If “where are you from” is a microaggression, “do you like San Diego” might be perceived as a microaggression as well. I woke up this morning with an idea about the do no harm principle and my writing. Follow along and decide whether I have an argument.
=========
The world is very small. People know people. And I suspect the desire to do no harm will weaken my writing over time. These are examples of my most powerful writing: The Burbank Happening and Other Signs of Intelligent Life, The Souls of Black Folks, I Am Afraid of Young Surgeons The best writing is unfiltered. Honest writing poses a threat to the Black Elite.
For example, a serious proposition on the table last night was whether my wife and daughter were the first black mother-daughter graduates of Pierson College. This is not a humble brag. I reject this idea out of hand. It is the year 2024 and surely there are other black mother-daughter legacies in the land. The topic for discussion affirmed how the world and worthy conversations for discussion are curated though the filter of race.
Aside from the small talk angle, there are deeper ramifications to this proposition. Out of over 40 million Black Americans, perhaps 1/10 of 1 percent of Black Americans could relate to this conversation. Let’s use a wild-eyed guess that 40,000 black Americans would have skin in this game of “Do You Know?” Remember how I was affected by the passing on May 10 of former Harvard Law School professor Christopher Edley, Jr.? I knew Professor Edley in law school. We crossed paths. And his Dad was also a Harvard Law School graduate. Establishing family traditions at top universities and colleges is a sacred part of the race project in America. If the Bush family can have 3 generations matriculate from Yale, there should also be generations of Black Americans as well in the same situation. Tradition and legacy means the larger world has opened up.
What is the down side of the development of black Ivy League families over generations? Like a small town, everyone begins to know everyone. I attended an event at Pierson College last year. It was my wife’s 35th reunion. There were a few black alums, particularly one very vivacious black woman. She excitedly talked to us. She exuded connections, contacts and privileges. The more she talked, the more I feared I would be outed as an independent thinker who has left the reservation. She knew Professor Derrick Bell as a kid. Professor Bell wrote my recommendation to be a law professor. She summered at Martha’s Vineyard. I know people who do the same. I am a former law professor. She is married to a law professor at Harvard. (People, do not cosplay Sherlock Holmes and unearth this woman’s identity. Like Paul McCartney sings, Let It Be.)
My point is Harvard and Yale created these overlapping connections for me. I felt less free to just talk and be me. Why create tension and drama for my wife at her college reunion?
=========
If whether being the first black mother-daughter combination is being discussed earnestly and in good faith, one is no longer marginalized. One cannot recount a racist incident an ancestor faced during Reconstruction and enjoy the full privileges of marginalized status in the year 2024 in Connecticut. The world has changed. I perceive a changed world. I do not do dogma and slogan words like marginalization.
If I felt the entanglement of small social circles, I imagined how much worse it must be for adult children. They have been educated as the sons and daughters of the Ivy League at the Ivy League. Our adult children in the realm of the 40,000 or 1/10 of 1 percent know other kids in the same boat. The Obama daughters are third-generation Harvard and within one or two degrees of separation from my adult children. Michelle was my little sister in the Black Law Students Association at Harvard. My best friend from college is the Mom of a second-generation Harvard graduate. And last night, I was reminded once again how these legacy black adult children of the Ivy League will naturally gravitate towards one another. I get it.
What is the downside here? Shouldn’t it all be peaches and cream? The reality is comparable to the Old Money WASP class in America. No one is talking about these generational issues, so I will give it a go.
=========
First, there is tremendous pressure to conform and live in a sense of family. Few other black Americans will speak one’s language, understand one’s experience of private schools and prep schools and Sag Harbor and a white parent and all the rest. See Our Kind of People: Inside America’s Black Upper Class Some adult children will over compensate to belong. Blackness becomes oppression in public. Nothing else matters. My oldest son has a copy of Our Kind of People. Perhaps, his guide to living life as an authentic black young man? I’m just speculating.
Second, it becomes more and more difficult as a writer to mask identifying details about people. This weekend in particular brought it all home to me. I wrote about fascinating characters this past week in New Haven. Normally, I would be vivid, concrete and specific in my writing. But…I can’t be the writer I want to be right now. Why? The characters in my snippet are now more and more a part of my known world. Sigh. One slip up and they would know I am writing about them. So, my writing becomes more vague and abstract. The intimacy of the social class weakens my writing in the moment. (But I did enjoy the quip that someone couldn’t tell a blood kin was black/that was too funny.)
I have felt this way before.
When I wrote my book, Letters in Black and White: A New Correspondence on Race in America, my wife objected to depiction of a cousin. The cousin is a mover and shaker in the United States. As my wife elegantly put it, cousin could (and would) sue me. So much for truth in writing about family. The incident was deleted from the manuscript.
When one inhabits a tiny Black Elite in America, one as a writer benefits from dogma in a way. Independent and non-conforming words about race are dismissed. An examined life doesn’t register. There is one way to perceive life — social connections, influential contacts, the Ivy League education like Mom and/or Dad, the obligatory excitement when Auntie is initiated into Jack and Jill as a legacy, the Black Graduation Ceremony, the Kente Cloth stole, Alpha Phi Alpha, Alpha Kappa Alpha, pink and green, etc., etc., etc. The Known World This Weekend Notice how critical and dismissive the Wikipedia entry is of the Black Elite. I guess Wikipedia prefers its black people to be dumb, ignorant and unaccomplished. Ditto for Google. A Google search reveals no separate, independent entry for the book Our Kind of People: Inside Black America’s Black Upper Class by Lawrence Otis Graham.
Deviate from dogma and one’s words are air brushed out of history. This works for me sometimes as I feel more free to write with the knowledge my words are invisible to most of my family’s social class. As I once put it, my words are wished away into the corn field.
However, there is a down side to a tightly-wound world of rituals and customs and beliefs. Everyone knows everyone knows everyone. I am an old elder who grew up to be indifferent about color and race. The world of my adult children is not the world of my youth. My children are living in conforming times, so to preserve racial harmony on the home front, I am inclined to leave some details in this essay vague and masked.
Conclusion: There is a disconnect between the dogma Blackness is Oppression. Nothing Else Matters and reality. The other night, a young black woman asked me about my life growing up in Richmond, Virginia. I looked all around me, considered my adult children, and decided the young black woman could not handle the truth.
Before I could say more, an elderly black woman asked me whether I liked San Diego.