city official. Having the juice to be accused of pay-to-play munic.i.p.al corruption is perhaps the surest sign that an immigrant community has arrived.

Ethiopian immigrants have also moved into the parking industry, although more as employees than employers. Whenever you use one of the city's overpriced lots, it is likely that the gentleman who parks your car and the polite woman who deprives you of your money will have been born in Ethiopia.

Still, taxicabs and parking lots do not leave a particularly large footprint for such a fast-growing, highly educated immigrant group. That imprint is yet to come: It is the children of these African and Caribbean newcomers who, I am confident, will soon make their presence known. I can make that prediction because I know that there is not just one Bemnet Faris. There are many.

My first body of evidence is largely anecdotal but quite voluminous. Several years ago my wife, Avis, started a nonprofit whose mission was to funnel high-achieving African American high-school students from the Washington area into the nation's top-ranked colleges and universities, with all the support and financial aid they needed to succeed. The first step in the process was getting the high schools to identify these students, based on a well-defined set of criteria-grade point average, SAT or ACT scores, letters of recommendation. When the first set of applications started rolling in from students considered by their high-school princ.i.p.als and guidance counselors as the best of the best, nearly 40 percent were from students with surnames like Tsegaye, Olatunde, Arowojolu, Agboke, Getachew, and Diallo-identifiably African names.

This presented an obvious question. The program was clearly a form of affirmative action. But was the purpose of affirmative action to compensate the descendants of people who were enslaved and oppressed? If so, that would exclude the sons and daughters of recent immigrants. Or did affirmative action have the forward-looking purpose of fostering diversity in a society where soon there will be no racial or ethnic majority? If that was the case, then immigrants should be treated like everyone else.

Avis decided, and I concurred, that it would be wrong to try to draw some kind of bright line between students who presumably were the children of immigrants and those who presumably were not. For one thing, presumption is an inexact science; using names as a proxy for country of origin would miss almost all Caribbean immigrants (although you could argue that immigrants from the West Indies shouldn't be excluded in any event, since they, too, were the descendants of slaves). Relying on names as a filter would fail to "catch" some African immigrants as well. And why shouldn't a special exception be made for Liberians, since the country was settled by the descendants of American slaves? But then wouldn't a distinction have to be made between Liberians who were descended from freed American slaves and Liberians who weren't?

Leaving aside the practical question of whether sorting out the immigrants would even be possible, it became obvious that some of the students with African-looking surnames came from extremely low-income households, while some of those with non-African names came from families whose income and net worth made them solidly Mainstream-or, in some cases, just plain affluent. It would not make sense to offer help to the black daughter of a corporate vice president but withhold it from the black son of two parking-lot attendants, no matter where their parents or grandparents were born.

The trend we were seeing was evident around the country, wherever African immigrants had settled in substantial numbers: Their children were performing so well in school that they were overrepresented, relative to their overall numbers, in the lists of overachievers. In 2009, sociologists Pamela R. Bennett of Johns Hopkins University and Amy Lutz of Syracuse University published a paper in the journal Sociology of Education Sociology of Education that revealed just how well the immigrants were doing. Bennett and Lutz looked at data from the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988, which follows a large, nationally representative sample of students who were eighth-graders that year. Crunching the numbers, Bennett and Lutz found that black immigrant children-defined as those who were immigrants themselves, or were the children of immigrants-were stellar academic achievers not only when compared to native-born blacks but when compared to whites as well. They reported that 9.2 percent of immigrant black students went on to enroll in elite colleges, such as those in the Ivy League, versus 7.3 percent of whites and 2.4 percent of native blacks. Immigrant black students also had the highest rate of overall college attendance, including non-elite as well as elite schools-75.1 percent of the immigrant blacks enrolled in college, compared to 72.5 percent of whites and 60.2 percent of native blacks. that revealed just how well the immigrants were doing. Bennett and Lutz looked at data from the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988, which follows a large, nationally representative sample of students who were eighth-graders that year. Crunching the numbers, Bennett and Lutz found that black immigrant children-defined as those who were immigrants themselves, or were the children of immigrants-were stellar academic achievers not only when compared to native-born blacks but when compared to whites as well. They reported that 9.2 percent of immigrant black students went on to enroll in elite colleges, such as those in the Ivy League, versus 7.3 percent of whites and 2.4 percent of native blacks. Immigrant black students also had the highest rate of overall college attendance, including non-elite as well as elite schools-75.1 percent of the immigrant blacks enrolled in college, compared to 72.5 percent of whites and 60.2 percent of native blacks.3 The sociologists discovered that the immigrant black students were more likely than native black students to come from two-parent households, and that they were also more likely to have attended private high schools-two factors that increase a student's chances of attending an elite college. That finding about two-parent families requires some elaboration. Remember that black immigrant families, particularly those from African countries, are generally not just intact but also highly educated. For a variety of reasons, the parents may not have been able to find jobs in this country that are fully commensurate with their skills; home-country professional qualification in medicine or law, for example, obviously does not allow an immigrant to land at JFK or Dulles one day and start practicing as a doctor or lawyer the next. But even if the father is an accountant who has to work as a security guard while he studies to become certified in this country or the mother is a teacher who is putting food on the table by working as a custodian, the family has a history of education and a reverence for learning. They are likely to know what it takes to guide and motivate a child toward excellence because they will have undergone the process themselves-a process that may involve strict parental discipline, researchers have found, and that may be notably successful in inculcating children against negative peer-group influences. And while each parent maybe working long hours to make ends meet, perhaps even holding down two jobs, having both parents in the household means stability and predictability-and creates the expectation that the children will lead stable and predictable lives.

There are also cultural norms that come into play. Not just in Africa but in much of the third world, subjecting the family to shame or disgrace is an awful transgression-if not unthinkable, then certainly unacceptable. Respect for parental authority, and for one's elders in general, is not so much demanded as a.s.sumed. Based on evidence that I admit is wholly unscientific and anecdotal, the many African immigrant or first-generation high-school students that I have met in recent years have been adept at walking the tightrope between being "normal" teenagers-loving hip-hop, wearing the right clothes, fitting in-and acceding to heavy-duty academic and social demands at home.

I believe there is an important psychological factor as well. Most immigrants who surmount all the obstacles and make it to the United States are accustomed to success. Whatever degree of political and economic dysfunction their home countries might be suffering, the immigrants managed to master or escape the local context. By virtue of their presence, they are among the winners in their societies. Optimism comes easily, and with it a certain sense of ent.i.tlement. All or some of this gets pa.s.sed down to the next generation.

African and Caribbean immigrants come from societies where there may be ethnic tension but only rarely is there racial tension. The question of whether the black majority would hold political power, and at least share in holding economic power, was decided long ago in source countries such as Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Ghana, and on islands across the Caribbean. In effect, the immigrants are coming from societies that in some ways are similar to the all-black Orangeburg in which my sister and I were raised-not wealthy, to be sure, but proud, economically diverse, and socially integrated.

There is ample evidence that the first-generation, American-born sons and daughters of black immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean perform better in school than their African American counterparts. Much less clear is what happens to second-generation black immigrants; some studies have found a drop-off, with the overachieving determination and drive of the immigrants having been pa.s.sed down to their children but not their grandchildren.

A 2007 paper published in Social Psychology Quarterly Social Psychology Quarterly by researchers at the City University of New York and Stanford University suggests that cultural identification might be a factor. The first generation, this argument goes, self-identifies as Jamaican American or Nigerian American, and is largely immune to "stereotype threat"-the phenomenon in which members of a group that is subjected to negative stereotypes perform less well when those stereotypes are made salient. For example, black students will score lower on a standardized test if they are told beforehand that black students do not do well on standardized tests. The researchers from CUNY and Stanford, who used performance on a standardized test as a measure, found that stereotype threat had little or no effect on first-generation Caribbean immigrant students but that it had significant impact on second-generation students-who were more likely to have dropped their country-of-origin identification and begun to consider themselves "black" or "African American." by researchers at the City University of New York and Stanford University suggests that cultural identification might be a factor. The first generation, this argument goes, self-identifies as Jamaican American or Nigerian American, and is largely immune to "stereotype threat"-the phenomenon in which members of a group that is subjected to negative stereotypes perform less well when those stereotypes are made salient. For example, black students will score lower on a standardized test if they are told beforehand that black students do not do well on standardized tests. The researchers from CUNY and Stanford, who used performance on a standardized test as a measure, found that stereotype threat had little or no effect on first-generation Caribbean immigrant students but that it had significant impact on second-generation students-who were more likely to have dropped their country-of-origin identification and begun to consider themselves "black" or "African American."4 All of which may prove nothing, except that who we are depends on who we All of which may prove nothing, except that who we are depends on who we believe believe we are. we are.

The Washington-area Ethiopian community, estimated by local activists to number 150,000,5 has been called the biggest, most affluent, and most important outside of the mother country. Ethiopia's best-known and most highly acclaimed director, Haile Gerima, lives in Washington and teaches film at Howard University. His 1993 movie, has been called the biggest, most affluent, and most important outside of the mother country. Ethiopia's best-known and most highly acclaimed director, Haile Gerima, lives in Washington and teaches film at Howard University. His 1993 movie, Sankofa Sankofa, is a powerful examination of the horrors of slavery; his newest work, Teza Teza, is about a fictional Ethiopian intellectual who returns to his homeland during the brutal reign of Mengistu Haile Mariam. The community has an English-Amharic bilingual newspaper, Zethiopia Zethiopia, which in July 2009 proudly reported that a local Ethiopian American woman-Mehret Ayalew Mandefro, thirty-two, a Harvard-trained doctor from suburban Alexandria, Virginia-had been named a White House Fellow. Since 1992, the nonprofit Ethiopian Community Center has helped immigrants get settled in their new home, offering cla.s.ses in English, computer literacy, and other needed skills. Now some of the center's early clients are coming back and asking for help in teaching their Americanized children about the glories of Ethiopian history and culture.

Keeping history alive is important for all early-generation immigrants, but even more important for Ethiopians than most. Ethiopia is believed to have been the birthplace of the human race; some of the very earliest known hominid fossils, dating back 3.2 million years, were found there. More recently, the land once called Abyssinia was one of the great empires of the ancient world, known to the Egyptians, Greeks, Persians, and Romans as an important regional power. Ethiopians were among the leaders in the development of civilization-how we live together, govern ourselves, provide for our basic needs, organize our thinking about life, death, love, family, commerce, community, nation.

Ethiopia also presented humanity with smaller gifts. One of the tasks that Sentayu performed at my gym-before he left for a better-paying job-was to keep the coffee machine in the lounge area functional. When it broke down, which was fairly often, he made coffee at home and brought it to the gym in big thermoses. "Much better," he said proudly of his home brew. "You know, coffee is from my country. Ethiopia gave coffee to the world!"

He and the other immigrants know who they are and where they come from. The native-born, with a few exceptions, quite literally don't. As the immigrants' numbers and impact grow, I wonder what, if anything, that difference will come to mean.

When our ancestors were brought here, slave owners waged a deliberate, thorough, and successful campaign to erase all traces of our prior cultures. There were, for example, many slaves who left Africa as Muslims; Islam had been established on the continent for centuries by the time the Americas were discovered and the Atlantic slave trade began. Once in the Americas, Muslims were given no leeway to practice their faith. Christianity was the only religious option, and it was all but mandatory.

In some other countries of the western hemisphere, notably Brazil and Cuba, enslaved peoples found ways to hold fast to some of their beliefs and traditions. The Yoruba people, from what is now Nigeria, had partial success. In Cuba and Brazil, they managed to fuse their religious tradition with Roman Catholicism in a way that was Catholic enough to satisfy the slave owners, but Yoruba enough to allow the slaves a sense of connection with their ancestors. These syncretic faiths came to be known as Santeria, candomble, mac.u.mba-there are many names and many distinctions-and they basically involve a.s.sociating specific Yoruba demiG.o.ds, called orishas in Cuba and the other Spanish-speaking slave-owning islands, with specific Catholic saints. On the day that Catholics celebrated Saint Barbara, for example, the slaves joined in the acts of veneration-but unbeknownst to the slave owners, the Africans were actually honoring Shango, the Yoruba G.o.d of thunder, lightning, and virility.

Along with these beliefs, snippets of language survived. The standard greeting one gives to an Afro Cuban babalawo babalawo, or priest-Iboru, iboya, ibocheche-is said to be a corruption of a name given to a Yoruba deity that means "one who lives both in heaven and earth." Today officials of the various Afro Cuban and Afro Brazilian faiths hold ec.u.menical councils with Nigerian religious leaders. A certain continuity of ident.i.ty was maintained.6 In the United States, nothing of the old religious belief system survived. This was perhaps because Protestantism lacked the Catholic emphasis on the pantheon of saints, which left the slaves no convenient way to practice their faiths surrept.i.tiously. In the barrier islands along the South Carolina coast, a culture called Gullah still exists and is being studied and preserved; the creole that the Gullah people speak is a mash-up of archaic English and various West African tongues, and it is utterly incomprehensible to a nonspeaker. Beyond that one example, however, our ancestors' history was obliterated. In that sense, we really have no idea who we are.

Advances in genetic science do make it possible for African Americans to send away a DNA sample and get back a report offering some general idea of what region and ethnic group their ancestors came from. But after a lot of initial excitement about the prospect of being able to do Roots Roots in a lab, it turns out that the testing might not be as precise as originally thought. To learn that one of your ancestors might have been a member of the Ibo ethnic group, for example, or that an ancestor might have come from the Angola region would be something. But it wouldn't be much-especially given that different laboratories often come up with different histories. in a lab, it turns out that the testing might not be as precise as originally thought. To learn that one of your ancestors might have been a member of the Ibo ethnic group, for example, or that an ancestor might have come from the Angola region would be something. But it wouldn't be much-especially given that different laboratories often come up with different histories.

The African immigrants, by contrast, have family histories that go back hundreds of years. They are proud of this heritage-and it shows. These are generalizations, but they are true: Native-born African Americans often envy the immigrants their deep historical knowledge and heritage, and immigrants often look down on the native-born for their rootlessness. These deep and seldom-expressed differences over ident.i.ty, I believe, may underlie the shallower complaints that the two groups voice about each other. The native-born say that the immigrants are arrogant, and the immigrants say that the native-born have no pride in themselves.

In decades past, the process of incorporating immigrants fully into the African American community was natural, inevitable, and quick. Most of the newcomers were from the Caribbean, similarly disconnected from their ancient roots, and in any event they were black in a society that made no fine distinctions between people with dark skin. The formal and informal rules of Jim Crow segregation did not take into account country of national origin; there was no special section in the front of the bus for Jamaicans.

Today, immigrants from Africa can, if they choose, maintain a distinction. Ethiopians and Nigerians are both Africans, but they come from different ethnic groups, separated by the breadth of a continent, and they have radically different histories. They can insist on their individual national and cultural ident.i.ties or they can feel a sense of common ident.i.ty in being immigrants; they can stand apart from the native-born, or they can blend into the fabric of Mainstream black America.

The point is that they will have a choice. There can be different shades of black.

8.

THE EMERGENT (PART 2):.

HOW BLACK IS BLACK?.

The other segment of Emergent black America also faces issues of heritage and ident.i.ty, but they are quite different: What if you knew that half of your history was written in Africa and the other half in England or Ireland or Germany or Sweden? What if you were biracial?

According to the way American society has always worked, you would still be black. But societies evolve, and this one is no exception. Do you now have the option of being white as well? Are you something in between? And who gets to decide, society or the individual?

There is a long backstory to this question of modern ident.i.ty, and to understand it we can look at a society where the story began much like it did here but took a different turn: Brazil.

More than twelve million people were brought from Africa to the New World to work as slaves, roughly between 1500 and 1870, and more than 40 percent of them went to Brazil-far more than to the United States or any other country. The Portuguese colonists who crossed the ocean in search of fortune were overwhelmingly male, so there was a long history of miscegenation between settlers and female slaves. The same was true in this country, of course, but one important difference is that in Brazil-and in the rest of Latin America-the offspring of these black-white unions were considered not black or white but mulatto. This intermediate designation persisted after emanc.i.p.ation, and compared to the United States there was only a mild taboo against interracial marriage. Brazil today is characterized by racial disparities-white people, generally, are richer and more powerful than black people-but the question of who is "white" and who is "black" has been more a matter of skin color than family history.

In the United States, by contrast, the unwritten one-drop rule mandated that anyone with any African genetic heritage, visible or not, was "colored" or "Negro" or "black." As far as Jim Crow was concerned, no one was mulatto or biracial. If you had one black parent and one white parent, you were unambiguously and permanently black. If you happened to think otherwise-and decided, say, to use the "white" restroom or water fountain-you were soon instructed in the error of your ways.

That pattern has never changed, but now it might. Since interracial marriage was made legal throughout the country in 1967 and gradually became socially acceptable, what once was an anomaly has become commonplace. Stanford University sociologist Michael J. Rosenfeld estimated that the number of black-white interracial couples has increased fivefold since 1960, and that in 2000 about 7 percent of all married and cohabitating couples in the country were "interracial." While Asian-white and Hispanic-white marriages are more numerous, the frequency of black-white marriages-more "transgressive" of societal norms than other cross-couplings, according to Rosenfeld-is accelerating.1 A Pew Research Center survey, based on a.n.a.lysis of census data, found that in 2008, a full 22 percent of black male newlyweds married "outside their race." This reflects what Pew called a "stark" gender difference: Just 9 percent of black female newlyweds had embarked on interracial marriages.2 Race still matters in love and marriage, but it matters much less now than it did just a few decades ago. I attended the previously all-white Orangeburg High School in the late 1960s, and the students I got to know best were in the fast-track cla.s.ses. There were not many girls who took the upper-level math and science courses. One who did was Kathy Kovacevich, who was from somewhere up north and didn't fully understand what race meant in my hometown. Once the two of us were working together on a project, and I gave her a ride to pick up some notes she had left at home. We walked into her house and I froze at the door-I remembered myself. I knew that for a young black man to be alone with a young white woman was asking for a world of trouble, even if I were just sitting on the couch and waiting while she found the papers she was looking for. What if her father came home while I was there? What if the neighbors had seen me go inside? At a minimum, she was risking social ostracism. At worst, I was risking life and limb.

Today this all sounds ridiculous. But back then, the idea of seeing an interracial couple walking down Russell Street, past the main square with its statue of a Confederate soldier, would have been as far-fetched as the notion of seeing a Martian and a Venusian strolling beneath the Spanish moss down by the Edisto River. The only difference is that the extraterrestrials wouldn't have risked a beating.

The reality was, of course, that interracial relationships took place all the time. In 2003, when it was revealed that Essie Mae Washington-Williams-a light-skinned black woman-was the daughter of arch-segregationist Strom Thurmond, and that she had attended South Carolina State University in Orangeburg, I called home to tell my family the news. "Oh, we thought you knew," my mother said. "Everybody knew. All the older people, I mean."

It turned out that a good friend and longtime coworker of my mother's had been at SCSU at the same time as Washington-Williams. She had told my mother-and everybody else in town, I guess-about the day when Thurmond had pulled up in a big sedan in front of a building on the SCSU campus and waited patiently until Washington-Williams came out and got into the car. They sped off, and the car brought her back to campus hours later. Apparently Thurmond visited his daughter fairly often and actually paid for her education. While he never could have publicly acknowledged her as family, privately he accepted his paternity and a.s.sumed at least some measure of parental responsibility. Since the relationship was not revealed until after Thurmond's death, no one had the chance to ask him about the obvious conflict between his die-hard insistence on separation of the races, which had been the basis of his failed presidential campaign, and his fatherly concern for the well-being of a child. Not for the first time, philosophy proved no match for biology.

Washington-Williams's mother was Carrie Butler, a servant in the household of Thurmond's parents. Butler was just sixteen when her daughter was born; Thurmond was twenty-two. This was the pattern of interracial relationships for much of American history-master-slave until the Civil War, then employer-servant afterward. In the South, these unions were almost exclusively between white men and black women. The determination of white Southerners to eliminate the possibility of s.e.xual relations between the other variable in the matrix-black men and white women-was one of the foundational pillars of Jim Crow.

Naturally the unthinkable did happen-jazz musicians with their white groupies and patrons, Sammy Davis Jr. marrying May Britt. But such relationships were formed on the fringes of society, among entertainers, hipsters, hopheads, bon vivants, academics, and foreigners. In 1961, one such union, between an adventurous young student from the American heartland eager to discover the world and a brilliant but mercurial scholar from Kenya, produced the forty-fourth president of the United States.

The Loving v. Virginia Loving v. Virginia decision in 1967, which legalized interracial marriage in the states where it was still illegal-Virginia, Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, South Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, West Virginia, and Maryland (which repealed its law after the suit was filed but before the court ruled)-was a huge step. Perhaps a more important event, that same year, was the Summer of Love in San Francisco, which marked the beginning of the American cultural revolution. For those young enough to tune in, turn on, and drop out, barriers such as race existed only to be overcome. The wild side existed only to be walked on. And for those who might not have felt compelled to make a political statement-or who, perhaps, had found other effective ways to annoy their parents-there was the simple circ.u.mstance of falling in love. decision in 1967, which legalized interracial marriage in the states where it was still illegal-Virginia, Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, South Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, West Virginia, and Maryland (which repealed its law after the suit was filed but before the court ruled)-was a huge step. Perhaps a more important event, that same year, was the Summer of Love in San Francisco, which marked the beginning of the American cultural revolution. For those young enough to tune in, turn on, and drop out, barriers such as race existed only to be overcome. The wild side existed only to be walked on. And for those who might not have felt compelled to make a political statement-or who, perhaps, had found other effective ways to annoy their parents-there was the simple circ.u.mstance of falling in love.

This once-forbidden love made possible the existence of Tiger Woods, Halle Berry, Derek Jeter, Mariah Carey, Alicia Keys-bold-faced names who are part of Emergent black America. It is difficult to tease out of census data an accurate figure for the number of black-white biracial Americans in the United States. My best guess, after looking at the data and making a few conservative a.s.sumptions, is at least two million. Whatever the number may be, I'm quite confident in predicting that it's ab