“font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14px;”>Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Eugene Robinson was in St. Louis on Sunday afternoon to speak at a Black History Month program that attracted a large, attentive audience, sponsored by the St. Louis Public Library. It was fitting to have Robinson speak at the end of Black History Month, because in his new book Disintegration he argues, “Black America, as we knew it, is history.”
“font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14px;”>He explained this startling assertion in a conversation with The St. Louis American.
“font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14px;”>“Black America, as we knew it, was thought of as a coherent, single entity. Forty or 50 years ago, we had a common situation and a common agenda, and that agenda was very clear: fight for civil rights and an end to segregation and the right to go to school and vote and other basic rights supposedly guaranteed by the Constitution,” Robinson said.
“font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14px;”>“Because of our victories in the Civil Rights Movement, African Americans have more options, beginning in the ‘60s through the ‘70s up to the present. So Black America is more diverse, and it is more difficult to identify a single black agenda or a single black leadership.”
“font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14px;”>This is a familiar point. Disintegration breaks new ground – and is getting Black America talking – by breaking down this new diversity and giving it names: Mainstream, Abandoned, Transcendent and Emergent.
“font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14px;”>The Mainstream is the black middle class; if you are reading this newspaper, more than likely this describes you.
“font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14px;”>The Abandoned is the black underclass – the youths shooting each other on our streets and the men languishing in our prisons.
“font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14px;”>The Transcendent is the elite class with “enormous wealth, power and influence” – think David Steward and Arnold Donald (though they would likely shy away from such grandiose terms).
“font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: Verdana;”>The Emergent is the class of mixed race people and new black immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean “that makes us wonder what ‘black’ is even supposed to mean”; think Barack Obama, before he went Transcendent.
“font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14px;”>Robinson grew up in the segregated South of 1950s South Carolina and has been well acquainted personally with many civil rights luminaries. One of them already has called him on the carpet for crafting an analysis that could be accused of undermining African-America unity. But mostly what he is hearing on the book trail and from readers is gratitude for coming out and saying what they had been thinking.
“font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: Verdana;”>“
lot of people have said essentially this is what they have been
trying to say, something they have been thinking,” Robinson
said.
“font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14px;”>And it’s something that needed to be said. “The basic idea is we need to look clearly with kind of a cold eye at where black Americans are now as a first step toward developing new agendas for a new era,” Robinson said.
“font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14px;”>The book’s title, Disintegration, is apt, because Robinson argues that Black America was more integrated internally under the segregation imposed by Jim Crow laws. New opportunities opened up in a society that still imposes many barriers based on race has resulted in a more stratified and fragmented set of black communities.
“font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14px;”>“When I was kid, there was a white side of town and a black side of town, and black folks lived on the black side of town – well to do, or relatively well to do, poor black folks, you name it. Within the context of a segregated community, we were more economically and socially integrated,” Robinson said.
“font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14px;”>“Then, the Civil Rights Movement pried open a bunch of doors, and people walked through them. People have different options for where they want to live, how they want to live. Not everybody is in the same situation; not everybody has the same daily experiences.”
“font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14px;”>However, there is nothing naive about Robinson’s analysis. He is not saying we have entered a post-racial society, but rather offering a more nuanced description of the society’s new racial contours. Nor does he imagine for a moment that a larger Mainstream class and a dazzlingly successful Transcendent class of African Americans have blunted the facts of American racism.
“font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14px;”>“Yes, it’s true that a poor black man and a rich black man standing on a corner trying to catch a cab at night will both have problems,” Robinson said. “And sure, while there is less of that in-your-face, flat-out racism than before, there is still a good deal of it out there.”
“font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14px;”>Robinson’s book evolved from a conversation he had with publishers from the black press. What implications does his analysis have for newspapers like this one?
“font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14px;”>“You would think in a superficial way it might be worrisome for the black press, but in practice that’s not necessarily the case,” he said. “Insofar as these papers can continue to deliver news and information and opinion to the community that they need and don’t get elsewhere, there is definitely a future.”
“font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14px;”>Above all, Robinson aims for his analysis to be constructive – to generate new strategies for furthering the opportunities and success of a more complex black community. He writes that his book was born of “a desire to move forward, to find contemporary language for contemporary conditions, to frame our search for effective policies – and constructive individual actions – in terms of how things are rather than how they were.”
“font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: Verdana;”>The American carries Robinson’s twice weekly columns in print and online and invites all of its readers to read Robinson’s analysis and send us a response for potential publication. Send your response to:
“text-decoration: none;”>cking@stlamerican.com
