Write discussion at least 500 words in Sociology
What do you conclude about racism and racial identity in reading # 31 (Showing my Color by Clarence Page)? Do you think the readings is still relevant today? (3 pts)
The sociologists William Wilson argues that social class is more important than race in determining the life chances of African Americans. Please present his argument and state if you agree with him or not and why. (5 pts)
Showing My Color
As you know, the circumstances that we inherit at birth (sometimes called social capital ) affect what happens to us in life. Some of us are born poor, others rich, and most of us in between. Some of us are born to single mothers, others to married parents; some to parents who are college graduates, others to parents who have not finished high school. Even our geography (South, West, rural, urban) sets up background factors that play a significant role in our orientations to life. Sociologists use the term life chances to refer to how the background factors that surround our birth affect our fate in life. In the United States, race–ethnicity is a major divide. It opens and closes doors of opportunity and privilege. It is a primary source of identity, uniting us with some people, while separating us from others. Although race–ethnicity becomes a vital part of our identity, as with other concepts, we are not born with an awareness of race or ethnicity. These we learn from others around us, which can be a jarring experience. In this selection, Page, a journalist, recounts how he learned that he was a black in a white society. He also shares examples of what this has meant for his life.
R ACE HAS LONG HAD A RUDE PRESENCE in my life. While visiting relatives in Alabama as a child in the 1950s, I first saw water fountains marked “white” and “colored.” I vaguely recall being excited. I rushed over to the one marked “colored” and turned it on, only to find, to my deep disappointment, that the water came out clear, just like the water back home in Ohio. “Segregation,” my dad said. I’d never heard the word before. My southernborn parents explained that it was something the white folks “down home” practiced. Some “home.” Yet unpleasant experiences in the North already had taught me a more genteel, yet no less limiting, version. “There are places white people don’t want colored to go,” my elders told me in their soft southern accents, “and white people make the rules.” We had plenty of segregation like that in the North. We just
didn’t have the signs, which made it cheaper and easier to deny. We could look out of my schoolhouse window to see a public swimming pool closed to nonwhites. We had to go across town to the separate-but-equal “pool for colored.” The steel mill that was our town’s biggest employer held separate picnics for colored and white employees, which seemed to be just fine with the employees. Everyone had a good time, separately and unequally. I think the colored folks, who today would be called the “black community,” were just happy to have something to call their own. When I was about six years old, I saw a television commercial for an amusement park near the southern Ohio factory town where I grew up. I chose to go. I told my parents. They looked at each other sadly and informed me that “little colored kids can’t go there.” I was crushed. “I wish I was white,” I told my parents. “No, you don’t!” Mom snapped. She gave me a look terrible enough to persuade me instantly that no, I didn’t.
“Well, maybe for a few minutes, anyway?” I asked. “Just long enough for me to get past the front gate?” Then I could show them, I thought. I remember I wanted to show them what a terrific kid I was. I felt sorry for the little white children who would be deprived of getting to know me. Throughout our childhood years, my friendships with white schoolchildren (and with Pancho from the only Latino family in the neighborhood) proceeded without interruption. Except for the occasional tiff over some injudicious use of the N-word or some other slur we had picked up from our elders, we played in each other’s backyards as congenially as Spanky, Buckwheat, and the rest of the gang on the old Hal Roach Our Gang comedies we used to watch on television. Yet it quickly became apparent to me that my white friends were growing up in a different reality from the one to which I was accustomed. I could tell from the way one white friend happily discussed his weekend at LeSourdesville Lake that he did not have a clue of my reality. “Have you been?” he asked.
“Colored can’t go there,” I said, somewhat astonished that he had not noticed. “Oh, that can’t be,” he said. For a moment, I perked up, wondering if the park’s policy had changed. “Have you seen any colored people there?” I asked. My white friend thought for a moment, then realized that he had not. He expressed surprise. I was surprised that he was surprised. By the time I reached high school in the early 1960s, LeSourdesville Lake would relax its racial prohibitions. But the lessons of it stuck with me. It taught me how easily white people could ignore the segregation problem because, from their vantage point, it was not necessarily a problem. It was not necessarily an advantage to them, either, although some undoubtedly thought so. White people of low income, high insecurity, or fragile ego could always say that, no matter how badly off they felt, at least they were not black. Segregation helped them uphold and maintain this illusion of superiority. Even those white people who considered themselves to have a well-developed sense of social conscience could easily rationalize segregation as something that was good for both races. We played unwittingly into this illusion, I thought, when my friends and I began junior high school and, suddenly thrust into the edgy, high hormonal world of adolescence, quickly gravitated into social cliques according to tastes and race. It became even more apparent to me that my white friends and I were growing up in parallel realities , not unlike the parallel universes described in the science fiction novels and comic books I adored—or the “parallel realities” experienced by Serbs, Bosnians, and Croatians as described years later by feminist writer Slavenka Drakulic in The Balkan Express . Even as the evil walls of legal segregation were tumbling down, thanks to the hard-fought struggles of the civil rights movement, it occurred to me that my reality might never be quite the same as that experienced by my white friends. We were doomed, I felt, to dwell in our parallel realities. Separated by thick walls of prejudice, we would view each other through windows of stained-glass perceptions, colored by our personal experiences.
My parents had taught me well. “Don’t be showin’ yo’ color,” my parents would admonish me in my youth, before we would go out in public, especially among white folks. The phrase had special meaning in Negro conversations. Imbued with many subtle meanings and nuances, the showing of one’s “color” could be an expression of chastisement or warning, admonishment or adulation, satire or self-hatred, anger or celebration. It could mean acting out or showing anger in a loud and uncivilized way. Its cultural origins could be traced to the Africa-rooted tradition of “signifying,” a form of witty, deliberately provocative, occasionally combative word play. The thrill of the game comes from taking one’s opponent close to the edge of tolerable insult. Few subjects—except perhaps sex itself—could be a more sensitive matter between black people than talk about someone else’s “color.” The showing of one’s “color” then, connoted the display of the very worst stereotypes anyone ever dreamed up about how black people behaved. “White people are not really white,” James Baldwin wrote in 1961, “but colored people can sometimes be extremely colored.” Sometimes you can still hear black people say in the heat of frustration, “I almost showed my color today,” which is a way of saying they almost lost their “cool,” “dropped the mask,” or “went off.” Losing one’s cool can be a capital offense by black standards, for it shows weakness in a world in which spiritual rigor is one of the few things we can call our own. Those who keep their cool repress their “color.” It is cool, in other words, to be colorless. Showing My Color (the title of the book from which this reading is taken) emerged from my fuming discontent with the current fashions of racial denial , steadfast repudiations of the difference race continues to make in American life. Old liberals, particularly white liberals who have become new conservatives, charge that racial pride and color consciousness threaten to “Balkanize” American life, as if it ever was a model of unity. Many demand that we “get past race.” But denials of a cancer, no matter how vigorous they may be, will not make the malignancy go away.
No less august a voice than the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has taken to arguing in the 1990s for a “color-blind” approach to civil rights law, the area of American society in which color and gender consciousness have made the most dramatic improvement in equalizing opportunities. The words of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., have been perverted to support this view. Most frequently quoted is his oft-stated dream of the day when everyone would “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” I would argue that King never intended for us to forget all about color. Even in his historic “I Have a Dream” speech, from which this line most often is lifted, he also pressed the less-often quoted but piquantly salient point about “the promissory note” America gave freed slaves, which, when they presented it, was returned to them marked “insufficient funds.”
I would argue that too much has been made of the virtue of “color blindness.” I don’t want Americans to be blind to my color as long as color continues to make a profound difference in determining life chances and opportunities. Nor do I wish to see so significant a part of my identity denied. “Ethnic differences are the very essence of cultural diversity and national creativity,” black social critic Albert Murray wrote in The Omni-Americans (1970). “The problem is not the existence of ethnic differences, as is so often assumed, but the intrusion of such differences into areas where they do not belong.”
Where, then do they belong? Diversity is enriching, but race intrudes rudely on the individual’s attempts to define his or her own identity. I used to be “colored.” Then I was “Negro.” Then I became “black.” Then I became “African-American.” Today I am a “person of color.” In three decades, I have been transformed from a “colored person” to a “person of color.” Are you keeping up with me?
Changes in what we black people call ourselves are quite annoying to some white people, which is its own reward to some black people. But if white people are confused, so are quite a few black people. There is no one way to be black. We are a diverse people amid a nation of diverse people. Some black people are nationalists who don’t want anything to do with white people. Some black people are assimilationists who don’t want anything to do with other black people. Some black people are integrationists who move in and out of various groups with remarkable ease. Some of us can be any of the three at any given time, depending on when you happen to run into us.
Growing up as part of a minority can expose the individual to horrible bouts of identity confusion. I used to think of myself as something of a transracial man , a figure no less frustrated than a transsexual who feels trapped in the body of something unfamiliar and inappropriate to his or her inner self.
These bouts were most torturous during adolescence, the period of life when, trembling with the shock of nascent independence from the ways of one’s elders, the budding individual stitches together the fragile garments of an identity to be worn into adulthood. Stuttering and uncooperative motor skills left me severely challenged in dancing, basket shooting, and various social applications; I felt woefully inadequate to the task of being “popular” in the hot centers of black social activity at my integrated high school and college. “Are you black?” an arbiter of campus militancy demanded one day, when he “caught” me dining too many times with white friends. I had the skin pass, sure enough, but my inclinations fell well short of his standards. But I was not satisfied with the standards of his counterparts in the white world, either. If I was not “black” enough to please some blacks, I would never be “white” enough to please all whites.
Times have changed. Choices abound for black people, if we can afford them. Black people can now go anywhere they choose, as long as they can pay the bill when they get there. If anyone tries to stop them or any other minorities just because of their color, the full weight of the federal government will step in on the side of the minorities. I thank God and the hard-won gains of the civil rights revolution for my ability to have more choices. But the old rules of race have been replaced in many ways by new ones.
Today, I live a well-integrated life in the suburbs [of Montgomery County, Maryland, outside Washington, D.C.]. Black folks still tell me how to be “black” when I stray from the racial party lines, while white folks tell me how to be “color-blind.” I still feel as frustrated in my attempts to transcend race as a reluctant lemming must feel while being rushed over the brink by its herd. But I find I have plenty of company in my frustration. Integration has not been a simple task for upwardly mobile African-Americans, especially for those of us who happen also to be parents.
A few years ago, after talking to black friends who were raising teenage boys, I realized that I was about to face dilemmas not unlike those my parents faced. My son was turning three years old. Everyone was telling me that he was quite cute, and because he was the spitting image of his dad, I was the last to argue.
But it occurred to me that in another decade he would be not three but thirteen. If all goes well, somewhere along the way he is going to turn almost overnight from someone who is perceived as cute and innocent into someone who is perceived as a menace, the most feared creature on America’s urban streets today, a young black male . Before he, like me when I was barred from a childhood amusement park, would have a chance to let others get to know him, he would be judged not by the content of his character, but by the color of his skin….
My mom is gone now, after helping set me up with the sort of education that has freed me to make choices. I have chosen to move my father to a nice, predominantly white, antiseptically tidy retirement village near me in Maryland with large golf courses and swimming pools. It is the sort of place he might have scrubbed floors in but certainly not have lived in back in the old days. It has taken him a while to get used to having so many well-off white people behaving so nicely and neighborly to him, but he has made the adjustment well.
Still the ugly specter of racism does not easily vanish. He and the other hundred or so African-American residents decided to form a social club like the other ethnically or religiously based social clubs in the village. One night during their meeting in the main social room, someone scrawled KKK on little sheets of paper and slipped them under the windshields of some of their cars in the parking lot. “We think maybe some of the white people wanted the blacks to socialize with the whites, not in a separate group,” one lady of the club told me. If so, they showed an unusual method for extending the arms of brotherhood. I live in a community that worships diversity like a state religion, although individuals sometimes get tripped up by it. The excellent Spanish “immersion” program that one of the county’s “magnet” schools installed to encourage middle-class parents to stay put has itself become a cover for “white flight” by disgruntled white parents. Many of them, despite a lack of empirical evidence, perceive the school’s regular English program as inferior, simply because it is 90 percent minority and mostly composed of children who come from a less-fortunate socioeconomic background. So the Spanish immersion classes designed to encourage diversity have become almost exclusively white and Asian America, while the English classes have become almost exclusively—irony of ironies—black and Latino, with many of the children learning English as a second language. Statistically, the school is “diverse” and “integrated.” In reality, its student body is divided by an indelible wall, separate but supposedly equal….
Despite all these color-conscious efforts to educate the country’s children in a color-blind ideal of racial equality, many of our children seem to be catching on to race codes anyway, although with a twist suitable to the hiphop generation. One local junior high school teacher, when he heard his black students referring to themselves as “bad,” had the facts of racial life explained to him like this: They were not talking about the “bad means good” slang popularized by Michael Jackson’s Bad album. They meant “bad” in the sense of misbehaving and poorly motivated. The black kids are “bad,” the students explained, and the white kids are “good.” The Asian kids are “like white,” and the Latino kids “try to be bad, like the blacks.” Anyone who tried to break out of those stereotypes was trying to break the code, meaning that a black or Latino who tried to make good grades was “trying to be white.”
It is enough, as Marvin Gaye famously sang, to make you want to holler and throw up both your hands. Yet my neighbors and I hate to complain too loudly because, unlike other critics you may read or hear about, we happen to be a liberal community that not only believes in the dream of integration and true diversity, but actually is trying to live it…. We see icons of black success—Colin Powell, Douglas Wilder, Bill Cosby, Oprah Winfrey, Bryant Gumbel, the two Michaels: Jordan and Jack-son—not only accepted but adored by whites in ways far removed from the arm’s-length way white America regarded Jackie Robinson, Willie Mays, Lena Horne, and Marian Anderson.
Yet, although the media show happy images of blacks, whites, Asians, and Hispanics getting along, amicably consuming the good life, a fog of false contentment conceals menacing fissures cracking the national racial landscape. Despite the growth of the black middle class, most blacks and whites live largely separate lives. School integration actually peaked in 1967, according to a Harvard study, and has declined ever since. Economic segregation has proceeded without interruption, distancing poor blacks not only from whites but also from upwardly mobile blacks, making the isolation and misery of poor blacks worse. One out of every two black children lives below the poverty line, compared to one out of every seven white children. Black infants in America die at twice the rate of white infants. A record-setting million inmates crowd the nation’s prisons, half of them black. The black out-of-wedlock birth rate has grown from about 25 percent in 1965 to more than 60 percent (more than 90 percent in the South Bronx and other areas of concentrated black poverty)….
The decline of industrial America, along with low-skill, high-pay jobs, has left much of black America split in two along lines of class, culture, opportunity and hope. The “prepared” join the new black middle class, which grew rapidly in the 1970s and early 1980s. The unprepared populate a new culture, directly opposed not only to the predominantly white mainstream, but also to any blacks who aspire to practice the values of hard work, good English, and family loyalty that would help them to join the white mainstream. The results of this spiritual decline, along with economic decline, have been devastating. Although more black women go to college than ever before, it has become a commonplace to refer to young black males as an endangered species. New anti-black stereotypes replace the old. Prosperous, well-dressed African Americans still complain of suffering indignities when they try to hail a taxicab. The fact that the taxi that just passed them by was driven by a black cabby, native born or immigrant, makes no difference….
Behind our questions of race lurk larger questions of identity, our sense of who we are, where we belong, and where we are going. Our sense of place and peoplehood within groups is a perpetual challenge in some lives, particularly lives in America, a land where identity bubbles quite often out of nothing more than a weird alchemy of history and choice. “When I discover who I am, I’ll be free,” Ralph Ellison once wrote. I reject the melting pot metaphor. People don’t melt. Americans prove it on their ethnic holidays, in the ways they dance, in the ways they sing, in the culturally connected ways they worship. Displaced people long to celebrate their ethnic roots many generations and intermarriages after their ancestors arrived in their new land. Irish-American celebrations of St. Patrick’s Day in Boston, Chicago, and New York City are far more lavish than anything seen on that day in Dublin or Belfast. Mexican-American celebrations of Cinco de Mayo, the Fifth of May, are far more lavish in Los Angeles and San Antonio than anything seen that day in Mexico City. It is as if holidays give us permission to expose our former selves as we imagine them to be. Americans of European descent love to show their ethnic cultural backgrounds. Why do they get nervous only when black people show their love for theirs? Is it that black people on such occasions suddenly remind white people of vulnerabilities black people feel quite routinely as a minority in a majority white society? Is it that white people, by and large, do not like this feeling, that they want nothing more than to cleanse themselves of it and make sure that it does not come bubbling up again? Attempts by Americans to claim some ephemeral, all-inclusive “all-American” identity reminds me of Samuel Johnson’s observation: “Sir, a man may be so much of everything, that he is nothing of anything.”
Instead of the melting pot metaphor, I prefer the mulligan stew, a concoction my parents tell me they used to fix during the Great Depression, when there was not a lot of food around the house and they “made do” with whatever meats, vegetables, and spices they had on hand. Everything went into the pot and was stirred up, but the pieces didn’t melt. Peas were easily distinguished from carrots or potatoes. Each maintained its distinctive character. Yet each loaned its special flavor to the whole, and each absorbed some of the flavor from the others. That flavor, always unique, always changing, is the beauty of America to me, even when the pot occasionally boils over….
African Americans are as diverse as other Americans. Some become nationalistic and ethnocentric. Others become pluralistic or multicultural, fitting their black identity into a comfortable niche among other aspects of themselves and their daily lives. Whichever they choose, a comfortable identity serves to provide not only a sense of belonging and protection for the individual against the abuses of racism, but also, ultimately, a sturdy foundation from which the individual can interact effectively with other people, cultures, and situations beyond the world of blackness.
“Identity would seem to be the garment with which one covers the nakedness of the self,” James Baldwin wrote in The Devil Finds Work , “in which case, it is best that the garment be loose, a little like the robes of the desert, through which one’s nakedness can always be felt, and, sometimes, discerned. This trust in one’s nakedness is all that gives one the power to change one’s robes.” The cloak of proud black identity has provided a therapeutical warmth for my naked self after the chilly cocoon of inferiority imposed early in my life by a white-exalting society. But it is best worn loosely, lest it become as constricting and isolating for the famished individual soul as the garment it replaced. The ancestral desire of my ethnic people to be “just American” resonates in me. But I cannot forget how persistently the rudeness of race continues to intrude between me and that dream. I can defy it, but I cannot deny it….