two years ago, when David Ellington decided to start NetNoir in the San Francisco Bay area, he faced a difficult choice. His company aimed to serve a black community online. Wouldn’t it make sense to locate his offices in heavily black Oakland, instead of with all the other Web start-ups in San Francisco’s mostly white South Park area, known as Multimedia Gulch?
Ellington — deciding that his first allegiance was to blacks online, and that he could best serve that community if he first built a presence in the heart of the high-tech industry — chose South Park.
“We realized Multimedia Gulch would make more sense because we’d be in the thick of it,” says Ellington. “We’d at least be black players, able to go to lunch at the South Park Cafe and meet people and cut deals. We’re a tech-driven media company, therefore I need to be around people doing cutting-edge technology. Why do I have to stay over [in Oakland] because I’m black — to prove my blackness? Even when that might limit my growth, my strategic partnerships, my ability to leverage deals?”
NetNoir’s dilemma reflects the thorny complexity of race in cyberspace. The online world has barely even begun to acknowledge the deep well of feelings and history that underlie the black American experience; the vague utopian heritage of the Net has led much of the online industry to act as though race simply disappears as an issue once we shed the physical world for the virtual. Oakland or San Francisco? That’s not supposed to matter in the new world of the Net. But of course it does.
Blacks still make up a disproportionately small percentage of the American online population. (It’s almost impossible to find a reliable exact number, since most demographic surveys of online users don’t ask about race, though Net statistician Donna Hoffman says her Project 2000 is preparing a detailed study for release next month.) Ellington estimates that, out of America Online’s 8 million-plus subscribers, at least 500,000 are black, and he expects that number to continue to grow.
“I’m not panicked,” the NetNoir CEO says. “If in 2007, the numbers are the same, I’ll panic. But in 1997, I still point out to folks that 99 percent of white people are still not online. So I’m not going to worry. One of the driving points of technology today is making things more widely available. Between kiosks, work environments and schools, there’s going to be a lot of points of entry for people to get online.”
In a 1995 study, “Falling Through the Net: A Survey of the ‘Have Nots’ in Rural and Urban America,” the National Telecommunications and Information Administration reported that only 11.8 percent of urban black households have computers, compared with 30.3 percent of white households. (The numbers are even lower for rural black households. And not every household with a computer is online.) But any inquiry into such numbers inevitably produces circular, chicken-and-egg-style explanations: There’s not a big black presence online because fewer blacks have computers, so there hasn’t been much incentive to create content that caters to the black community, so there’s not much reason for blacks to get online.
A similar dilemma has long faced the leaders of the U.S. newspaper industry, whose newsroom rosters have often failed to reflect the changing urban population. In one view of the problem, publishers will find black readers or users only if they can better integrate their staffs and the content of their publications.
“I know the names of a lot of minority journalists, and I don’t see any of their names in the magazines like yours, Slate or Feed. Why is that?” asks former PC magazine editor Joel Dreyfuss. “There are thousands of black writers out there, dozens of Pulitzer Prize winners. So the question goes back to, what kind of intellectual culture is being created on the Net: Is it just going to be a bunch of white guys talking to each other?”
Now the editor of Our World News, an online weekly newspaper devoted to black perspectives on the news, Dreyfuss is hardly surprised by the relative “whiteness” of the Web — after all, most Web ventures are a combination of the historically white computer industry and the predominantly white print publishing industry. But he is concerned that it will continue to be so, even as Web culture begins to penetrate the mass market.
He asks: “Where is the creativity going to come from? The nature of creativity in this country is that it comes from gays, from blacks, from Hispanics and Asians, as well as whites. But when you’re operating in an all-white world, you’re kind of missing the opportunity.”
Print publications have long been under pressure to increase minority employment and have only made limited progress. Despite efforts over the past 20 years by unions and the American Society of Newspaper Editors, minorities — including blacks, Hispanics and Asian-Americans — comprise only 11.35 percent of U.S. newsroom employees today, according to a recent Editor and Publisher report. That’s less than half the percentage of these minority groups in the general population.
But even that record looks good compared with the Web publishing industry, where many companies remain totally white. Startup companies are usually more concerned with trying to break even than with long-term social causes. And companies often argue that they don’t have a large group of minority applicants to choose from in filling new jobs.
“We would like to increase the minority representation on our staff,” says Salon executive editor Gary Kamiya, who acknowledges that Salon’s staff includes few minorities and no African-Americans or Latinos. “As a start-up, your first need is to survive, so you tend to hire people you’ve worked with closely. In our case, for a number of familiar reasons, that pool didn’t include many blacks or Latinos. But in our next round of hires, we’ll definitely be looking for qualified people of color.” Kamiya added that Salon has used many black, Latino and Asian-American freelancers.
While the past few years have seen a proliferation of black-oriented Web sites — like Virtual Melanin, Cafe Los Negroes, Gravity and Melanet — most of these sites are based in New York, where there is a much larger minority population.
“Clearly, we’re the only black company in all of Multimedia Gulch,” NetNoir’s Ellington concedes. “So realistically, I don’t know how much of a pool there is to draw from.”
That’s the complaint of Wired Human Resources director Marilyn Hommes, who says the company has had difficulty recruiting black applicants. “We’re doing OK in just about every other area — Asians, Hispanics, gays, women. And a lot of those groups are represented in upper management. But with African-Americans, that’s where we’re low,” she says.
Ellington says that although he receives plenty of risumis from qualified black applicants, only two companies have come to him looking to recruit black employees. “I try to be objective and ask, how much can you expect start-ups to do all this aggressive outreach?” Although he recognizes that an industry with its legs so firmly rooted in libertarianism isn’t likely to embrace anything resembling affirmative action, Ellington points out that “we’ve certainly found lots of black folks that do this. They do exist.”
At some online companies, hiring policies are based on the principle that race not only shouldn’t, but truly doesn’t, matter. “The staff here is very ethnically diverse, but that’s happenstance,” says CNET editor Christopher Barr. He can’t say how many of the company’s more than 500 employees are black or members of other minority groups, he says, because “they were hired for their skill set only. When a risumi comes in, you don’t know anything other than what’s on there.”
Still, if companies are hiring for “skill set only,” that leaves journalists like Joel Dreyfuss wondering about the overall scarcity of black faces and black voices.
“I had an editor’s column in Information Week that was very well read, but I never got a call from any of these online magazines saying, ‘Hey, you wanna write something for us?’” Dreyfuss says. “It’s not happened. I talk to my friends about it, some of them minorities who are running the Web sites for major papers, and no one’s beating down their door. I can understand an editor at the New Republic or the New York Review of Books doing their thing, because they are mostly old, liberal white folks who have a kind of patronizing attitude about blacks anyway. But what concerns me is that the 30-somethings, the younger Web people, are not any different in their attitudes, or perceptions. The point is not affirmative action — I don’t want anybody to feel like they have to do affirmative action. The question is, can you have a more interesting site if you bring in a perspective that’s not a rehash of what’s seen on all the Sunday morning talk shows?”
But Ellington is much more optimistic. Preferring to focus on the “tech” half of “information technology,” he believes technology can go a long way toward leveling the playing field: “Where liberal arts are still going to be heavily laden with biases, because they demand interpretation, here you can design the killer app and people don’t care what you are — VCs are ready to invest. If you’re smart, you go to the head of the class.”
Maybe so — but try telling that to Ronald Dennison. A black programmer, Dennison was hired last year to do HTML work for the Web site of the high-tech investment magazine the Red Herring. Accustomed to doing more advanced programming, he found his efforts to advance were resisted. “Eventually, I had to be disobedient,” he says. “If I tried to do more than just the HTML, they’d say, ‘You can’t do that.’”
Now the systems administrator, Dennison doesn’t feel he’s been discriminated against, emphasizing that he knows his boss hires people “based on what they can do.” But he does remember feeling that, because he stood out as one of very few minorities in the office, “any mistake I made would be magnified.” And because he knows he will never be part of the inner circle of friends that forms the core of the company, as with many Silicon Valley start-ups, he feels his opportunities are limited. “I’ll never be in a position where they’ll have me over to their house. They won’t want me in that group. And even if I was there, I’d feel awkward,” he admits.
Hoping to take what he’s learned at the Red Herring and someday apply it to his own company, Dennison says the most important lesson he’s learned is one that he’s reluctant to accept — that white faces have an easier time of it in the Web business: “If I’m going to get any help — if I’m going to get anything for free — I know I’ll have to have a white front end.”
Despite such stories and experiences, the notion that race “doesn’t matter” in the online world and the industries that shape it remains widespread. In one MCI commercial, a rainbow of people stare at their computer screens to a world-beat soundtrack, while a voice commands the viewer to “imagine … a world where race doesn’t matter.” To some critical observers, such rhetoric just masks a convenient, though sometimes well-intentioned, effort to sidestep unresolved racial issues instead of dealing with them in earnest.
“I think people would like to think we live in a world where race doesn’t matter,” says Soledad O’Brien, host of MSNBC’s The Site. When she mentioned on her message board that she is half black, half Latina, some posters chastised her: “A couple of people wrote in and said they were offended I would mention my race, saying, ‘You’re a good journalist, that’s all that matters.’” she says. “It’s not all that matters. Race is an issue. It will always matter. It’s your perspective, your history, your bias, for bad and for good. People have tried to argue that from the ’60s — ‘I don’t see color, everybody’s beautiful’ — but I just don’t buy that. I had long discussions about it, and they were all with white people. Latinas sent letters saying, ‘It’s so good to see a Latina on a show that would usually be only for white men.’ Only white people were the ones who [objected]. I thought that was really interesting.”
Having worked, often as the only minority female, in both print and broadcast newsrooms, O’Brien prefers acknowledging a journalist’s perspective over the traditional media’s cloak of “objectivity” and the Web’s new promise of race-free anonymity.
“You can tell, right now, that most black organizations on the Web are very Afrocentric,” O’Brien says. “And I think that’s probably a good thing right now, because the Web is at such a beginning stage that you want to be able to help people find something they can relate to.”
But Dreyfuss, of Our World News, worries that such narrowcasting of Web sites contributes to a resegregation of sorts.
“The question is, what do these Afrocentric sites bring to the Web? Are they just celebratory racial sites, or do they bring good writing, good stories, good entertainment — good Webness to this? What I don’t want them to do is let everybody else off the hook — ‘Well, the blacks have their sites, therefore we can just do our thing.’”
Whatever strategy Web companies adopt to try to reach black users and present black perspectives, they face plenty of difficulties.
The Red Herring’s Dennison says: “I’ve been trying to get all my black friends online, get them into e-mail, but they don’t have much interest. I taught a computer class at the local high school, and in a class of 36, only two students would come to me after class to ask questions, and they were both Asian. None of the blacks or Hispanics really gave a shit. But I see where the Web is going to become much more integral to people’s lives — it will affect money, voting, everything. I worry about people who are going to be left out.
“It reminds me of the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie ‘Total Recall,’ where those with a key to the inside have all the oxygen, and those on the outside are either rebels or physically different somehow. In this scenario, it’s blacks who won’t have the key.”
the surveys aren’t very precise, but however you count them, it seems that a significantly smaller percentage of American blacks use the Worldwide Web than their white fellow citizens.
Why? While everyone from hide-yer-tails white militiamen to cosmic conspiracy paranoids to lonelyhearts clubbers visit the Web, why do so few black Americans do so? Is it something intrinsic in the medium? Is the Web somehow racist? Is the issue purely economic?
Let me answer with a story: I once had a landlady who thought she was hip. A potter by trade, she dressed in gauzy cottons and attended gallery openings and thus qualified as among L.A.’s liberal arts set. Complaining to me about the black next-door neighbors because they objected to her backyard marijuana plants, she said, “I thought black people were cool.”
It’s a testament to the majority’s ignorance of black culture that my landlady probably spoke for a great many with that statement. Yes, black folks brought you jazz. Yes, we are famed in the popular mind for adapting forms of music, speech and worship to suit our own ends, the rules be damned — and we have historically been demonized in the majority mind for congenital lawlessness. Yet in fact we are the product of a culture that is among the most conventional and, yes, even timid in modern America.
For instance, with the clarion call of order and discipline, Louis Farrakhan filled the D.C. streets with nearly 1 million black men. Can you imagine such stalwart words enticing a million white folks to cross the country? Additionally, only 35 years from legalized segregation and enforced second-class citizenship, black Americans still honor the idea of a firm foothold in the middle class, with all of the virtues (and vices) that that implies. A lot of us are still trying to grasp the good old tried-and-true. We haven’t necessarily graduated from “The Cosby Show” to “Roseanne.” We are the farthest thing from cool.
The Web, however, is cool. The Web is the antithesis of middle-class virtues. New, chaotic, shamelessly undisciplined, alternately revolutionary and reactionary, the Web, by nature, butts heads with entrenched Afro-American cultural truths. It mocks some of our fundamental beliefs, our core desires.
Malcolm CasSelle, co-founder of NetNoir, told USA Today that “African-Americans just don’t perceive the value of the Internet.” That’s because the Web can’t help us achieve our ’50s and ’60s ideals. We still want the corporate American dream — a good steady job with benefits, a shot at the executive suite — while the rest of the country moves on to dreams of entrepreneurship and self-employment.
Suggesting a break with what many consider Afro-American tradition is often greeted with dismay or dismissal. Not only are we outrageously conservative in our cultural outlook, we can be awfully self-righteous about it as well.
On a radio show last year I suggested that black Americans should look beyond marching in the streets to gain political power. After all, the Christian right does not hold street rallies, yet has gained political muscle out of all proportion to its numbers. The Web is among the tools the right uses to solidify and mobilize its power base; I suggested that black Americans should do the same.
Another guest, a black reverend, stated flatly that black Americans were a people who relied on mass public demonstrations for political gain. Period. He made the statement as if putting into words an inalterable truth. It was as if he was stating that black Americans are people with dark skin.
This man was so married to the ’50s and ’60s legacy that he could not see that times had changed. It was as if he believed that we marched in the ’50s and ’60s and have yet to get what we sought, and so we will keep marching and seeking those same results until we achieve them. (Remember the Million Man March? Does anyone remember the Million Man March?)
We fail to realize, however, that by the time we get the results we seek, they will be what no one else wants, and we will have foregone opportunities like those offered by the Web and other high-tech, chaos-theory-driven engines onto which the majority will have climbed and ridden away.
We are American traditionalists in the extreme — and I am torn between being proud of that fact and being irked by it. On the one hand, it was that traditionalism — our middle-class strivings and solidly Christian social mores — that kept us from violence while this country’s majority made sport of spitting on us. And on the other hand, well … that same traditionalism kept us from violence while this country’s majority made sport of spitting on us.
Another tradition to which we keep, whether out of pride or fear or both, is one of place. The Web is considered a place. We call it cyberspace. We visit a Web site. The Web is presented as a series of landscapes or neighborhoods.
Walk into any integrated college dining hall and you will find a majority of the black students sitting together. There is safety in numbers, and we have a long history that makes us crave that safety. Even today, walk down the wrong set of streets and meet the wrong white men and you wind up in a coma.
Through decades and generations of cross burnings and redlining and beatings and bombings and harassment, black Americans are wary of majority space. The Web is no exception to the rule.
Some suggest that the Web is the great uncolorizer, the great color barrier dissolver, because in cyberspace, one doesn’t know what color one’s audience or conversation partner might be. But that’s only true in a very narrow sense. True — a black man or woman can do business on the Web without facing what even ideologically pure black conservative Rep. Gary Franks, R-Conn., called the majority’s distaste for “the idea of putting money in a black man’s pocket.”
But suggesting that black Americans would take solace in conversing with those who would not show hatred or bigotry or cultural chauvinism toward them only because the other party didn’t know they were black — that’s insulting in the extreme. Such a suggestion could only come from a mindlessly, liberally chauvinistic mind, like that of the landlady who thought all black folks were cool.
This cyber place is no haven. The hatreds that are part of this nation’s very soul live here too, and black Americans know it. Rather than avoid the place, however, instead of retreating to safe ground — familiar territory — we should slough off our conventionalities and hack some new trails through this principally white territory. We’ve got to embrace some anarchy for once in our history — use those Najee and Kenny G CDs for the coasters they are, and slap on some David Murray and Henry Threadgill.
Since the Web is a place, instead of an institution, it holds particular promise. No one’s sense of white self and white worth is invested in it. It can truly be, and be seen as, ours as much as anyone else’s. There are precious few nationwide places of culture and commerce about which that can be said.
The Web could be an extraordinary disseminator of Afro-American culture (true Afro-American culture, not the sociopolitical tics that the majority and too many of us accept as that culture), an extraordinary political tool and a boon to black business people. But only if we are finally willing to forego the dreams of terra firma to which we’ve hitched our star for all of our postwar history. We must acknowledge that the world into which we so desperately sought entree is dying — and we, like the majority, must embrace new and untested worlds if we are to prosper.
Are African-American writers Americans first and blacks second? Is it time for black writers to, in the words of Henry Louis Gates Jr., “discard the anxieties of a bygone era” and put words to page with the confidence that their work will speak to the 
population at large? These are some of the questions that were addressed in a lively, and sometimes explosive, fashion at this year’s National Black Writers Conference, which drew authors like Walter Mosley, Stanley Crouch, Ishmael Reed, Terry McMillan and Bebe Moore Campbell to Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, from March 21-24.
The following remarks by Wall Street Journal editorial page writer Hugh Pearson helped spark a spirited debate at a conference panel titled “Assuming the Universality of the Black Experience.” Pearson is the author of “The Shadow of the Panther: Huey Newton and the Price of Black Power in America,” a book which called into question recent romantic reinterpretations of the Black Panther experience.
The key attribute of any healthy group of people is the element in their culture that tells them they are special in the eyes of the higher creator. However, as people of black African descent define that element which makes us special, our efforts are fraught with contradictions. The racism we face is based on the notion that we are inherently less intelligent than everyone else, that we are a less advanced form of human being. Too often, in our search for authenticity, we inadvertently reinforce that image.
We people of black African descent have been quite hard on ourselves. This tendency causes us to narrow our horizons and ostracize the dissenters among us who acknowledge their connection to the rest of mankind. In the process we unwittingly contribute to our oppression, feeding the notion that we are less intelligent than others. This narrow conception of who we are causes many blacks to question something that should be obvious: Is there a universal element connecting us with the rest of mankind?
Convinced that there is, I researched and wrote “The Shadow of the Panther.” To observe the human connections in the Panther story, I attempted to assume the perspective of a visitor from another planet. This vantage allowed me to observe a number of parallels between the behavior of people in the party and the behavior of people in historical movements outside of the black Diaspora.
For example, in the 1930s, it was common for leftists to extol the virtues of the Soviet Union. Their sentimental attachment to communism grew out of the Great Depression, when capitalism was at its lowest repute. In the process, Russian leaders such as Joseph Stalin were extolled as great leaders. Years later, when Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn published “The Gulag Archipelago,” large numbers of leftists were forced to confront Stalin’s atrocities. The lesson we should take from this is to never give carte blanche to any movement or ideology, no matter how righteous or romantic it paints itself to be.
The same lesson is to be learned from what happened to the Black Panther party. During the late ’60s and early ’70s plenty of black Americans were willing to ignore or excuse the party’s problematic behavior. And today, since nostalgia creates a rosier picture of the past than was actually the case, there are many skewed romantic interpretations of the Black Panthers.
There were plenty of well-intentioned party members. But there were also plenty of bad apples who contributed to its demise. Party sympathizers told us, and still tell us today, that all of those bad apples were FBI informants. But that wasn’t the case. Yes, some were saboteurs collaborating with the FBI, in many cases because the FBI blackmailed them into cooperation. But others who helped destroy the party had no connection with the FBI. Too often party members who witnessed their crimes or who were victims were forced into silence by the tenor of the times. Radical white leftists from the anti-Vietnam War movement aggrandized the party as the nation’s revolutionary vanguard. A limousine-liberal media aided and abetted the process.
Thus, with a sympathetic media always ready to construe negative information about the party as a racist conspiracy, leaders like Huey Newton were granted carte blanche to engage in atrocities. They beat, tortured, raped and killed many fellow Black Panthers. They robbed from blacks in the Oakland community. They sold drugs and extorted money from drug dealers.
Like the romantic white leftists who chose not to believe what was reported about Stalin’s Russia, plenty of black people chose not to believe these facts about the Black Panther Party. They prefer to grant party miscreants a bye, due to the existence of racism.
Was party co-founder Huey Newton an intelligent, insightful man? Yes. Did a racist society contribute to his disintegration? Yes. Was all of his destructive behavior attributable to racism? Even if we are to assume that ultimately racism was totally responsible, we must ask ourselves, At what point should a black person accept responsibility for her or his actions? Are we to blame racism, even when our behavior amounts to self-destruction? If that’s the case then, again, we inadvertently reinforce the assumption of racists that we are so crippled mentally we can’t be treated as full human beings. And I don’t think anyone in this room believes that.
The lessons to be learned from the Black Panthers are but one example of a universal connection between black people and the rest of mankind. Another example is the Jewish experience in pre-World War II Germany after Hitler came to power. Nazis portrayed Jews as subhuman. They installed a system of Jim Crow laws excluding Jews from the most desirable areas and forms of enterprise. They ghettoized Jews. In fact, Nazi theory placed Jews at the lowest rung of the human totem poll. They preached that Jews were lower than blacks because they were lecherous, an attitude which ultimately led to the Holocaust, which of course also consumed other groups of people.
Despite these lessons teaching how we are mutually connected to other peoples, plenty of blacks insist on believing no other group of humans has suffered more than us. Yet what greater demonstration of hatred can there be than to engage in systemic extermination? The Holocaust teaches us historically that, like us, Jews have known what it is like to be treated like niggers, even though today many Jews treat us as inferior to them. We shouldn’t allow such racism to cloud our thinking.
Do blacks face the greatest oppression of all God’s children? Possibly. But if we deny the universal elements of our experience we permanently relegate ourselves to second-class status and collaborate in our own oppression.
As the nation struggled through its group therapy session on race last fall, courtesy of O.J. Simpson, Mark Fuhrman and Louis Farrakhan, I found myself wondering why corporate America didn’t have more wisdom to share, based on its decade-long experiment with diversity training, the booming mini-industry designed to cleanse the workplace of racism and sexism.
Two-thirds of big employers now run some kind of diversity program. From government agencies like the FBI and the Federal Aviation Administration to firms including IBM, GE, AT&T and the New York Times, American employers have been rushing their workers into diversity training since 1987, when a Labor Department study projected that 85 percent of new workforce entries after the year 2000 would be women or minorities. Have these company-paid field trips to the front lines of race and gender conflict yielded a model for the nation?
Hardly. Never before have so many people been sharing their deep, dark feelings about race and sex, with so little positive impact. Diversity training is everywhere because it plays into our American predilection to talk our troubles to death, but do nothing about them. It reflects a laziness about change on both sides of the race and gender divide. Whites, and men, want to be instructed on how to treat women and other racial groups, instead of using common sense, curiosity and compassion to figure out how they want to be treated. And women and people of color are looking for a quick-fix answer to discomfort in the workplace, an alternative to the tiresome but necessary task of making clear how they expect to be treated. Perhaps most damaging, the solemn, moralistic tone of most trainings sends a destructive message — Diversity Is a Drag — rather than helping companies, and individuals, see the creativity that’s unleashed when cultures mix well.
While most criticism to date has come from conservatives and beleaguered white men, there’s a scathing critique to be made by advocates for women and racial minorities, in whose name such training is sold. “Training is becoming a substitute for dealing with the real issues that prevent women and minorities from succeeding,” says Aileen Hernandez, a former NOW president, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission director and veteran corporate trainer.
That became clear to me after I spent 18 months examining the ambitious diversity training program of a mid-sized California software maker, The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc. (SCO), for a Glamour magazine feature. A national diversity expert recommended the program as “a model of what these programs should be.” It began in a time of crisis: the firm’s founder and CEO, known for his wandering hands, was sued by four secretaries for sexual harassment. Diversity training was SCO’s answer to the public relations and morale crises that ensued.
To its credit, SCO set out to develop a diversity initiative that went beyond talk. It got 110 employees involved in diversity task forces, looking at how the firm could advance women by subsidizing childcare, increasing flextime for mothers, even recruit a woman for SCO’s white, male board of directors. But those ideas hit internal roadblocks and went nowhere. The centerpiece of the effort turned out to be what it usually is: diversity workshops for managers.
The workshop I attended was typical: middle managers squabbling about who’s to blame for race and gender inequities at the firm. The session got hot when a facilitator pointed out that all but one of the Fortune 500 CEOs are white men. A white manager I’ll call Tim erupted in anger.
“Do you think every white guy in America is going to be CEO?” he shouted. “Eighty to
90 percent of CEOs are Episcopalian; I’m Irish Catholic. The Irish had it rough here, too! Now I’m being categorized as a white guy!”
A woman from Human Resources I’ll call Rita responded in a soft voice, near tears. “Tim, how do I deal with the fact that in my department, everyone knows that the men are being promoted ahead of women who’ve been there longer? We don’t know why, except that all the men go golfing and sailing together, and make all the rules. And I’m watching good women leave the company. What should I do?”
Tim stared down at his tasseled loafers, uncomfortable. “Go to Human Resources,” he said, apparently forgetting that was the division she was complaining about. “I believe you, Rita, but I don’t think it’s about being a woman, it’s about being perceived as weak.”
The dramatic conflict went unresolved. But Rita returned to work to learn her frank
comments had been reported to her boss; Tim, by contrast, was within months promoted to director.
In another tense training moment, an accounting supervisor named Lynn went head to head over sexism with a human resources manager I’ll call Rick. Again, they argued to a draw. A few months later Lynn sued the firm, charging she was sexually harassed by a supervisor, and Rick was named in the suit for failing to address her complaint properly. Clearly diversity training didn’t help Lynn and Rick communicate about sexual harassment.
Not long after the training I attended, SCO’s initiative unraveled completely. Its co-director, Gail Garrow, resigned in anger, complaining the effort was just window dressing. Garrow claimed that she herself had been sexually harassed just before the lawsuit against SCO’s founder was filed, a charge the company denies. “We used the sexual harassment scandal to our benefit, and management used us, as damage control,” she says now. SCO’s affirmative action effort left untouched vast discrepancies between male and female managers’ salaries, Garrow charged, as well as a glass ceiling that meant only two of 19 vice presidents were women.
SCO’s juicy scandals make good reading, but is the outcome of its program typical?
Aileen Hernandez thinks its troubles are common in the field, thanks to the vexing paradox at the heart of diversity training. “To have a successful program, you need to have some diversity already — women and people of color who are ready to advance — and you need top management committed to advancing them,” Hernandez notes. “But if you have that, you probably don’t need these programs. And if you don’t, all the seminars in the world can’t make a difference.”
The truth is that, as the SCO debacle painfully demonstrated, corporate diversity programs are patronizing, quick-fix solutions to workplace tension. And they cause more backlash than positive change.
America’s moral wars grow harsh and increasingly cartoonlike. On the right, resentful moralists, oblivious to the shaping power of history, demand that individuals be held absolutely responsible for their actions. On what’s left of the left, pious academics, oblivious to the fact that individuals also choose their fates, insist that societal oppression excuses criminality.
Shocking images from the inner city — pregnant women smoking crack, murderous dealers flaunting their Mercedes, teenagers gunned down for a pair of shoes — are constantly invoked by conservatives as evidence of moral pathology. Now an academic named Philippe Bourgois has decided to reclaim that terrain for the left, by going far more deeply into the brutal reality of the ghetto than his ideological opponents ever have. His “In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio” is a stunning piece of reporting that overturns the dogmas of left and right alike — including, disconcertingly, those clung to by Bourgois himself.
Bourgois, an anthropologist at San Francisco State University, lived among Puerto Rican crack dealers in New York City’s East Harlem for five years. He immersed himself utterly in his subject’s lives, hanging with them in crackhouses, partying with them, grieving with them, celebrating with them, dodging the cops with them, earning their complete trust. From thousands of hours of taped conversations, Bourgois constructs a densely-textured documentary that affords unparalleled insights into the culture of the street.
There are terrible revelations here, offered casually in project staircases over snorts of coke and heroin; there are brief moments of joy and banal cruelty and boredom. Few passages in contemporary literature are as heartbreakingly pathetic as the scene in which one of Bourgois’ main informants, Primo, talks about his son, whom he has largely abandoned. Such passages, almost cinematically vivid, give human faces to a demonized group, revealing the shallowness of the moral judgments we are so quick to pass. And by demonstrating how structural economic changes — the disappearance of factory jobs and the concomitant growth of the service economy — have slammed the door on the dreams of young males in the underclass, Bourgois demolishes the conservative myth that opportunity is equal for all Americans. He convincingly demonstrates that crack dealing is indeed a “rational career choice” for many ghetto youths.
But Bourgois is not content to simply present the brutal and brutalized lives of his subjects and allow us to draw our own conclusions about how they got that way. He insists on constantly leaning over our shoulder to tell us, in the sententious, often jargon-ridden language of academic social science, why a specific act of degradation, violence, or self-destruction is the result of societal oppression. If his own reporting were not so honest, deep and textured, this voiceover might be more convincing. But the reality Bourgois depicts is so messy and complicated, so funny, tragic, horrifying, depraved and monotonous, that his attempts to draw pious meanings from it become, at times, almost ludicrous.
“In Search of Respect” is a strange amalgam of brilliant reporting and orthodox leftist academic theorizing. Bourgois tries to link the most intimate details of the often horrific lives of his subjects to larger societal structures — poverty, racism, cultural antagonism.
The problem is that the two simply don’t fit: they operate at different levels of descriptive validity.
It’s not that larger historical factors don’t matter. From 30,000 feet above the ground (which is, after all, where policy decisions should be made, not at street level being sputtered on by some choleric citizen who just had his car radio stolen), the primacy of structural factors is undeniable. If El Barrio were not the desperate wasteland that it is, Bourgois’ informant Caesar might not have burned down classrooms and smashed teachers with chairs, nor his informant Ray have fathered nine children without providing for them. No task facing America is more urgent than a commitment to take the necessary steps — doubtless difficult and expensive ones — to rectify the dreadful conditions of the inner city. The bootstrap exhortations of William Bennett et al, while not without merit, remain empty without such a commitment. As Bourgois notes, “No society is propelled by ‘values’ alone.”
But Bourgois, fearing that his book might give ammunition to conservatives, falls into the opposite error: he dismisses individual responsibility, absolving those who embrace the pathologies of street culture from all blame. He does this, as the title of his book indicates, by romanticizing that culture as an “oppositional” one that exists to create “respect” for people who get none from mainstream society, with its “middle-class,” “Anglo” values. Once the debate is framed in these deterministic terms (the legacy of Marxist thinking is plain here), the inhabitants of El Barrio have a blank check: whatever they do, oppressive society made them do.
But neither street culture nor an individual’s choices are simply “oppositional.” As Oscar Lewis argued in “La Vida,” his classic 1965 study of an extended Puerto Rican family in New York and Puerto Rico, what he calls the “culture of poverty” exists not merely as a form of resistance to oppression, but becomes an autonomous tradition, with its own independent codes and values. Moreover, individuals are not stuck in their culture like flies in glue: far more than Bourgois wants to admit, they are capable of separating themselves from aspects of their culture. Which leads to a difficult, but unavoidable, question: Why has this particular version of the “culture of poverty” continued to exist for decades, when other formerly impoverished groups have joined the economic and social mainstream? Is racism and injustice the only answer? Or can some responsibility be placed on the “victims” themselves, or the cultural values some of them embrace?
There are no easy answers to this question, but Bourgois doesn’t even address it. His discussion of the difficulties his subjects have with holding down white-collar jobs, where they feel “dissed” by female supervisors, is instructive. He tendentiously subtitles that chapter “Disrespect and resistance,” but the “disrespect” seems to just be standard boss behavior, and as for “resistance,” it looks a lot less like revolutionary rage than it does like petty theft, incompetence, and general bad attitude. How is the public sector, which Bourgois constantly indicts for its failure to help the inhabitants of El Barrio, supposed to deal with a street-cultural ethos that celebrates hustling, violence, and scamming? It is difficult to escape the conclusion that there are some areas where society simply cannot do everything, where family, community and the individual must step forward.
At bottom, structural explanations and individual responsibility are not mutually exclusive. Bourgois pays lip service to this idea, but when the chips are down he always points the finger at oppressive structures. To do otherwise, he argues, would be to “blame the victim.” But victimhood is not an eternal state, or no one would ever make it out of El Barrio.
Bourgois’ subject requires a delicate moral calculus, one capable of sorting through the intricate dialectic of overdetermination and responsibility. Instead, Bourgois offers mechanical exculpations, which reach their nadir in his assertion that “pregnant crack addicts can be de-essentialized from the monstrous image of the cruel, unfeeling mother, and be reconstructed as self-destructive rebels” who, “desperately seeking meaning in their lives,” refuse “to sacrifice themselves to the impossible task of raising healthy children in the inner city.”
In the end, Bourgois’ ideological approach, however compassionate, denies human agency. Ironically, his subjects are more aware of this than he is. As Primo says, “Felipe it’s not only the white man…that makes it harder for us. We’re poor, that’s true, but we’re supposed to struggle and make something of ourselves. It’s just a harder struggle ’cause we’re poor.”
The weaknesses of Bourgois’ approach derive, in part, from what we might call the “anthropological fallacy” — the fieldworker’s methodological suspension of judgment, combined with the posture of hands-off cultural relativism that is de rigueur in the contemporary academy. “In Search of Respect” oddly inverts the pattern described by Janet Malcolm, replacing the treachery of the journalist with the loyalty of the bien-pensant social scientist.
Neither approach, in the end, is adequate to capture a life. Bourgois succeeds remarkably in evoking the raw, intimate stuff of life, the place where actions emerge, catalyze, from an unknowable soup of emotions, history, and desires. His work, in the end, is less a social scientific tract than field notes towards a tragedy — with the full weight of moral ambiguity carried by that word. Perhaps it would have taken a writer of the literary gifts of Piri Thomas, author of the brilliant 1967 East Harlem autobiography “Down These Mean Streets,” to capture the thousand facets and meanings of the world that Bourgois has so courageously revealed.
