University of Georgia

Terry College of Business
 

"A disciplined, graceful exposition of a neglected aspect of the subject of race in America."--New York Times Book Review
 

Introduction: Shouts and Whispers
 

DESPITE ITS VERY EVIDENT PROSPERITY, MUCH of America's black middle class is in excruciating pain. And that distress- although most of the country does not see it--illuminates a serious American problem: the problem of the broken covenant, of the pact ensuring that if you work hard, get a good education, and play by the rules, you will be allowed to advance and achieve to the limits of your ability.

Again and again, as I spoke with people who had every accouterment of success, I heard the same plaintive declaration--always followed by various versions of an unchanging and urgently put question. "I have done everything I was supposed to do. I have stayed out of trouble with the law, gone to the right schools, and worked myself nearly to death. What more do they want? Why in God's name won't they accept me as a full human being? Why am I pigeonholed in a 'black job'? Why am I constantly treated as if I were a drug addict, a thief, or a thug? Why am I still not allowed to aspire to the same things every white person in America takes as a birthright? Why, when I most want to be seen, am I suddenly rendered invisible?"

What exactly do such questions mean? Could their underlying premise conceivably be correct? Why, a full generation after the most celebrated civil rights battles were fought and won, are Americans still struggling with basic issues of racial fairness? This book attempts to provide some possible answers. And in exploring why so many of those who have invested most deeply in the American dream are consumed with anger and pain, I hope to show how certain widespread and amiable assumptions held by whites--specifically about the black middle class but also about race relations in general--are utterly at odds with the reality many Americans confront daily.

That the black middle class (and I use the term very loosely, essentially meaning those whose standard of living is comfortable, even lavish, by most reasonable measures) should have any gripes at all undoubtedly strikes many as strange. The civil rights revolution, after all, not only killed Jim Crow but brought blacks more money, more latitude, and more access to power than enjoyed by any previous generation of African Americans. Some blacks in this new era of opportunity have amassed fortunes that would put Croesus to shame. If ever there was a time to celebrate the achievements of the color-blind society, now should be that time.

Joe Feagin, a sociologist at the University of Florida, observed in a paper prepared for the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights that most whites believe that blacks no longer face significant racial barriers. "From this white perspective employment discrimination targeting black Americans is no longer a serious problem in the United States. The black middle class, in particular, has largely overcome job discrimination and is thriving economically. Only the black underclass is in serious trouble, and that has little to do with discrimination." Indeed, many people believe the tables have turned so far that whites are more likely to be victimized by discrimination than blacks.

At an early stage of my work, I outlined the thesis of this book to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, senior senator from New York and celebrated scholar of ethnicity. Moynihan made the counterargument succinctly. The black middle class, he noted, was "moving along very well." And he had every expectation that it would continue to do so. Indeed, with so many black mayors and black police chiefs in place, blacks represented, to many new arrivals, America's power establishment. "The big problem," added Moynihan, "is, 'What are we going to do about the underclass?' And a particular problem is that [the] black group you're talking about [the middle class} doesn't want to have anything to do with them."

Certainly one can show statistically that black "married-couple families" with wives in the paid labor force (as categorized by the U.S. Census Bureau) do not make that much less than comparably stratified whites. Such households, which earn slightly over 80 percent as much as similar white households, are arguably within striking distance of economic parity. One can empathize with Moynihan's pique when he reflects on the public reaction to his famous 1970 memorandum to Richard Nixon pointing out that young two-parent black families in the Northeast were progressing nicely and suggesting that perhaps race could benefit from a period of "benign neglect." "I went through hell's own time," recalls Moynihan.

But whatever such aggregate statistics may show, they do not demonstrate--and cannot--that hiring has become color-blind. As Andrew Hacker observes in Two Nations, "While there is now a much larger black middle class, more typically, the husband is likely to be a bus driver earning $32,000, while his wife brings home $28,000 as a teacher or a nurse. A white middle-class family is three to four times more likely to contain a husband earning $75,000 in a managerial position. " Feagin notes that he has found "no [emphasis his] research study with empirical data supporting the widespread white perspective that employment discrimination is no longer serious in the U.S. workplace."

In lieu of scientific research, we are offered speculation and conjecture, self-congratulatory theories from whites who have never been forced to confront the racial stereotypes routinely encountered by blacks, and who--judging themselves decent people, and judging most of their acquaintances decent as well--find it impossible to believe that serious discrimination still exists. Whatever comfort such conjecture may bring some whites, it has absolutely no relevance to the experiences of blacks in America.

I am not suggesting that most whites are "racist. " The majority emphatically are not--at least not in any meaningful sense of the word. If a racist is defined as one who hates blacks (or members of any other racial group, for that matter), the number of true racists is very small, and a substantial portion of them are the pathetic sorts of people who call themselves Nazis and glorify the Ku Klux Klan. Even those fanatics tend to be motivated less by racism than by some pathology expressed in racial terms. The point here, however, is that people do not have to be racist--or have any malicious intent--in order to make decisions that unfairly harm members of another race. They simply have to do what comes naturally.

In 1991, ABC's "Primetime Live" attempted to gauge the effect of race on average black and white Americans. Over a period of two and a half weeks, the program followed two "testers," one black and one white, both trained to present themselves in an identical manner in a variety of situations. At times, host Diane Sawyer acknowledged, the two men were treated equally, but over and over--"every single day," she said--they were not.

The white tester, John, got instant service at an electronics counter; the black one, Glenn, was ignored. Glenn was tailed, not helped, by the salesman in a record store, while John was allowed to shop on his own. Passersby totally ignored Glenn when he was locked out of his car; John was showered with offers of help. In an automobile showroom, Glenn was quoted a price of $9,500 (with a 20 to 25 percent down payment) for the same red convertible offered to John for $9,000 (with a 10 to 20 percent down payment). In an apartment complex, John was given the keys to look around, while Glenn was told that the apartment was rented. At an employment agency, Glenn was lectured on laziness and told he would be monitored "real close," while John was treated with consideration and kindness. At a dry cleaners, Glenn was turned down flat for a job and John was encouraged to apply. In encounter after encounter, the subtle insults and rejections that Glenn had to swallow mounted, to the extent that even the two professional testers said their eyes had been opened.

"Primetime Live" did its experiment in St. Louis, Missouri. Yet throughout America, black and white Johns and Glenns, no matter how equivalent their backgrounds and personal attributes, live fundamentally different lives. And because the experiences are so immensely different, even for those who walk through the same institutions, it is all but impossible for members of one group to see the world through the other's eyes. That lack of a common perspective often translates into a lack of empathy, and an inability on the part of most whites to perceive, much less understand, the soul-destroying slights at the heart of black middle-class discontent.

This is not to say that white Americans are intent on persecuting black people, or that blacks are utterly helpless and fault-free victims of society. Nothing could be further from the truth. Nonetheless, America is filled with attitudes, assumptions, stereotypes, and behaviors that make it virtually impossible for blacks to believe that the nation is serious about its promise of equality--even (perhaps especially) for those who have been blessed with material success.

Donald McHenry, former U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations, told me that though he felt no sense of estrangement himself, he witnessed it often in other blacks who had done exceptionally well: "It's sort of the in talk, the in joke, within the club, an acknowledgment of and not an acceptance . . . of the effect of race on one's life, on where one lives, on the kinds of jobs that one has available. I think that's always been there. I think it's going to be there for some time." Dorothy Gilliam, a columnist for the Washington Post, expressed a similar thought in much stronger terms. " You feel the rage of people, [of] your group . . . just being the dogs of society."

Upon declaring her intention to leave a cushy job with a Fortune 500 company to go into the nonprofit sector, a young black woman, a Harvard graduate, was pulled aside by her vice president. Why, the executive wanted to know, was the company having such a difficult time retaining young minority professionals? The young woman's frustrations were numerous: she felt herself surrounded by mediocrity, by people trying to advance on the basis of personal influence and cronyism rather than merit; she was weary of racial insensitivity, of people who saw nothing about her except her color, or conversely of those who, in acknowledging her talents, in effect gave her credit for not really being black; she deemed it unlikely, given her perceptions of the corporate culture, that she would be allowed to make it to the top, and feared waking up in a rut several years hence to find that opportunities (and much of life) had passed her by; and she was tired of having to bite her tongue, tired of feeling that she could only speak out about the wrongs she perceived at the risk of being labeled a malcontent and damaging her career. Rather than try to explain, the woman finally blurted out that there was "no one who looks like me" in all of senior management--by which she meant there were no blacks, and certainly no black women. "What reason do I have to believe, " she added, "that I can make it to the top?" When she related the incident to me several years later, she remained discouraged by what seemed a simple reality of her existence. "The bottom line is you're black. And that's still a negative in this society."

Ulric Haynes, dean of the Hofstra University School of Business and a former corporate executive who served as President Carter's ambassador to Algeria, is one of many blacks who have given up hope that racial parity will arrive this--or even next--millennium: "During our lifetimes, my children's lifetimes, my grandchildren's lifetimes, I expect that race will . . . matter. And perhaps race will always matter, given the historical circumstances under which we came to this country." But even as he recognizes that possibility, Haynes is far from sanguine about it. In fact, he is angry. "Not for myself. I'm over the hill. I've reached the zenith," he says. "I'm angry for the deception that this has perpetrated on my children and grandchildren." Though his children have traveled the world and received an elite education, they "in a very real sense are not the children of privilege. They are dysfunctional, because I didn't prepare them, in all the years we lived overseas, to deal with the climate of racism they are encountering right now."

In 1992, a research team at UCLA's Center for the Study of Urban Poverty benefited from a fortuitous accident of timing. They were midway through the field work for a survey of racial attitudes in Los Angeles County when a jury exonerated four white policemen of the most serious charges in the videotaped beating of a black man named Rodney King. The riot that erupted in South Central Los Angeles in the aftermath of the verdict delayed the researchers' work, so they ended up, in effect, with two surveys: one of attitudes before the riot, and one of attitudes after.

The questionnaire they used included four statements thought to be helpful in measuring "ethnic alienation from American Society": "American Society owes people of my ethnic group a better chance in life than we currently have." "American society has provided people of my ethnic group a fair opportunity to get ahead in life." "I am grateful for the special opportunities people of my ethnic group have found in America." "American society just hasn't dealt fairly with people from my background."

Responses to the statements were merged into a single score, cataloged by income level and ethnic group. The responses of blacks with a household income of $50,000 and more were especially intriguing. Even before the riot, that group, on average, appeared to be more alienated than poorer blacks. But what stunned the researchers was that after the riot, alienation among the most affluent group of African Americans skyrocketed, rising nearly a full "standard deviation"--much more than it did for those who were less well off. In reporting the findings, the UCLA team wrote: "This strong and uniform rise in black alienation from American social institutions is the single clearest and most consistent change observed from any of the items we have examined. . Careful inspection of responses shows that this rising discontent occurred among black men and women, as well as across educational and income levels. With respect to the effects of income level, however, there is an unexpected twist.... Analysis of this 'Ethnic Alienation from American Society' measure showed, critically, that the rise in discontent was strongest among black households whose incomes were $50,000 or higher." The researchers concluded: "Our own data strongly confirm that middle class blacks continue to feel the burdens of discrimination."

In a press release, Lawrence Bobo, a UCLA sociologist who directed the survey, added, "These are people of high accomplishment and who have worked hard for what they have achieved. As far as they are concerned, however, what happened to Rodney King can just as easily befall any of them. Given all the dues they have paid, and all the contributions the black middle class has made, these events--especially the jury verdict--came as a jolt of racial injustice."

It's quite possible that the leap in alienation recorded by Bobo and company was an ephemeral phenomenon, nothing more than a passing wave of anger generated by an extraordinary event. The entire country, after all, seemed in a state of shock over the verdict in Simi Valley. But that does not account for the sentiments registered before the verdict, when so many blacks who were doing well seemed to be so very unhappy. So many seemed in a state of raging discontent. And much of America, I am sure, has not a ghost of a notion why.

In the pages that follow, individuals of substantial accomplishment explain why they are angry. In some cases, they have given up hope that the covenant will ever be honored. Others hold on to the dream that it eventually will. What they have to say will surprise those who assume that the black middle class has it made. But even many who admit the legitimacy of the complaints will be disinclined to care. For the problems of the black middle class, they will argue, pale by comparison with those of the underclass, the group that truly deserves our attention.

That response would be a grave mistake. Formidable though the difficulties of the so-called underclass are, America can hardly afford to use the plight of the black poor as an excuse for blinding itself to the difficulties of the black upwardly mobile. For one thing, though the problems of the two classes are not altogether the same, they are in some respects linked. Moreover, one must at least consider the possibility that a nation which embitters those struggling hardest to believe in it and work within its established systems is seriously undermining any effort to provide would-be hustlers and dope dealers with an attractive alternative to the streets. But whatever one believes about the relative merits of the grievances expressed by the different economic classes, clearly the troubles of one do not cancel out the concerns of the other.

Obviously, blacks are not America's only group still wrestling with how--or whether--to fit into the mainstream. Hispanics, Asians, and other ethnic minorities, as well as women, also experience stereotyping and chauvinism. Others claim bias because of sexual orientation or age. And increasingly, even young straight white men see themselves as victims of discrimination. (A national survey of American youth conducted in 1991 by Peter Hart Research Associates found whites more likely to believe that "qualified whites" were hurt by affirmative action than that "qualified minorities" were harmed by racial discrimination.) The histories and current experiences of all these groups differ too much to lump them together in one coherent analysis. In focusing on the predicament of blacks, and specifically of those who belong to the middle class, I do not intend to imply that the concerns of others are trivial, or that there are no similarities between their situation and that of blacks, or no common lessons to be divined. In reality, the opposite is true.

Yet even in this age of "diversity" and multiculturalism, the status of blacks in American society rates special attention. No other racial group in America's history has endured as much rejection on the path to acceptance. No other group has stared so longingly and for so long at what Sharon Collins, a University of Illinois sociologist, calls "the final door." And no other group remains so uncertain of admittance.

Racial discussions tend to be conducted at one of two levels--either in shouts or in whispers. The shouters are generally so twisted by pain or ignorance that spectators tune them out. The whispers are so afraid of the sting of truth that they avoid saying much of anything at all.

Those profiled in the following pages are neither shouting nor whispering. They are trying, in a more honest manner than is generally encouraged, to explain how race affects their lives and the lives of those they care about. They are passionately, often eloquently, sometimes anonymously bearing witness. Their hope and mine--is that their voices will be heard.
 

chapter one Why Successful People

Cry the Blues
 
 
 
 
 

IN OCTOBER 1992, EDWARD KOCH, THE FORMER, THE FORMER mayor of New York, delivered what was billed as a major lecture on race at New York University. I opted not to attend, largely because I couldn't imagine that Koch, given what seemed to be a tin ear for racial harmonics, could do the subject justice. Nonetheless, when he sent me--and, I'm sure, a long list of others--a copy of his remarks along with a note calling race and its impact on society "the most important subject facing the United States," I was seized with curiosity.

I found that instead of dwelling on polarizing sentiments of the sort he had been identified with in the past, Koch had produced a serious and thoughtfully nuanced essay. In it, he documented--and strongly denounced--widespread, continuing racial discrimination, discussing with sensitivity and insight the indignities American society imposes on "the individual black . . . every day of his or her life."

But racism, he insisted, was not a permanent feature of American life and could eventually be licked--though not through quotas, and not until black violence was dealt with honestly, and not as long as so many black and Hispanic youths were "disaffiliated from society." Koch proposed to combat such disaffection through universal national service that would compel everyone temporarily to relocate and thereby "take those who . . . are disaffiliated out of their environment." He also spoke in favor of more education and employment training programs, and more federal jails. And he issued a blunt and passionate call to put " facts above preconception": "Because we are not willing to face up to the importance of who we are and where we come from, we will never have the candid dialogue and the real debate we should have. "

I spoke with Koch shortly after reading his speech, and he told me he had worked extremely hard on it. I said I thought it showed, and that though I disagreed with some of his opinions and prescriptions, I emphatically agreed with what I took to be his central point, that Americans are afraid to talk honestly about race. The reason for prevarication, to Koch, seemed quite apparent. Many whites fear that "if they talk honestly they'll be called a racist," while many blacks, he conjectured, were scared they'd be called Uncle Toms.

I told him I suspected blacks were less afraid of being called Uncle Toms than of being penalized for speaking out against racial inequities, and that his concept of universal service did not even begin to come to grips with the principal causes of alienation. Koch argued that unless I had a better solution, his was certainly worth a try, pointing to Israel and how it had taken in "one hundred and twenty different races and ethnic groups and . . . melded them into one nation."

While it's no doubt true that removing people from slums and placing them in a more wholesome environment could go a long way toward reducing crime (if only because it would expose some young delinquents to a more productive set of goals), it doesn't follow that it would do much to reduce alienation. Many welleducated, affluent blacks have already found their way out of inner-city ghettos, yet they have not escaped America's myriad racial demons. Consequently, they remain either estranged or in a state of emotional turmoil.

Even if black alienation and black crime could be lessened merely by putting young blacks into the American equivalent of kibbutzim, there is little reason to believe the result would be an end to discrimination against blacks. Notwithstanding currently fashionable arguments that blame white racism on black crime, it's unlikely that discrimination against certifiably "safe" blacks stems Primarily from fear of black violence. Black executives, for instance, are not barred from private country clubs because white members fear their African-American peers will rob them. Nor do black associates in law firms have such difficulty advancing because white partners fear that black lawyers will rape their wives. Something other than anxiety over black crime is at work--something that lowering the black crime rate (desirable though that is) or even taking young blacks out of their environment (beneficial though that may be) will not necessarily change.

Edward W. Jones, a black management consultant who specializes in racial issues, agrees with Koch that an honest dialogue on race is urgently required, but he views the issue very differently from the former mayor. "If we think just education, middle-class values, and proper enunciation will be adequate, we're making a serious mistake," says Jones. The problem, as he sees it, is not merely (or even mostly) black attitudes, but those of whites who still retain so much power over black lives: "As a numerical minority . . . the only power we've really got is to be sure that we define the problem correctly."

One could argue ad inhn~tum over Jones's assessment of the limits of black power. What one cannot refute, however, is the reality of the perceptual chasm separating so many blacks and whites. The problem is not only that we are afraid to talk to one another, it is also that we are disinclined to listen. And even when the will to understand is present, often the ability (gained through analogous experiences) is not.

In some respects, the answer to "Why are these people so angry?" is not at all simple. For one thing, none are angry all the time. A few deny their anger even as they show it. And while all African Americans, in one way or another, have spent their lives coping with racial demons, the impact has not been identical. Some have been beaten into an almost numb submission, into accepting that they will never reach the goals they once thought possible. Others have refused to accept that being black means being treated as a lesser human being, and they respond to each insult with furious indignation. A number wonder whether, given the blessings they have received, they have any right to be angry at all.
 

The sketches that follow are offered not only to give a sense of why some middle-class blacks are angry, but to put that anger in the context of the hopes, fears, and insecurities that come with being human, irrespective of race.
 
 
 

The Trade Association Vice President
 

To the world, he presents a charming, self-assured facade, yet he often wonders whether his career is in a terminal stall. He has been with the trade association for more than a decade, having previously held an array of impressive-sounding jobs in sales, government, research, and marketing. But despite his experience, his law degree, his lofty title, and a personality that makes him a natural diplomat, he has been given responsibility for little more than "minority affairs."

It is an assignment, he acknowledges, that no one else in the organization wanted or "would care to be associated with." And though he accepted it enthusiastically, he has come to realize that the minority affairs portfolio is not one that will do him any good. The topic of progress for minorities, he is convinced, "conjures up feelings of confusion and guilt" among whites within his industry.

He did not reach that conclusion lightly, or even on his own. He was guided toward it largely by a former boss who, in a moment of comradely candor, told him why his career had run into a ditch. Though he did his job extremely well, the former boss said, no one really appreciated him: "When they look at you, they see black issues, problems.... They don't like what you do."

That his superiors considered his work unimportant had been clear to him all along. All other department heads regularly presented reports to the board of directors, but he had to plead for the privilege. His entire budget was smaller than the salaries of certain high-ranking executives in the association, and one-third that of the next smallest department. For years he had begged for additional assignments, but his entreaties had been spurned. The manager of government relations had refused, point blank, to work with him, citing the inviolability of turf. No other coworker had rejected him quite so bluntly, but word had gotten back that some felt he was too much a self-promoter. "They see you as having too much power, and they don't want to do any more to augment that," a friendly white colleague had told him. In response to such feedback, he had resolutely lowered his profile, sharply cutting back on speeches and participation in public events.

"I brought to this job a lot of experience," he gloomily observed, yet he now felt trapped in an unfulfilling role that tapped only a fraction of his potential. And he didn't see things changing for the better any time soon. In the old days, when black issues were in vogue, he felt he and his department had a certain amount of clout, or at least that he commanded "a sort of reluctant respect." He feared, however, that the industry no longer believed race relations to be a problem worthy of attention. And to make matters worse, he had stayed in his present job long enough and become so visible in it that he had been pigeonholed as an affirmative-action man.

"I would have been gone a long time ago," he confessed, but noted that the jobs he had thus far been offered either paid less or promised a similar set of frustrations. So he was resigned, for the present, to staying where he was as he tried to focus on the positive aspects of his situation. He had a decent salary, a good deal of autonomy, and a certainty that he was doing something worthwhile, despite the attitude of his employers.

Yet he could not help but feel dissatisfied and more than a little bit bitter; and at one point, during a lengthy conversation, he turned to me and asked, "Am I the only one who feels this way?"
 
 
 

The Partner
 

He is one of the nation's most successful lawyers, comfortably ensconced at a prestigious East Coast firm that would not even have granted him an interview when he graduated from law school some three decades ago. Back then, he had tried to get a Wall Street job but was told that despite his degree from a topnotch school and his appointment to the law review, Negroes were not hired as Wall Street lawyers. So he had gone to work for the federal government.

A few years later, after the civil rights revolution shook the nation, the private sector began to open up. In the late 1960s, major law firms began very tentatively to recruit blacks. "Everybody wanted one, " he recalls. And he intended to take advantage of the shift in the winds. Moreover, he felt he understood the kind of attitude he had to demonstrate in order to get a job. "I knew white folks. I knew how to deal with them." He understood how to ask "nonconfrontational questions" and how to appear "calm and deliberate."

He talked to several firms. Many of the interviewers lied, denying that racism existed in their establishments, and concocting any nurnber of excuses for not having employed blacks. But one firm was different. The partners acknowledged that they had discriminated in the past but said they were prepared to change and share power. He was impressed with their honesty and their general approach, but not without reservations. Through no fault of his own, he pointed out, he had been denied entry to a major law firm, and he did not want to be penalized for that. Provided he could prove his worth, he did not want to be kept on a string forever, but to be made a partner straightaway. They agreed, and he came aboard. The year was 1970.

For a while, struggling to adjust to the ways of the firm, he felt embarrassingly adrift. Having always worked for the government, he had no idea how to bill his time, and nobody volunteered to show him. So he resolved to figure it out on his own: "I would go in on Saturday and sneak into people's offices to see what in the fuck they were doing." He persevered and eventually prospered, largely, he believes, because he mastered an obvious and supremely important lesson: "If I was valuable to the bottom line, a lot of that racial shit would be overcome."

His court appearances were a source of pride, but also of annoyance. Though he generally did well, he sensed that he was not really seen as a litigator but as a black litigator. "I would go to court and do a workmanlike job, nothing special," and receive rave reviews, not only from colleagues but from judges. "They were impressed with me because their assumption was that I should have been dumb and ignorant." In that sense, he acknowledges, his color was probably an advantage: "Being black and competent, I had more visibility, and I got more credit."

His growing stature within the firm did not end his partners' racial insensitivity. They continued to hold important meetings at a private club that did not admit blacks unless they were accompanied by a member. Rather than do business in a place where he felt so unwelcome, he simply opted not to attend. Finally he was confronted by a Jewish partner who demanded to know the reason for his boycott. "I told him that going to that club was, for me, like going to a club that idolized Hitler would be for him." The partners eventually stopped meeting at the place, but he is convinced that the firm remains less than hospitable to blacks.

When he was made a partner, a little less than three years after signing up, his first act was to request his personnel file. What he saw astounded him and confirmed his impression that many factors considered relevant to partnership potential were idiotically idiosyncratic. He discovered that one partner, disapproving of his Afro hairstyle, had fretted over his "bushy" appearance. Another had worried that clients might not accept him. Yet another, noting that he had worked for a civil rights agency, wondered whether his politics might not be too radical.

At partnership meetings where the future of associates is determined, he still sees evidence of subjective criteria being used to weed blacks out. "Someone will say, 'Tom Jones is a wonderful lawyer. He really has a lot to offer. However . . .' One has to look out for the 'however.' I've seen them destroy people with the 'however.' " Too often, he says, the "however" is followed by criticisms like "he cannot perform on a day to day basis, or at a certain level," phrases that seem to say something but in reality say nothing at all. When he hears such comments directed at talented blacks, he makes a point of stopping the conversation to demand clarification. In so doing, he says, he can keep a career from being destroyed out of unconscious and unthinking prejudice: "By being there, I can prevent that from happening to a black associate.... Once you do that, people back off; but if you're not there . . . nobody's going to question this stuff."

Because such subtle discrimination continues, he worries about his children and those of his black peers, For he believes they are inheriting a world that is in some respects more treacherous than the one in which he came of age. "In the sixties, you knew white people didn't like black folks," he says, but today things are not so clear. Consequently, raising children presents an extraordinary predicament. "You educate your kids with the hope they will be given a fair shot," which means shielding them from racial rejection. But the result is that they may not be ready for the "street fight" he is sure they will face in the white world: "This is the goddamn dilemma. And that is why I have this rage."

His views on racial progress in general have a distinctly pessimistic cast. He is convinced that a ceiling exists for most African Americans, that black skin is still equated by many in the business community with a lowering of standards, and that nothing much will change that. "I don't care how good blacks become. If blacks were all educated, all went to school, and all got the best grades . . . it wouldn't help us. It would probably increase our frustration.

For individual blacks, he sees some protection in "becoming valuable" by making money for the enterprise. But discrimination, he believes, will be a constant. "We fought some fights," he says, "but the kids are going to have to fight this fight again." He adds softly, almost prayerfully, "I don't want my kids to have to go through this shit."

The Journalist
 

Joel Dreyfuss is editor of PC Magazine, the nation's number-one publication for owners of personal computers. He is a man with a reputation for speaking his mind--a reputation that has not always served him well, in his view. His journalistic talent has landed him a host of impressive positions: reporter for the Washington Post, managing editor for Black Enterprise, New York bureau chief for USA Today, Tokyo bureau chief for Fortune. But an unfair perception of him as a racial rabble-rouser, he believes, has limited his success.

Dreyfuss, whose parents are Haitian, grew up shuttling among Haiti, Africa, and the United States, in the tow of a father attached to the United Nations. He settled in New York, more or less for good, at the age of fifteen. When he enrolled in school, he found that despite his elite prior education, he was immediately "put in a class of basketball players. " Shortly thereafter, he took an exam, and a counselor told him in apparent astonishment that he had done extremely well. He found the counselor's attitude bewildering, since until then he had always been expected to do well.

The reassessment of his abilities gained him entry to an honors program whose ethnic composition left him puzzled. In a school that was roughly 90 percent black and Hispanic, the honors program was 90 percent white. To all appearances, they had "created a school for white kids within the school. " He entered City College] of New York in the mid-1960s, before the open admissions policy, at a time when CCNY was considered one of the best schools in the city. The white students often asked him how he had managed to get in.

With the country caught up in the throes of rebellion, his interest in journalism blossomed. In addition to seeing journalism as force for social reform, he saw it as something of a family tradition; his father, years previously, had been publisher of an English-language paper in Haiti. Dreyfuss got a job at the Associated Press, where one evening, while helping to edit copy, he saw an AP story about three black men who had been accused of a crime. He questioned whether the racial identification was appropriate, citing AP policy prohibiting the use of racial designations unless they were somehow relevant to the story. The editor, in explaining why race was in fact relevant, asked, "Aren't blacks arming themselves?"

For Dreyfuss, the incident was a turning point. "I became outraged and I remained outraged for about twenty years." At that moment he realized that when faced with issues involving race, normally intelligent whites could become "irrational" and "would violate their own rules." He found support for that view a short while later when he went to work for the New York Post, where an editor involved in his hiring remarked, "Your people are trying to destroy us."

Such foolishness from editors fueled Dreyfuss's desire to seek change. He pushed his bosses to hire more blacks and criticized coverage he considered particularly witless. Not surprisingly, some found his outspokenness annoying, but his journalistic gifts nonetheless made him a standout. At the Washington Post, where Dreyfuss worked after leaving New York, an editor was so impressed that she took him aside to tell him that he was doing a terrific job. "How do we get more blacks as good as Joel Dreyfuss?" she asked. Dreyfuss found the remark offensive, and told her as much.

As a result of his propensity for rubbing editors the wrong way with his racial consciousness-raising, Dreyfuss was denied a coveted transfer to the California bureau. Ben Bridle, then executive editor, acknowledged his abilities but told him that he was "a pain in the ass." The Bridle kiss-off became a footnote in the Bridle legend and cemented Dreyfuss's reputation as a troublemaker. For years after he left the Post, recalls Dreyfuss, the widely reported Bridle remark "made it difficult for me to get a job in the mainstream media."

He tried, often at great emotional price, to live his reputation down, and learned to keep his mouth shut even when events outraged him. Yet nearly two decades after that episode, "there are still a lot of people who view me as a dangerous subversive.... I've been told that."

For all the pain the 1960s and '70s evoke, Dreyfuss believes they allowed certain black journalists to thrive. In those days, race was major story, and blacks were essential to covering that story. As a result, a fair number of black journalists became stars. Now he believes the best reporting jobs are largely going to whites, a reflection not only of the changing nature of the news, but of the fact that most news organizations still have "a limited imagination when it comes to black people."
 
 
 

The Law Professor
 

Anita Allen, a full professor at Georgetown University Law Center, is haunted by a sense that her life has been too easy. With her Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Michigan and her law degree from Harvard, she can match credentials with academia's best and brightest. Yet she knows that in some important respects her race has given her an edge--and a burden.

When going for her Ph.D. in the 1970s, she was admitted to several top schools, even though her Graduate Record Exam scores placed her closer to the eightieth percentile than to the ninety-eighth. And after she decided on Michigan, the Ford Foundation gave her a full fellowship, even though some of her white counterparts had to struggle to make ends meet. After receiving her doctorate, while many of her classmates were striving unsuccessfully to line up coveted interviews, she got more than her share and was hired by Carnage Melon University. Not that the offer was undeserved; she did, after all, graduate in the top 10 percent of her class. And not that the academic environment was always supportive. At one point, as a doctoral candidate and teaching fellow, she was confronted by a young white man who demanded to know, "What gives you the right to teach this class?" She assumed a similar challenge would not have been made had she been male and white. Indeed, the man who recruited her for Carnegie Mellon told her, in effect, that she would not have been hired had she been white. "I'm not sure you have the power we're looking for," she recalls him saying, in assessing her intellectual ability and drive. -.

She shrugged off the slight and threw herself into her work; but despite her popularity as a philosophy professor, she soon found herself experiencing "a sense of irrelevance.'' Law school, she decided, might be a ticket to "more meaningful work."

Like her graduate school exams, her law school boards were less than stellar, but she nonetheless won acceptance to Harvard. The law school curriculum was more difficult than her course work at Michigan, and her academic struggle was compounded by a sense of being subjected to heightened scrutiny, by what she calls "the pressure of being a black person under the microscope." The pressure became so intense that she suffered depression and migraine headaches, and her physician put her on antiseizure drugs.
 

Away from school, the race-related tension did not abate. On her first day as a summer associate at a Wall Street firm, she was asked to write a memo explaining why private clubs had a constitutional right to exclude women and minorities. Then she expressed her disapproval of discrimination, the partner dismissed her objection as irrelevant, telling her he was not interested in "sociological considerations."

Despite the initial discomfort, she did well that summer, and after receiving her law doctorate, waltzed into a job with the tony white-shoe firm of Cravath, Swaine and Moore. Here, as at Carnegie Mellon, she was bluntly informed that she had not been hired for her intellectual firepower. The partner who offered her the position told her she had the worst grades he had ever seen but that she made up for this deficiency with her poise and articulateness.

"I've been a very lucky person," she says, without irony. She got a good education, thanks in large part to affirmative action, and she has been helped at many points along the way, perhaps more than her white counterparts. Not that she got something for nothing. She has always worked extremely hard, habitually showing up at work around seven in the morning and staying until late at night.

Moreover, she has faced heartache and hurdles at every step. When she and another lawyer at Cravath, Swaine were meeting with an important client, for instance, her colleague announced he had to leave early, but paused long enough to reassure the client about her abilities. She was hurt that he felt it necessary to do that--enough so that years later the incident stands out in her mind. She is unsure whether the gesture was a comment on her race, her gender, her youthfulness, or all three, but she attributed it to race. "Just a feeling I had," she says. Yet notwithstanding such minor humiliations, she always felt she could succeed at the firm. And she left of her own volition, having decided to give the academic track another try.

As a Georgetown law professor, she again absorbed racial blows. After addressing the American Association of University Professors on the issue of "discriminatory harassment on campuses," she found herself talking to a middle-aged white man who explained that she should not take offense at being called a jungle bunny because "you are cute and so are bunnies." On another occasion, a white scholar said she reminded him of his family's former maid. And once, "on a hot day in which I had my kinky hair tied back in a bandanna," wrote Allen in the Berkeley Women's Law Journal, "a white colleague innocently remarked that I looked like comedian Eddie Murphy's parody of [the 'Our Gang' television series character] Buckwheat." All the comments registered, all caused pain, but she feels that none of this boorishness really stood in her way.

After her fourth year at Georgetown, she was awarded tenure by a unanimous vote, strictly on the merits of her case, she believes. She estimates that she had produced the second highest number of publications of any member of the faculty, and as her colleagues were well aware, she was being pursued by law schools at Stanford, Michigan, Berkeley, and elsewhere. Eventually even Harvard came calling, and she accepted the invitation of Dean Robert Clark to be a visiting professor during the 1990 91 academic year.

In taking the offer, she was really consenting to an elaborate dance that would conclude with her appointment to the Harvard faculty if everything went well. The pressure was intense, and the dance was very public: Allen arrived shortly after Derrick Bell renowned scholar and Harvard Law School's first black faculty member, announced that he was taking a leave of absence in protest, and would neither accept his $120,000 salary nor return to the school until a black woman was hired for the permanent faculty. Bell's ultimatum became a big story in the press and threw much of the Harvard community into turmoil.

Allen tried to concentrate on her work. After her stint was done, she returned to Georgetown, hopeful that she had performed well enough to be tapped for a permanent post. Instead, she got a call from a supporter at Harvard who suggested that her candidacy should probably be tabled until the political situation calmed down. It was. Shortly thereafter, she heard that Harvard had made offers to four white males.
 

"Not getting that job offer was the first time I had gone for something and I didn't get it," she says. And the fact that the rejection was so public made the pain much harder to take. She had always assumed the powers that be at Harvard were not merely playing a game, that they knew her and her record and would not have invited her if she did not stand a chance. She also knew that whatever insufficiencies they could find in her transcript, she had an outstanding professional track record. She had completed a book during her first year at Georgetown, and had both a doctorate in philosophy and a law degree. She could not understand Harvard's refusal to hire her, or even to accord her the courtesy of an official explanation. But neither is she sure she has much ground for complaint, only that the experience was galling: "I've had a lot of pain in my life over what might seem to some [to be] very small things."

Still, it is more than the personal sense of rejection that bothers her; Allen sees in the Harvard ordeal portents of a larger and disturbing trend. In the Berkeley Women's Law Journal article, she wrote: "Even successful black women students have felt out of place within higher education. And in the post-civil rights era, black women educators have been made to feel unwelcome. Long before the media caught wind of the controversy over hiring women of color, black women knew that many on campus privately raised the question I wasonce asked publicly: 'What gives you the right to teach this class?" Among the other lessons Allen has learned is "the fact that including black women in higher education arouses inherent suspicion."
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

The Management Consultant
 

Lennox Joseph is executive director and chief executive officer of NTL(NationalTraining Laboratories) Institute, an Alexandria, Virginia-based firm that specializes in workshops, conferences, and other activities aimed at making executives into better managers. He has a Ph.D. in organizational behavior and analysis from Case Western Reserve University and is a respected member of the applied social sciences community. Yet he is troubled. "I have had hell to pay for where I am today," says Joseph, whose melodious voice retains more than a trace of his native Trinidad.

Joseph came to Alexandria by way of Cleveland, where he worked in governmental social programs and was later head of a management consulting group. He left because "I couldn't stand the racism." Joseph recalls going to a nightclub in 1988, a few months before deciding to relocate. Several whites had entered the club before him, but he and a black physician friend were politely rebuffed: " All of a sudden, the club had become 'private.' " A few weeks later, at another club, a black friend who was supposed to meet him inside was turned away at the door. Angry and frustrated, Joseph began to think about moving to a city where his personal comfort level might be higher. Atlanta, Philadelphia, and the D.C. area all seemed to be reasonable alternatives, so he began a job search and accepted the position of director of operations of NTL.

He did well enough that he was soon asked to take the organization's top job, but he was unsure what to make of the offer. For one thing, the title was being changed from president to executive director--almost as if the board intended to signal that "president" was a bit much for Joseph to carry. Not that he didn't have his own doubts about how effectively he could function as NTL's leader. Though he had wealth of professional credentials, he was young--in his mid-thirties--and somewhat unproven. Moreover, he would be the first black person to hold the position, and the board seemed less than totally supportive. "No one was saying, 'Come on Lennox, you'll be great.' " Instead, at least on the part of a few board members, he sensed an attitude that he should be grateful for whatever salary and compensation package they decided to give him. He also sensed resistance from a few people on staff. The woman in charge of marketing, for instance, could never seem to find time to put together a press release announcing his promotion.

Whether or to what extent such resistance was racial was impossible to tell with any precision. But Joseph felt a need, more intense than many white executives might have felt, to build support for himself within NTL. Upon being made executive director, he threw himself into an almost constant round of dinners and meetings with the huge cadre of consultants through which NTL did much of its work. In addition, he held a series of management retreats where an expert in group dynamics encouraged the consultants to explore their feelings about the new boss. At one retreat, at the expert's urging, a consultant drew a picture of how he saw Joseph in relation to himself, showing Joseph as a child being physically supported by the consultant. Joseph found the image indicative of a depressing lack of confidence. It told him that despite his academic accomplishments and international reputation, he was not being taken seriously.

His response was to work even harder at proving himself and v./inning acceptance. In one five-month period, he took only two weekends off, working virtually around the clock. He appeared in the office at 6:00 A.M. and did not leave until well after dark. The strain of maintaining that schedule left him on the verge of collapse. His social life had vanished, he was putting on weight, and he felt emotionally exhausted. After he suffered a serious blood clot, his physician hospitalized him for a week.

The experience was sobering and made him face up to the effects of the stress he was inflicting on himself. It helped him resolve not only to take better care of himself, but to put his life and its pressures in perspective. Certain burdens, he recognized, would inevitably fall on people like himself--pioneers in areas where few members of the race had gone before. During difficult times, he would remind himself that he and others like him had a special mission, that "part of our role is to create space for other black people to follow us." And despite the stress he would draw a measure of peace from the knowledge that he was "helping to move the race forward."
 

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