Back when I finally got to college, I read Paul Fussell's 'Class' and I have been rather fascinated ever since. The funny thing about Fussell was that he put himself in a new bucket, the 'X' class. Class restraint was all somebody else's problem, he didn't fit in the traditional definitions.
I think the traditional breakout of class has always been too clumpy to work. Upper Class, Middle Class, Lower Class doesn't cover 300 million American people well. So I've improvised. For the most part in my writing I have concentrated on the class differences between African Americans and I've done so from the point of view that geography is destiny in a post Jim Crow society. For African Americans I have used five classes.
{Hill,Hood,Ghetto,Projects,Sticks}
Much of my guidance in these matters comes from Weiss and Garreau, but also Fussell, David Brooks, Cornel West and (of all people) PJ O'Rourke. (off the top of my head)
As pertains to African America, I've been particularly curious about the fate of the Talented Tenth, what integration has done both positively and negatively for that group and those who looked up to them. Thus my interest in creating things like The Neighborhood Project.
As I look around, I wonder how well black politics is prepared to deal with the consequences of the expressed desires of African America not to be percieved as a monolith. Now that the monolith is smashed, who is going to pick of the biggest pieces and which direction are they heading with those fragments?
Taking responsibility for the Old School and Talented Tenth, I percieve our fault to be assuming that the kind of respect we got in the 'hood would translate, or that we would be always able to take it back to the 'hood. Everybody knows, or pretends to know, that we don't respect Jessie Jackson. So who do we respect? And who do we tell about it? Or does that not matter any longer? In other words was politics too much with us for the sake of that one time transition from Negro to Black to African American and now we need to recognize this is the promised land and get back to {home, church, business} and out of the public sphere.
As a Republican (and I'm fairly sure I'm in the mainstream of moderate Republicans, as few as there may be remaining), I advocate for a pro-business, commonsense, pro-family, pro-civil libertarian kind of politics of social power. This is quite distinct from the politics of liberation. So this brings me to the serious question of what to do with gap that makes (real of percieved) between the 'watchdogs / liberators' (often misnamed 'progressives') and those pushing the envelope of black politics.
You see I'm operating on the assumption that Black Culture (which I will no longer put in lower case) is the responsibility of those who surpass ordinary boundaries. As integration and emergence proceed, more and more African Americans of substance will be capable and able to do those things we've always measured ourselves by. 'The Jews do x', 'Whitefolks do y'. And while it's certainly not fair or accurate to have such 'standards' of comparison, there are Jews and whitefolks who are indeed doing some of the things that make our country great. Despite what we do or do not know about their networks, I think it is reasonable to assume that African Americans of a successful hue will clump together in autonomous networks which are multiracial, but include large interconnected black families.
As a generation who integrated predominantely white colleges and universities, black networking was significant and useful to us, both academically and socially. What becomes of the leaders of the Black Student Unions of 1984 now in the greater society in 2004? This is not simply an echo of the Black Baby Boom. There is rebellion and synthesis, but it doesn't quite have a face. Certainly not a nationally recognized one when it comes to politics.
I think Class plays a big part in this, but I don't think 'trans-class unity' is an appropriate way to identify the pull between previously proud Talented Tenthers and the black man on the street.
More later...
Posted by mbowen at January 28, 2004 06:18 PM | TrackBack