American society’s most radical experiment in rewriting the definitions of household, family, and fulfillment.
The truth is that I never fully bought the matriarchy idea. But I always thought that the women’s movement was mostly old news to African American women. They were long accustomed to juggling family and career, well acquainted with the tradeoffs that modern life demands. Now, I believe, Mainstream black women may be blazing another trail that the rest of American society will follow as we redefine the concepts of household and family. In this sense, the black Mainstream is at the cutting edge of societal evolution.
* * *
It is hard to overstate how heroic the Mainstream’s rise has been. Larger numbers of African Americans have made a greater advance, and done so more swiftly, than has been the case with any other significant “outsider” group that successfully pushed, charmed, or clawed its way into the American middle class. Just as it’s wrong to ignore the overlapping pathologies of poverty, hopelessness, unemployment, crime, incarceration, and family disintegration that plague black Americans disproportionately, it’s also wrong to deny that the rise of the black Mainstream is truly a great American success story—arguably, the greatest of all.
To state the obvious, African American progress cannot be measured from the very beginning—the arrival of the first Africanslaves at Jamestown in 1619. (The Spanish had brought some Africans to Florida decades earlier, but that turned out to be a false start.) For more than half the elapsed time since, black progress was not just discouraged, not just hampered, but actually outlawed—in South Carolina, Georgia, and other Southern states, it was against the law to teach a slave to write. These restrictions against black literacy—in effect, laws to prevent black intellectual development, which was rightly considered dangerous—became more draconian, not less so, during slavery’s final tumultuous decades. White Southerners had long lived in constant fear of black insurrection, and in 1831 the Nat Turner revolt in Southampton County, Virginia, turned that fear into something like sheer panic throughout the slave-owning states. In Mississippi, for example, legislators promptly passed a new law requiring all free blacks to leave the state, lest they incite the slaves by educating them.
It is equally useless to take emancipation as a starting point. This is not just because of the enormous deficits that newly freed blacks faced. Without assets or education they had to start from scratch, but during Reconstruction they made rapid gains. The problem was that those gains were promptly and often brutally taken away by Southern officials when Reconstruction was abruptly halted. This betrayal was committed with the acquiescence of the federal government—which was more interested in reaching an accommodation with the South than in following through on General Sherman’s promise of “forty acres and a mule”—and a stunningly racist Supreme Court. Jim Crow laws in the South deliberately kept the building blocks of meaningful development—education, opportunity, wealth that could be passed down through thegenerations—out of African American hands. Black advancement simply wasn’t allowed.
This situation, in which African Americans were deliberately and at times brutally held down, persisted through the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. In 1945, black sociologists St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton published
Black Metropolis
, a landmark study of the huge African American community in Chicago. Benefiting from extensive data collected during the Depression by WPA researchers, the book is perhaps the most comprehensive and vivid portrait ever assembled of separate but unequal black America. The authors devote one chapter to “The Job Ceiling”—the strictures that confined most blacks to semiskilled, unskilled, or “servant” jobs where the
The truth is that I never fully bought the matriarchy idea. But I always thought that the women’s movement was mostly old news to African American women. They were long accustomed to juggling family and career, well acquainted with the tradeoffs that modern life demands. Now, I believe, Mainstream black women may be blazing another trail that the rest of American society will follow as we redefine the concepts of household and family. In this sense, the black Mainstream is at the cutting edge of societal evolution.
* * *
It is hard to overstate how heroic the Mainstream’s rise has been. Larger numbers of African Americans have made a greater advance, and done so more swiftly, than has been the case with any other significant “outsider” group that successfully pushed, charmed, or clawed its way into the American middle class. Just as it’s wrong to ignore the overlapping pathologies of poverty, hopelessness, unemployment, crime, incarceration, and family disintegration that plague black Americans disproportionately, it’s also wrong to deny that the rise of the black Mainstream is truly a great American success story—arguably, the greatest of all.
To state the obvious, African American progress cannot be measured from the very beginning—the arrival of the first Africanslaves at Jamestown in 1619. (The Spanish had brought some Africans to Florida decades earlier, but that turned out to be a false start.) For more than half the elapsed time since, black progress was not just discouraged, not just hampered, but actually outlawed—in South Carolina, Georgia, and other Southern states, it was against the law to teach a slave to write. These restrictions against black literacy—in effect, laws to prevent black intellectual development, which was rightly considered dangerous—became more draconian, not less so, during slavery’s final tumultuous decades. White Southerners had long lived in constant fear of black insurrection, and in 1831 the Nat Turner revolt in Southampton County, Virginia, turned that fear into something like sheer panic throughout the slave-owning states. In Mississippi, for example, legislators promptly passed a new law requiring all free blacks to leave the state, lest they incite the slaves by educating them.
It is equally useless to take emancipation as a starting point. This is not just because of the enormous deficits that newly freed blacks faced. Without assets or education they had to start from scratch, but during Reconstruction they made rapid gains. The problem was that those gains were promptly and often brutally taken away by Southern officials when Reconstruction was abruptly halted. This betrayal was committed with the acquiescence of the federal government—which was more interested in reaching an accommodation with the South than in following through on General Sherman’s promise of “forty acres and a mule”—and a stunningly racist Supreme Court. Jim Crow laws in the South deliberately kept the building blocks of meaningful development—education, opportunity, wealth that could be passed down through thegenerations—out of African American hands. Black advancement simply wasn’t allowed.
This situation, in which African Americans were deliberately and at times brutally held down, persisted through the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. In 1945, black sociologists St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton published
Black Metropolis
, a landmark study of the huge African American community in Chicago. Benefiting from extensive data collected during the Depression by WPA researchers, the book is perhaps the most comprehensive and vivid portrait ever assembled of separate but unequal black America. The authors devote one chapter to “The Job Ceiling”—the strictures that confined most blacks to semiskilled, unskilled, or “servant” jobs where the
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