America Behind the Color Line by Henry Louis Gates Read Free Book Online

got here is, frankly, a dark and troubling mystery to me. Attitudes such as these are a perversion of Dr. King’s dream, of all that he gave his life for. But perhaps it is not so very surprising, really. For as long as any of us can remember, the odds have been deeply stacked against our success in American society. But historically, our political leaders, our mentors in school and church, our parents and families, all insisted that we fight to succeed, despite the odds.
    The great poet Audre Lorde once wrote that you cannot dismantle the master’s house using the master’s tools. But what other tools can we use, except those that built the house in the first place? Since Dr. King’s death, as a result of the expanded opportunities of affirmative action and our own hard work, an unprecedented number of African Americans have succeeded in worlds once all-white, the doors to which were historically locked shut for more than a hundred years.
    Despite the negative spin that Herbert Marcuse gave to it in the late fifties, the growth of the black middle class is one of the truly great victories of Dr. King’s Civil Rights Movement. Each hire and every promotion of a black on Wall Street is a victory over racism for our people. The challenge facing the black middle class is to use their clout and wealth to fight structural and institutional racism, on the one hand, and to become more effective role models— living, breathing mentors of social mobility—for dispirited millions of black youth thus far left behind, to show them that you no longer have to be white to aspire to obtain our share of the American dream. The level of social consciousness among the new black middle and upper middle class is deeply moving; built as their newfound status is on political gains made only because of the Civil Rights Movement, perhaps this should come as no surprise. These people’s lives and concerns, their political orientation and their social consciences, have refuted Marcuse’s worry that they would be tokens, or raceless, soulless black men and women in whiteface who had left their people behind, as E. Franklin Frazier describes the old middle class in
The Black Bourgeoisie
(1957). But unless we do these things, the new class divide within the black community will be a permanent fixture in African-American life, with deep and profound economic and structural differences masked to some extent, as they are now, by a seemingly shared African-American culture. No one can believe that Martin Luther King, Jr., died for that.

COLIN POWELL

The Good Soldier
    “The gulf between the two black communities—the middle class and those who have been left behind—need not be permanent, but it’s going to take a lot of work to change it,” U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell told me. “It’s going to take a lot of work on the part of both communities, the well-to-do and those who are striving. Those of us who have made it, white and black, need to give back with resources and mentoring. But there’s something else we have to give back. We have got to get to our young people and tell them they can be successful.”
    When I go to the Middle East or China or wherever my job takes me and I walk into a room, people see a black man. But they also see the American secretary of state and they know that I’m not coming to them as a black man; I’m coming to them as a representative of the American people, as a representative of the president of the United States. I represent all the values of this country and the power of this country, its military power, its economic power and political power, and once we sit down and they get past whatever color I am, they want to do business with me.
    Here at home in America, people sometimes ask what is the significance of my being the first African-American secretary of state. I hope it does have significance, particularly to African Americans, and I hope the significance is that it happened in America. It