STILL HYPHENATED AMERICANS
BY JULIANNE MALVEAUX
“Why are we still celebrating Black History Month,” the young white woman
asks me. Until then, our airplane conversation had been casual,
companionable. We’d spoken of trivia for nearly an hour, of changed travel
conditions, the flight delay, of the plastic knives we’d been had handed. My
seatmate, a California college student, was traveling to Washington, DC to
visit friends, and brimmed over with questions about sightseeing in
Washington. Then she lowered her voice just a bit, asked if I minded an
“awkward” question, and asked about Black History Month.
I didn’t know whether to chuckle or to scream. Seventy-five years after
the Dr. Carter G. Woodson established Negro History week in 1926, folks are
still wondering why we should commemorate black history. WE need look no
further than the words of one of our nation’s most-quoted African Americans,
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who wrote, “The mistreatment of the Negro is as
old as the most ancient history book, and as recent as today’s newspaper.”
AS long as African American life and history are not fully represented on
newspaper pages, in the broadcast media, or in the history books, it makes
sense to commemorate African American History Month.
The Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History annually
selects a black history month theme. Their website, www.asalh.com, lists
themes for the next several years. This year, the theme is The Color Line
Revisited: Is Racism Dead? I shared the theme with my young seatmate who
assured me that class, not race, is what separates Americans. Rubbing
shoulders in the first class cabin of the plane, she wondered, “You can’t
honestly say you’ve been discriminated against in your life, have you?”
Discrimination is an institutional, not an individual phenomenon. How
else but discrimination do we explain the differentials between African
American and white income, unemployment rates, and homeownership levels.
Those simple statistics make it clear that African Americans and whites have
very different realities. If the overall unemployment rate were 9.8 percent,
as the black rate was in January, we’d be talking about a depression and
designing programs to put people back to work. Instead, President Bush’s new
budget cuts employment and training programs from $225 million to $45
million, a cut of nearly 80 percent. These programs, targeted to some of our
nation’s largest cities, provide important training to high-risk young
people, many of whom are African American. To cut such programs at this time
is tantamount to cutting the defense budget in wartime, but we know that
President Bush has done no such thing. Indeed, while job-training funds are
being slashed by millions of dollars, the President proposes increasing
defense spending by $48 billion more this year.
The nation’s indifference to high black unemployment rates speaks to the
difference in our realities. Many whites see themselves as Americans, while
African Americans are hyphenated only because our realities are hyphenated.
We’ll feel like “regular” Americans when we have “regular” experiences
(meaning, no racial profiling, among other things), when our “regular”
history is reflected in our nation’s statuary (how many cities literally have
no public monuments to African American people) and libraries.
The unemployment rate difference isn’t the only place the color line is
drawn. Seventy-one percent of all whites own their homes, compared to 48
percent of African Americans. The gap is a function of redlining and
discrimination in lending, both of which have been convincingly demonstrated
by contemporary research. But when a home is the largest asset in most
people’s portfolio, too many African Americans are denied the opportunity to
accumulate wealth when they can’t buy homes. Restrictive covenants no longer
prevent people from owning, but implicitly restrictive lending policies are
as effective today as racist covenants were two generations ago.
To be sure, the color line is fuzzier than it has ever been. Our
airwaves frequently broadcast the lifestyles of the black and beautiful – the
Oprah Winfreys, Michael Jordans, Condoleeza Rices and Colin Powells of the
world. As proud as we are of African American icons it would be foolhardy to
suggest that all black people share experiences with these icons. AT the
other end, one in four African Americans, and forty percent of African
American children live in poverty. Is racism real? No question.
We commemorate Black History Month because it is an important way to
recognize the many contributions African American people have made to our
nation, because our nation, despite the progress it has made, still fails to
systematically acknowledge black history. Until our textbooks spill over
with stories of the slaves who built our nation’s capital, the African
American patriots who fought and died for our country, and the African
American scientists whose inventions have shaped our lives, I will gleefully
commemorate African American History Month. I shouldn’t be the only one
celebrating. African American history is American history! We hyphenated
Americans are merely celebrating the hyphen that history handed us.