The following conversation between a white sociologist, an African American mother, and her 15 year-old-daughter was recorded a few years back. However, it still seems to provide a rather personal exchange about how the meaning of race in America is changing, long overdue and too slowly, but for the better.
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"From then on, Enola frequently spoke for the communitarian movement, participated in our meetings, and participated as a key member of our task force on the family. In the process we became friends; not the kind who call each other regularly with "you know what happened today?!" and share intimate details of their personal lives, but of the kind who work together well and enjoy each others' company.
I was hence taken aback when one day over lunch Enola mentioned that she was ever so pleased that the summer was approaching; soon she and her family would retreat from the Yale community to Oak Bluff. "Oak Bluff?" I inquired. (I knew it to be the home of a middle-class African American community in Martha's Vineyard.) "Yes," Enola explained, "to be with my own kind." As my face must have registered some astonishment, Enola elaborated, "You know, to be able to let our hair down, to tell our kinds of jokes."
These brief comments evoked many deliberations. It does not take a PhD in sociology to realize that it is essential that community members be "comfortable" with one another and that this is much more readily achieved among people who are "of the same kind." But, at the same time, this means that communities exclude people who are different, which goes against the grain. There may be no way to expunge this tension inherent in the nature of community. There is just no way around the fact that communities draw a line between members and non-members --they aren't a railroad station. That is, by definition they exclude some people, typically many more than they include.
It saddened me, nevertheless, that the base for de facto exclusion so often is race. What would it take before a very successful, much respected, African American family would feel fully at home in the white part of Bethesda where I used to live (and for me to feel comfortable in Enola's parts of Oak Bluff)? Maybe communities of the future could build their affinity on some other social base, such as working for the same college or a shared interest in the arts. One cannot help but long for a day when communities will be made on the basis of what people chose rather than with what they inherited at birth.
While I was drafting my memoir I checked with Enola about our conversation on Oak Bluff, which took place several years earlier. This led to a number of candid exchanges by email about the relations between blacks and whites, culminating in a lunch to which Enola brought her 15-year-old daughter Leah. Enola explained that she and her family are members of many "affinity" groups that are either largely white or racially mixed and feel "comfortable" in them, but it was also true that they had special bonds with African Americans, in black-only groups. It was especially important, Enola elaborated, for her to be a member of the Jack and Jill society. Here, it was not even clear whether racially mixed couples should be admitted. A key purpose of this society is to encourage young African Americans to marry within their race. Enola pointed to the many successful African American men who marry white women, which sends a message to African Americans that they are not as worthy as whites are, feeding their inferiority complex. Hence, the need to allow, even encourage, some measure of separate social relations by race. Here is a verbatim transcript of the dialogue that ensued.
Amitai: We are talking about social life. We obviously are integrated in the classroom and at work. We can go from here in two directions. We can either segregate the social fabric and say there's nothing wrong with it. Both sides do it. Or we can see we need a mixture. We need some occasions where we can meet in our groups but we need also some situations where we meet socially across those lines. Because otherwise we're going to be a very divided society.
Enola: First of all, I don't think we have a problem. Maybe because I'm so alarmed about the rate of interracial relationships and marriage and the implications for black women, but I don't think we have a problem when it comes to people meeting socially across racial lines. . . .
Amitai: If you had a magic lever you would increase the separate tables (in campus and school cafeterias in which students tend to self-segregate by race) and decrease the social interaction?
Enola: I think, to be perfectly honest with you, I think that I'm a dying breed. I would. . .
Amitai: You said you are alarmed about the interaction?
Enola: I am because of my children. Because I have become more and more convinced through my research and my work that there's a lot of unfinished emotional business in the black community that needs to be taken care of. Particularly around issues of self-worth and relationships that we've just not attended to. As Orlando Patterson has argued in "Rituals of Blood," slavery was devastating in its effects on relationships between black men and black women and those effects are still with us today. And I think that has an effect on this whole issue.
Amitai: May I ask Leah about the same thing?
Enola: Sure.
Leah: I think that it's partially just a function of the way that I've grown up that I'm basically pretty much in favor of really integrating. The school I'm at is mostly white and a lot of my friends are white. And, they're just my friends. And I wouldn't give them up. I wouldn't give them up just because they're not my same race. And about the issue of intermarriage. I don't know it sounds like, I guess, hard to know that it might be hard for me to find someone to marry me because I'm black. But I think if people are really in love with other people they shouldn't really have much regard for their race.
Amitai: I don't think it's going to be hard for you to find people to marry you. Mark my words. Leah, one more question please. My older African American friends, present company not included, often tell me they feel discriminated against every day. When they try to get a cab, it won't stop for them; when they go to a shop, the shopkeeper keeps an eye on them thinking they're going to steal and such. Do you feel that way?
Leah: I have to admit that I don't really do a lot, mostly I just go to school. And I don't really feel that way. There was one incident when there was a lady in a store, I was there with my brother and a friend of ours and she was following us around. I mean it might have been because we were teenagers and it might have been because we were black, I don't know. But I don't feel that generally happens to me a lot, but I do believe that it does happen to some people.
There was much more of a three way conversation along the same lines, but the high points for me were Leah comments. She was clearly able to put whatever feelings of inadequacy and need to self-segregate her parents had behind her. In that sense her parents succeeded. They aspired to nurture young African Americans that could leave behind the psychologically damaging effects of the past. In Leah, they fully achieved their purpose. This was good news for all of us. I believe there is a growing sense, on both sides of the divide, not only to do right, but also to bring the matter to closure. There is a desire to bring an end to the charges and countercharges, the guilt and shame, the sense of racial "apartness," and to move toward a world in which people are judged by their personal journeys rather than by the past of the group of which they are members--by birth and pigmentation. Leah told me that this was not an idle dream."
Excerpted from My Brother's Keeper (Rowman & Littlefield 2003) by Amitai Etzioni.
