FACES AND PLACES: "Our Kind of People" (08/08/99)

FACES AND PLACES

by Myron B. Kuropas

"Our Kind of People"

I started teaching at the Alfred Lord Tennyson School on Chicago's West Side in 1956. The student body was all black with a faculty that was half white and half black.

It was a wonderful place to begin my teaching career. Most of the children were responsive and staff morale was high.

What struck me as peculiar from the first day, however, were the distinctions that existed among blacks. Lighter- skinned children tended to put down darker-skinned children. And the black staff, almost all of whom lived on Chicago's more elite South Side, seemed to project an air of superiority. When I asked one of them if he lived in the neighborhood, he gave me an incredulous look and answered with a firm "no."

Perusing Svoboda editorials for my first book, I was struck by the following comparison that appeared in the July 6, 1896, issue: "Negros have seven colleges, 17 academies and 50 high schools in America. And what do Rusyns have? Seven layers of lazy skin." Blacks were once being held up as models for Ukrainians to emulate.

Today, we live in a different world. Liberals tell us that institutional racism is rampant and that, despite the civil rights movement, blacks and whites are further apart than ever. The black community includes activists like Jesse Jackson who march on university campuses shouting "Ho, Ho, Ho, Western Civ has got to go," and the gangsta rap/gang groups of the inner city. Neither seems to have much use for middle-class values. Even middle-class blacks, I read in the November 15, 1993, issue of Newsweek, "are seething with grievances: over the petty indignities they still endure, the false fronts they have to put up to 'make it' in white institutions, the ways in which they they're pigeonholed in 'black jobs.' " The aftermath of the O.J. Simpson trial and black militant criticism of the Bill Cosby Show depressed me. The fact that some blacks attending Northern Illinois University believed that academic success was somehow a perverse "betrayal" of black values only added to my pessimism regarding better race relations in the future.

There are, of course, black conservatives such as Shelby Steele, Ken Hamblin, Walter Williams, Tom Sowell, Alan Keyes, Ward Connerly and, of course, Clarence Thomas who believed preferential politics are based on racist notions that perpetuate the idea that blacks can never make it on their own. These conservatives, however, are so few in number and their influence among blacks so minimal that the victimhood paradigm remains dominant in the black community. Martin Luther King's "content of their character" dream seems further away than ever.

I was heartened recently by a fascinating new book by Lawrence Otis Graham titled "Our Kind of People: Inside America's Black Upper Class," which is all about successful African Americans. Doctors, lawyers, engineers, college professors, businesspeople (many millionaires), members of what Mr. Graham has chosen to identify as the black elite. They have their own youth societies such as Jack and Jill, their own circles for women - Links and Girl Friends - and their own brotherhoods, the Boule (Sigma Pi Phi), the Guardsmen, One Hundred Blackmen and the Comus Club. Membership in these societies is restricted (usually by invitation only) and the emphasis is on collegiality and intellect.

How similar are these blacks to successful Ukrainians? Both groups have strong family ties and the Church to sustain them. Ukrainians have Plast and SUM for their youth. Blacks have Jack and Jill. Ukrainians take their children to Ukraine to learn more about their heritage. Jack and Jill chapters take their children to Africa to learn about their past. Ukrainians have summer resorts, youth camps and vacation spots - Soyuzivka, Verkhovyna, Baraboo, Wis., Wildwood, N.J. - as well as Plast and SUM camps. Black vacation locales are found at Sag Harbor on Long Island, Oak Bluffs on Martha's Vineyard, Highland Beach in Maryland, the Hillside Inn in the Poconos and Idlewild, Mich.

Unlike Ukrainians, blacks can point to such prestigious institutions of higher learning as Howard, Spelman and Morchouse, as well as Fisk University, Meharry Medical College, Tuskegee University, Bennett College, Hampton University, Lincoln University, Clark-Atlanta University, and Xavier University. There is a lesson here.

Ukrainians have communities in many American cities and each is different. Ukrainians on the East Coast, I believe, view Ukrainians in the Midwest and West as "country." Ukrainians in Chicago, Parma, Ohio, and Warren, Mich., seem to have more visible neighborhoods than Ukrainians who live in Boston, New York City and throughout New Jersey.

Blacks also have different status structures in American cities. In southern cities like Washington and Atlanta, family history rather than family wealth is what determines one's importance. In Chicago, Memphis and Detroit, the elite can often be traced back to old-line businesses like Chicago's Supreme Life Insurance or Memphis's Universal Life Insurance. Like other ethnic groups, Chicago's black businessmen flourished in Chicago's ghettoized communities because they were meeting a need. Self-reliance led to progress and status. The blacks on the West Side of Chicago, writes Mr. Graham, "were considered 'country' and unsophisticated by old-guard South Side blacks."

Given the plight of other blacks, do members of the black aristocracy feel any guilt? Not really. "Why is it okay for well-educated whites to be ambitious - and then not okay for blacks?" asked one affluent black matron. "You don't contribute to black achievement by knowing how to dance or play basketball," one Jack and Jill chaperone told Mr. Graham when he was young. "You are the ones who are supposed to be setting the example for the rest of those kids by school. Just because you look like them doesn't mean you have to act like them."

There is, unfortunately, a tragic side to black success: the desire to pass as white. The author devotes an entire chapter to this sad phenomenon that haunts many black families. The brown paper bag test of acceptance is mentioned as is the cynical rhyme repeated by aristocratic black kids: "If you're light, you're all right; if you're brown, stick around; if you're black, step back."

Fortunately, skin color has never been an issue with Ukrainians, only political ideology and religion.

Myron Kuropas' e-mail address is: mbkuropas@compuserve.com

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