The Color of Class in the New South - Research Paper Example

The Color in the New South Growing up white in Atlanta, Georgia meant living in the kind of proximity to blacks that inspires clichs about 'knowing the negro.' When I left for college in Vermont, most of the students were from all-white suburbs and small-towns in the Northeast, especially New England. I remember the fear of one, Adam, from Maine, as we were lost in the 'ghetto' of Washington, D.C. He reminded me, 'I'm from an all-white state.' I was from a place where driving through black neighborhoods was an everyday occurrence. But in the New South, 'the city to busy to hate,' segregation endured. My childhood memories of 'ghettos' like the one we passed through were also from car-windows, except in youth soccer games my brother and I played with mostly white kids on a large manicured field, while nearby, black kids our age played pickup games of American Football in the street.1 Sports are a divide. During a PTA meeting at my high school, one example of segregation was sporting events. The school Football team was all black, the Soccer team almost all white, and crowds in attendance reflected this. It was a tense moment; in a region with not-so-distant memories of the Civil Rights Movement, self-segregation is an uncomfortable topic. Gunnar Myrdal pointed out, "That 'all negroes are alike' and should be treated in the same way is still insisted upon by many whites, . None of the Jim Crow legislation distinguishes between classes of Negroes."2 But class always existed in the black community, and in Atlanta no one can pretend there are no distinctions. Tensions within the black community often overshadow white-black divides, although, drawn on a dark-light skin divide, they are colored by overarching realities of white supremacy. Atlanta was the one city in the Deep South to integrate peacefully, but integration triggered white flight. "Affluent whites moved to the northern suburbs to live at a distance from the city's blacks, whom segregation had concentrated in the near south side," which borders the edges of the Antebellum Black Belt, so named for the color of its soil and its people.3 Until the 1990s, the city's population declined while, amidst red-clay hills and pine forests that had been cracker country of moon shining and the Ku Klux Klan, Sun Belt suburbs and exurbs of gated communities and strip malls sprung up. These were the homes of the suburban 'angry white men' who propelled local congressman Newt Gingrich to power in 1994, believers in cheap real estate, low taxes and the need to avoid the black inner city of Atlanta during off-work hours. My Atlanta was far-removed, and hostile to, this suburban milieu. My neighborhood, Inman Park, was majority-white, but also proudly liberal and 'inner-city,' a 1890s streetcar suburb abandoned by the rich and middle-classes for more suburban neighborhoods, a veritable slum before being discovered by 'urban pioneers' in the 1970s. It gentrified with the rise of the local shopping district of Little 5 Points as the bohemian enclave of the Southeast. My families house is a white-columned mansion reminiscent of Gone With the Wind, modeled after the nearby Candler Mansion of Coca-Cola founder Asa Candler, an estate built not by cotton, but by sugar-water. True to clich, my brother and I were raised by our black housekeeper, Cathy Davis, and spent time in her neighborhood, in the black suburbs of southwest DeKalb County. Driving past the high school, the kids shouting 'white boy,' I remember feeling hurt. But I hurt others: one time I, playing with Cathy's son Nolan, I used the word 'colored,' which I had heard in a TV docudrama about young Martin Luther King. Cathy scolded me, 'We all human beings. God doesn't change the color of our skin.' Coming of age in the South is learning the color line. Bordering my neighborhood is Little 5, interracial, counter-cultural haven of drug dealers, con men, queers, hippies, punks, Rastas, street-musicians, bums and starry-eyed suburban teens. The other sides of the tracks, literally, are the 'ghettoes' of Reynoldstown and Old Fourth Ward. The divides are freight yards and train lines, and a disused spur, now a Southern Gothic landscape of weed covered railroad tracks. Class was never as simple as black and white-overlapping Reynoldstown, was the white ghetto of Cabbagetown, which grew up around the Fulton Bag Mill, founded in 1881, recruited poor white mountaineers from north Georgia as mill-workers. The mill closed in 1977, desperate locals turned to robbing a local cemetery, or to crack cocaine. As a child, this area was avoided except trips to the zoo, but I remember bare-foot children playing outside shotgun shacks, and rednecks working on their cars. Today, the main street of Cabbagetown is full of bars and bistros, the old mill turned into loft apartments. A shopping mall complex with a Target, Bed, Bath & Beyond, Best Buy and Barnes & Noble dominates Reynoldstown, where I used to go to buy drugs. The warehouses by disused tracks are Tyler Perry Studios, the writer/director/producer of soap operas and sitcoms of the black middle class. Class is still not as simple as black and white. A twenty-minute walk from my house is the Queen Ann birth-home of Martin Luther King, Jr., born in 1929, on Auburn Avenue, Main Street of black Atlanta in the era of segregation. The 'Richest Negro Street in the World,' it was home to a large number of black professionals and their families with a middle-class standard of living, even in the worst decades of the Great Depression.4 A new church has replaced the old Ebenezer Baptist, where King and his father pastored, with acoustics modeled on the Sydney Opera House, a rose garden and statues of Gandhi and a scene from the African-American novel Roots-the birth of Kunta Kinte.5 During the election of Obama, TV cameras focused on the crowd gathered here, with Jesse Jackson and other Civil Rights leaders present, the election of Obama portrayed as the culmination of the Civil Rights Movement. Sainthood has been bestowed upon Martin Luther King, Jr.-white conservatives use him to bash black Americans today-but the unity that made the Civil Rights Movement possible has vanished, replaced by divisive gaps between the Civil Rights generation and the post-integration 'Hip Hop' generation, newer African and Caribbean immigrants and native Americans, between the upwardly-mobile professionals and the masses stuck in the ghetto. In the last years of his life, Martin Luther King, Jr. hoped to turn the Civil Rights Movement into a movement against poverty. Poverty has not been overcome. On Auburn Avenue, sliced in half by the widest interstate in the U.S., there are abandoned buildings and stores selling malt liquor and rotting vegetables, and new condos and cafes of the gentrifying black bourgeoisie. When I was younger, the later did not exist-the Old Fourth Ward was synonymous with crime and poverty, abandoned by the middle-class for the suburbs. Multiracial gentrification is in full force, but most of the area is still poor. Transients wait to hustle tourists a few blocks from the King Center, and in the Royal Peacock, which played host to everyone from Bessie Smith to Gladys Knight is now a Jamaican night-club where drugs are welcome, but guns are checked at the door. Near the birth home, I passed a police raid-a man was taken from his home and forced on the ground in the street, in clear view of his neighbors. One thing has changed since the era of Jim Crow. The police were black. There were upwardly mobile black people in Inman Park, including my next-door neighbors, the Jefferies, Martin, a successful surgeon, and his wife Ayesha, a converted Muslim with political aspirations. They had three children, Shaqir, Iman and Sadiq; early on we played together, but grew apart. Ayesha and Cathy were close friends and Shaqir grew close to Nolan, less friendly towards my brother and I. There was Bill Campbell, mayor of Atlanta for eight years, who spent five years battling FBI charges of racketeering, bribery and wire fraud. He dressed as Santa Claus for the white children of my neighborhood Methodist Church, tore down housing projects, and giving homeless people one way bus tickets During his bid for re-election, was portrayed by dark-skinned, working-class City Council President Marvin Arrington as a light-skinned Uncle Tom. Under investigation, Campbell declared himself as a victim of racist profiling. Unlike Bill Campbell's son, I went to the public high school. Two middle schools fed into it, one was mostly white, students went into the Magnate Program; the other was almost entirely black, most of its students dropped out of high school at sixteen. There were black Magnate students, from middle-class suburban neighborhoods, that often played soccer, listened to Classic Rock, and embraced 'white culture' more than the whites, with whigger aspirations. The students were less divided than the parents. "The white parents expect teachers to explain to why their children should obey, black parents expect their children to obey."6 Legacies of slavery, like the way elderly blacks refused to look white people in the eye. In the South, race was white and black. Today, migrants from southern Mexico and Central America are the labor force of agri-business, the textile industry, and the construction and landscaping of the sprawling suburbs. Small-town Southern Main Streets have abarottes with the Virgin of Guadalupe and the Mexican tricolor, and the presence of Mexicans triggers 'black flight.' Motels and gas stations are more likely to be owned by Indians. In the 1970s strip malls and low-rent apartments of Atlanta's Buford Highway, Mexico and El Salvador border Vietnam and Cambodia; in more affluent Gwinnett suburbs their are enclaves of Korean and Japanese businessmen. Stone Mountain, the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan, it is still a shrine to the Confederacy, but today, on a weekend afternoon, one is just as likely to see families of South Asian Hindus and Muslims. The town is a symbol of the back bourgeoisie, a middle-class suburb with leafy yards that mock the decrepit northern ghettoes from which many of its residents have fled. Class and race are growing more complex in the United States, and nowhere has this had a more dramatic impact than in the Southeast, a region whose famous parochialism reflects the fact that it was mostly bypassed by important waves of immigration. Having only recently abandoned the American Apartheid of Jim Crow, the South must also cope with the challenges of a multi-cultural society. Read More