To begin with, Colin Powell, if he had gone, would have been staring out at an army of black men who had lived the same experience as he, and come to a very different conclusion. These were not deadbeats who needed to be encouraged to work harder, do better, be more responsible. This was, profoundly, a middle-class crowd. They were lawyers and teachers and laborers, many of them–in defiance of stereotype–with their sons in tow. They were people who had taken a stab at the American Dream, just as Powell had, and succeeded-perhaps to an extent their own fathers could never have imagined–but emerged from the ordeal outraged and alienated rather than triumphant. Outraged and alienated, in large part, because they were invisible to white America, mistaken for the criminals and layabouts of the black underclass. The emotional heart of the march, it seemed to me, was not atonement but affirmation: look at us, and look at our sons. We are not your stereotype. We are infuriated by your stereotype. “Look at you,” Louis Farrakhan said, striking the perfect note. Look around: you’re not alone. We’re not who they say we are.
But outrage over white blindness is only the most accessible sliver of a very poignant, complicated phenomenon–the agony of the black middle class. There is also embarrassment. There is embarrassment and horror over the depravities of the streets, the violence and irresponsibility of the underclass. There is pride at having transcended that, often at long odds– accompanied by guilt that the price of success may be capitulation: acting white. All these emotions tend to tangle. But there is also the unambiguous fear that the next generation will slip back into the streets: “There’s fear that our kids are drifting onto a path that troubles us,” says Hugh Price of the Urban League. “They’re under a lot of peer pressure not to succeed.”
No one has written better about all this than John Edgar Wideman, who has lived the submerged metaphor of the Million Man March: he is a success–an inspired novelist–whose brother and son have been convicted of murder. In his 1984 memoir, “Brothers and Keepers,” Wideman’s pain and candor are almost unbearable: “Most of what I felt was guilt… One measure of my success was the distance I’d put between us,” he writes, addressing his jailed brother. “Fear marched along beside guilt. Fear of acknowledging in myself any trace of the poverty, ignorance and danger I’d find surrounding me when I returned [from college] to Pittsburgh. Fear that I was contaminated and would carry the poison with me wherever I ran.”
This is a terrible, and confusing, burden. The essayist Shelby Steele has noted that the lowering of barriers has created greater opportunities, but also greater anxieties. I wouldn’t be surprised if part of what the men on the Mall were saying was: we are sick of carrying this weight. It’s just too difficult, too psychologically exhausting. There does seem to be a yearning for simpler answers. Which may be why several polls in recent years, especially a 1990 New York Times/WCBS-TV survey, suggest that the black middle class is far more willing than the black poor to entertain conspiracy theories: that AIDS is a white plot (40 percent think this might be true); that the government “deliberately makes sure that drugs are easily available” in the ghetto (67 percent say yes or maybe); that there may be a concerted effort to “set up” black officials (84 percent). Wideman, again: “A brother behind bars, my own flesh and blood… has to be a mistake, a malfunctioning of the system. Any other explanation is too incriminating.”
It has been suggested that this march wasn’t an endorsement of racial separatism. But it wasn’t exactly an endorsement of integration, either. And Louis Farrakhan’s message does resonate, particularly with the black middle class. A new CBS poll shows that approval of Farrakhan increases with education: 5 percent approval among blacks with less than a high-school degree, 25 percent among high-school graduates, 47 percent among college graduates. Why? I doubt that most teachers and entrepreneurs have an affinity for the mystic power of the number 19, or fear a Masonic conspiracy. More likely, it’s because Farrakhan offers unambiguous defiance–and unambiguous balm: “Look at you.” You are wonderful. It’s not your fault. The white man is sick.
Can Colin Powell offer anything nearly as satisfying? Probably not. The general’s most likely, and potentially most compelling, message would have been a variation on his theme at Howard University last year: striving for success isn’t acting white, it’s acting American–and we are, irreversibly, Americans. There is no future for us except as Americans. So be like me, proud and patriotic (and they may even let you run the country). This argument has the inestimable advantage of being true, but it doesn’t come close to touching the alienation and anguish of the black middle class. We have reached a terrible point when those who have worked hardest to succeed are the ones most skeptical about the possibility of success. But that is where we appear to be.
