Black in America. Christina Jackson
most educated and financially stable Black generation by far. They have witnessed our nation’s first Black President and first Black billionaire. Blacks can be counted among the leadership in almost every industry and profession, from business to education. In the Black community, however, the substantial success of some is juxtaposed with the failure of others. The chasm between the haves and have-nots continues to widen and is redefining what it means to be Black – while race and poverty remain highly correlated, they are no longer synonymous.
The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s transformed American life, changing both the symbolic and material relationships Blacks maintained with the United States through the extension of voting rights and outlawing discrimination. Yet, in many ways, its central promise of true equality remains unfulfilled (Wilson 1978). Dr. Martin Luther King’s dream that his “four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character” is interpreted by many as the original call for society to be colorblind. But that was not all Dr. King said. In fact, that was not even the focus of his speech at the March on Washington. The reference to not being judged by the color of your skin was made in the context of addressing the material inequality that was tied to race, specifically Blackness. Far from giving permission to trivialize race and focus on individual behavior, Martin Luther King’s now famous “I Have a Dream” speech sought to define the purpose of the march, “to dramatize the shameful condition” of Blacks in America.
It is helpful to revisit Martin Luther King’s actual words,2 because the reality that motivated the March on Washington and inspired King’s speech is often overlooked. He opened bemoaning the fact that, despite the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation 100 years prior, in 1963 Blacks were still not free. He continued:
One hundred years later the life of the Negro is still badly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself in exile in his own land.
These powerful words were followed by his assertion that the 250,000 people who came to the nation’s capital that day were there “to cash a check.”
King described the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence as a “promissory note … a promise that all men – yes, Black men as well as White men – would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Yet America, King argued, had failed to honor this “sacred obligation” to Black Americans. Despite all evidence to the contrary, King still believed in the promise of liberty saying: “But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So we have come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.” He reminded America of “the fierce urgency of now” and warned that there would not be “rest” while Blacks were less than full citizens. King recounted many social ails from police brutality to the lack of a right to vote, from the ghetto to Jim Crow, and he urged Blacks to conduct civil protest with “dignity and discipline,” urging them not to be satisfied “until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
King noted how hard the struggle has been and told Blacks to “not wallow in despair.” And only then, four-and-a-half pages into his five-and-a-half-page speech, did he begin to dream, to offer inspiration to the crowd to keep fighting for a promise that had not yet been realized.
I say to you today, my friends, though, even though we face difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream … I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” … I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.
The depth of King’s dream far exceeds the Black History Month oneliner and ode to colorblindness to which it has been reduced. King aimed for racial justice, for America to be post-racial in the definitive sense, to overcome racism and enable Blacks to be truly free. Yet, just as Mississippi continues to struggle with racial prejudice,3 Blacks in America are still judged by the color of their skin. In some ways, we are farther away from achieving the dream today than we were in 1963.
We now have a national holiday that recognizes the contributions of Martin Luther King Jr., and laws that prohibit segregation, but racial inequality persists. Blacks in America face the insurmountable struggle of trying to define the discrimination they face without being accused of playing the race card. America embraced colorblindness – the racial ideology that suggests the best way to end discrimination is by treating individuals as equally as possible (without regard to race) – while leaving the underlying inequality tied to racial domination untouched. The American Dream itself espouses a post-racial ideal that hard work and effort are all that is required for success, and meritocracy will win out in the end. Yet all of the available evidence suggests we are not there yet. Our racial legacy has left footprints that reinforce the centrality of race and racism in post-civil rights America. Sociologist Adia Harvey Wingfield (2015) argues that insisting on colorblindness comes at a cost:
By claiming that they do not see race, they also can avert their eyes from the ways in which well-meaning people engage in practices that reproduce neighborhood and school segregation, rely on “soft skills” in ways that disadvantage racial minorities in the job market, and hoard opportunities in ways that reserve access to better jobs for White peers.
The Civil Rights Movement led to a cultural shift in the understanding of racial inequality as inherent (a decline in overt racism), but today many draw on cultural explanations to explain persistent racial inequality alongside widespread belief in the virtue of racial equality. This book documents the role that racism (in shifting forms) has played in structuring the social and economic landscape that Black Americans must navigate.
We orient the reader historically, paying special attention to slavery and its legacy (Jim Crow), to show how the structure of American society, and Blacks’ long-time outsider status within it, have lasting contemporary implications. By examining both contemporary and historical facets of the Black experience, through a structural lens grounded disciplinarily in sociology, we aim to illuminate what is easily missed: a comprehensive understanding of the precise ways in which race continues to act as a fundamental organizing principle of American society today. Throughout the book, we integrate spotlights on resistance highlighting how Black Americans grapple with and respond to constraint.
Chapter 1, “How Blacks Became the Problem: American Racism and the Fight for Equality,” provides the historical and conceptual foundation for the book, arguing that it is impossible to understand the Black community without also interrogating the role that American racism played in its formation and the continued maintenance of the racial boundaries imposed on it. Education, and the active restriction and constraint on Black education from slavery to the present, is utilized to illustrate the institutional nature of racism and explain that, even though many claim today not to “see” race and therefore believe they cannot be “racist,” this logic misses a fundamental truth: one can claim not to be “racist” and yet reproduce a racial hierarchy.
Chapter 2, “Crafting the Racial Frame: Blackness and the Myth of the Monolith” (with Candace S. King and Emmanuel Adero), describes how Black Americans have been framed from without, by the stereotypes that suggest who they are supposed to be and represent. But it also emphasizes how Black Americans have defined and are actively restructuring what it means to be Black from within, resisting all attempts at a simple narrative. This chapter lays the groundwork for understanding