How the Talented Tenth Got Over
When is the black middle class going to pay its debt to King?
April 3, 2008--I am a child of the black middle class.
I wasn't quite a teenager when Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered. But I have always known that I am one of the millions of beneficiaries of his sacrifice.
Middle class.
I have spent a career considering the term as it relates to black people. In 1968 only roughly one in eight black households could have been defined as middle class. But a decade later, thanks in large measure to affirmative action -- the real and empirical legacy of the King Dream -- that number soared to about one in four households.
As sociologist Bart Landry noted in his landmark book The New Black Middle Class, the number of affluent black folks grew during the second half of the '60s by a number greater than the total increase during the previous 50 years.
Like their parents before them, my mother and father were born, raised and educated in segregated, rural outposts of North Carolina. Somehow, they overcame. The stories they passed along suggested hard work, education and unyielding faith as the tools they used to carve out what passed for a middle-class existence in the midst of a system that denied their very humanity. But there was something more intangible.
Call it a love for black people and a sincere desire to see one and all move upward.
For my direct ancestors, in the days before the Civil Rights Movement made things seem easier, being middle class wasn't so much an economic term as a mindset of survival. It had less to do with the size of a paycheck, and more to do with a determined familial effort designed to absorb the countless, daily indignities of life. It was about creating cocoons around family units and entire communities to shield us all from the shared sting of second-class status that we experienced outside of our protective enclaves.
All black folks in the segregated South lived cheek-by-jowl. My preacher father's house was next door to the gas station attendant's home; the dentist up the street shared the block with a guy who fixed televisions in his garage.
What made a black family middle-class wasn't easy to define. Nobody tossed such terms around back then. As I came to understand class stratification, I assumed it meant some black folks had enough food and money to share with those who didn't. If my folks knew about it, no needy family in my neighborhood went hungry or was evicted from their house.
But times changed. My education began with Dr. King's murder. I learned not long afterwards that not all black people felt as positive toward other black people as we did back in McCorey Heights, my corner of the world in Charlotte, N.C. Money – or access to a job in the white mainstream – became increasingly important as a fault line, separating brother from brother, sister from sister and, in some bizarre cases, child from parent.
In the time since King died, the power and prestige of America's black middle class has both waxed and waned. There are more affluent black people in the United States than ever before. In 2001, the top 5 percent of the nation's black households had higher incomes than 85 percent of white households.
You know the folks in this 5 percent --Oprah Winfrey. LeBron James. Sean "P. Diddy" Combs. Bob Johnson. Stanley O'Neal, late of Merrill Lynch. Regular folk aren't doing so bad either. Indeed, by some Census Bureau measures, a quarter of all black households are middle class. Some demographers say that figure is too low, counting nearly half the nation's African-American households as middle class.
Studying the black middle class, as I have done throughout most of my professional life, is an enterprise fraught with peril. It's easy for critics to distort quantitative results, turning them into qualitative indictment. More than a century after W.E.B. DuBois coined the phrase "Talented Tenth," an argument still rages over who does and who doesn't make up the black elite, an argument that misses the point entirely.
DuBois understood, as King did later, that middle-class black Americans have an obligation to do more than play at "acting white." And this is where the study of class and race in America gets dicey. I suspect it's because so few of us really know our history.
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How the Talented Tenth Got Over
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View All Comments »juanitaw at 04/06/2008 8:20:11 PM
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I am not sure if the talented tenth got over, I just think that the black community has become 2 different worlds and that there is such a cultural chasm that it makes communicating difficult between the groups. And if you can't communicate, you can't solve your problems.
Middle-classness to me is more about values and cultural tendencies than financial status. Many lower class people, and middle class people with lower class tendencies do not understand or execute their lives in a way that makes them successful.
As someone who came from modest means who is now doing well, I dealt with lower class kids while I was growing up. Many of them didn't like me because I was too proper, spoke and acted too white and obviously didn't put out. I did my homework, I was polite to my teachers and I was considered stuck up. Some of my relatives think the same thing. Now I am doing well and some of them are bewildered. There are many examples of middle class blacks and lower class blacks who practice their tendencies in the black community but those people are ridiculed. It is not until those people make money, buy a big house or expensive car that they are considered accomplished.
ken at 04/06/2008 1:16:10 PM
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@lola_44
I can't speak for everyone, but one of the things about hip-hop that I find most exciting is that it is basically an entrepreneurial culture. I don't think much of Puffy's music, but when I look at what he has done as a business man I can't help but be impressed. Not only has Puffy been successful himself, he has created a blueprint of sorts for others to follow.
gijoebo06 at 04/06/2008 7:59:45 AM
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I was just introduced to The Root and enjoy reading it. However, I must agree with SR Boston. I am in the military and by most accounts can be considered middle class. I didn't get here on by stepping onward, upward and over the backs of people that were once my neighbors, as this author so eloquently put it. My neighbors, black, white, mixed and brown, male and female, helped me in my time of need as I continue to help others after me. I am reminded of the many countries that I have visited and have been stationed around the world and it still shocks me that in this land of plenty there are those that WILL NOT take advantage of the opportunities that this country provides. When do we hold those of our race accountable for not wanting to be better, regardless of the hand reaching across the divide to bring them over? A great friend of mine, Mr Brandon Fauntleroy-McDowell, was murdered two weeks ago in Kansas City, Mo. This young man was assisting his community as he elevated himself into a better position in life. He was about to graduate with his Master's in three weeks and had already been accepted into Law School at the age of 25. He was surprised and subsequently shot to death in broad daylight by three assailants (read people you think the middle class has stepped on to get ahead) for the rims of his Tahoe as he left his job one afternoon. When you see the mug shots of the three people who allegedly had something to do with this horrific crime, you wonder what this man of God did to fail them to the point that they needed to murder him. Maybe from your position as an instructor at your university you have seen the Black middle class fail the rest of the black race. I see a middle class that tries to help our race, creates after school programs, tutors those less fortunate and does all those things that our grandmother taught us we should do to help our families prosper. But, as SR Boston wrote, you can bring a horse to water but you can't make it drink. Sad to say but the talened tenth could very well be the talented [20th, 30th or higher, you pick the number] if the very ones you say we have stepped over really wanted to rise up and bring someone else with them. I have not read your book but I plan to purchase it and examine the reasons why you think that that tenth has gotten over. Maybe it was when BET stopped becoming entertainment television that I was proud of as a child and started becoming Blacks Embarrassing Themselves. Or, maybe it was the childish antics of our professional sports players who don't see themselves as role models for our youth. Or maybe, just maybe, it is our collective self-loathing which causes us to classify those that we don't agree with, even though they have at least a drop of black blood in them, as not being "black enough" to run for the highest office in the land as a black man.