I've said before that one of my favorite things about Twitter is the way it lets readers listen in on conversations to learn without interrupting, especially from Black Twitter. Too often these days the legion of trolls, haters, and worse have driven too many Black Twitter users away, but sometimes there's still great thought on there if you're willing to just read and take it in.
Gene Demby of NPR recently put out such a thread. On the Code Switch podcast he co-creates there, they recently did a segment on Kamala Harris that I gather dared to be slightly critical of her as reformist vs. radical, and as part of that one of the guests mentioned her membership in the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority (which she joined as a Howard University student, but it's a life-long sisterhood).
In response, another Twitter user who's an AKA sister responded,
so AKAs are not active in racial justice conversations? Don’t have natural hair? Don’t show up?
Is that what was said?
There were many chewy things in that episode and it is incredibly revealing that people in an elite Black organization took issue with the 20 seconds in which their organization is referred to as an elite Black organization that has not primarily concerned itself with radical politics.
It's not editorializing to say those organizations are for the Black bourgeoisie, that their politics are deeply informed by and concerned with respectability, and that they necessarily self-select for people so inclined, especially among the first post-civil rights generation who was in college in the early 1980s — at HOWARD, no less.
I thought all of these things were the reasons y'all wanted to be in these groups!
Trying to keep in mind that people who join these organizations are already pretty motivated/true believers in those organizations before crossing — these *necessarily* ain't people who need to be convinced to pledge, but have wanted to be in them for a long-ass time. And then they *pledge*? phew.
So i get it. i'm hearing from people who have never been ambivalent about their organizations. Cool.
What i think is happening more broadly is a few things:
1) very little historical understanding of the social/political contexts that shaped these organizations — most popular histories are written by insiders, who are again, true believers.
2) we generally struggle to talk about class.
Not to get all Erik Olin Wright about it, but USian ideas of class are sort of contradictory and inconstant. Is class about income? A family with an income of $175k is on the upper end of the income distribution — unless they live in the Bay Area. Is class about something different? Sometimes we think of middle-classedness as about "values," other times we talk about it as if it's about our relationship to both capital-capital and social capital (bank accounts, access to credit, homeownership, college education, etc.)
This gets really complicated when we talk about Black folks. When i said that Black Greek letter organizations are in the business of credentialing and connecting the Black elite, somebody pointed out: well, aren't the biggest chunk of AKAs and Deltas *teachers*? Are teachers elites now?
But like, Black educators have long occupied a really particular social location in Black America — in the pre-civil rights world, teaching was one of the most portable jobs a Black professional could have. (In DC, where schools were segregated but where Black teachers and white teachers were paid the same amount of money under federal law, Black teachers were a vital part of the area's Black bourgeoisie.)
And there were just very, very few Black people with college educations in the pre-civil rights world: only 3% of Black USians had degrees in 1960. So Black teachers had out-sized social capital in Black communities. So if we know that 3 percent of Black people had four-year degrees by 1960... can't we make some pretty safe assumptions about the relative social locations of the Black folks who were starting some of these Black Greek letter organizations in the *first and second decade of the 1900s*? (Fewer than 8000 Black people in the US received degrees in the *entire 8 decades* prior to AKA's founding in 1908.)
They were founded by Black elites *for Black elites* — and coincided with the "New Negro" movement. They were pretty openly motivated by elite Black paternalism!
Anyway, it’s revealing that the AKA aside by our [show's] guest — meant to underline that Kamala Harris was part of the ascendant, respectability-minded post-civil rights Huxtable class — agitated more people than the point that their political successes didn't work out well for poor Black people.
The point was that Harris had the same general politics of the Black folks of her generational and class background. It wasn’t a radical politics — it was only a vaguely *progessive* one, at least by 2020 standards. It was twice-as-good aspirationalism.
That was a kind of politics that was not functionally available to poor Black people. And it’s also why the wellspring of the activist energy around policing and the criminal legal system, as one example, has been in the *most marginalized* Black spaces.
And that’s not new, right?
There’s a section in Marcus Mabry’s bio of Condi Rice where he sketches out the class dynamics of her childhood. Her father worked long hours delivering fuel to people’s homes in and around Black and white Birmingham. It was a job that codes as blue-collar, but again, the interplay of class and race are weird: they were, by Black Birminghamers standards, pretty middle class.
The civil rights movement was unfolding right in their city. Four schoolmates of Condi’s were killed when a Klan member bombed their church. Mabry points out that the people who had been marching, the foot soldiers of the movement, were not people like Condi’s family. Condi’s family had some relative status and business relationships to think about if they marched.
The people who were marching were poor. They were the people who had less to lose. I think about that aside a lot, because it nods at the way class is such an under-considered part of the way we talk about Black life and politics in the US — about how people’s politics are shaped and expressed and received.
Listen and read.
No comments:
Post a Comment