Our Kind of People Read online

  For men, there are also exclusive, hard-to-crack social groups. At the top of the list is Sigma Pi Phi—known simply as the Boulé, which admits professional men once they have distinguished themselves in society. It was founded in 1906, and its early membership included W. E. B. Du Bois; chapters have since been established in most major cities, initiating such men as Washington attorney Vernon Jordan, Atlanta mayor Andrew Young, Urban League president Hugh Price, Virginia governor L. Douglas Wilder, and American Express president Kenneth Chenault, as well as most black college presidents and the most prominent black physicians, attorneys, dentists, and corporate leaders in any major city. When I joined the group, the once-secret organization became an important bond for me and a wide circle of friends.

  Other elite groups for men include the Guardsmen, the Fellas, the Comus, and One Hundred Black Men. And as with the sororities, there are select college fraternities that are held in highest esteem: the Alphas, the Kappas, and the Omegas.

  As I was growing up amidst this social world, there were certain things of which I became acutely aware. One was the importance of tradition. Another was pride in family background and accomplishment. While some outsiders—both black and white—dismissed our traditions as bourgeois or as being solely “white aspirations,” members of the black elite still feel that there is nothing odd or inappropriate about the fact that they have created traditions that include a specific summer camp for black elite kids (Camp Atwater in Massachusetts), a specific boarding school for students of old-guard families (Palmer Memorial Institute in the South, and Northfield Mount Hermon for an integrated experience in the North), specific social clubs, specific summer resorts, specific family taboos (“passing” for white, putting down blacks in front of whites), specific colleges (among the black schools as well as the white ones), specific fraternities, specific churches, specific attitudes about whites (emulate them, but don’t marry them), specific neighborhoods or streets within certain cities, specific suburbs, and even specific funeral homes and cemeteries in which to be memorialized.

  When I recall the rules of the group, I think of a remark I once heard a friend of my parents make one afternoon when we were on my cousin’s yacht on the Long Island Sound. I had asked her about sororities when Mrs. Jenkins (not her real name) began explaining the distinctions between the group of people who joined either the Deltas or the AKAs, and the very different group of college girls who might join the other sororities. “Now, I’m an AKA, and the only other natural sorority for me would be the Deltas. The other sororities were just not a consideration. It’s not that I’m looking down on them, but the fit wouldn’t have been right for me or them. They were a tad bit darker than us. And they really didn’t come from our background. We were daughters of doctors, teachers, dentists, pharmacists, and such. They were doing good if their fathers were even Baptist preachers.” Mrs. Jenkins stared off into the water for a moment. “We just came from different worlds and we weren’t like-minded people. And why spend time with people who aren’t similar? Of course they were all quite polite and well-behaved. After all, we were at Spelman.”

  “Polite and well-behaved.” Although spoken with an air of condescension, that is probably the most disrespectful remark that a woman like Mrs. Jenkins—Spelman graduate, wife of a lawyer, mother of a debutante—ever would have said publicly about those blacks who were not of her class. People like her have equal respect for all blacks, regardless of their socioeconomic background and professional aspirations, but as she confessed, there is always a preference for being around like-minded people.

  During my first year at Harvard Law School, I had an experience that I’ve always considered to be an epiphany in my journey toward greater racial awareness. I had made the requisite first visit to Wellesley College by hiring a private car to drive me the thirty minutes from Cambridge to Alumnae Hall at the women’s school for a Saturday night party. It was sponsored by a black student organization called the Sisters of Ethos, one of the few small societies (along with ZA, TZE, and Shakespeare) on the sprawling suburban campus.

  When I arrived at the circular drive and marble entry of the building sometime around 10 P.M., it immediately occurred to me that the scene looked like every Jack and Jill party of my childhood. We were all still students, yet the parking lot was jammed with expensive cars. There was a completely dark ballroom and a brightly lit foyer, jam-packed with well-dressed, light-skinned young people in expensive yet conservatively tailored clothes. With long, streaked, straight—or straightened—hair flying behind them, the Sisters of Ethos were running in and around the tall French doors, inspecting college IDs as they approved or turned away male partygoers who either passed or failed the ubiquitous “brown paper bag and ruler test.”

  I knew many of these girls and their families, and I also knew the game, but it was still a bit disconcerting to see them practice it so well against male classmates of mine who were pounding at the doors trying to overturn their quick rejections.

  As the night got later, and as the sisters got hungry for more visitors, the rules were loosened and the darker-skinned guys (along with some darker-skinned non-Wellesley women) were admitted. By 11:30, the party was in full swing and we all turned our attention to the inner ballroom where the party was taking place. As I walked into the crowded, nearly pitch-black room, I could feel the beat of some new top forty crossover semirock, semirap song pounding away. As I circled the room, I saw reminders of my childhood. The “dark outer circle” was very much apparent. I remembered parties like this—where you’d customarily find the darker, less affluent, less popular, and less attractive guys standing against the wall, dateless and unpartnered. This was where one found the gericurled guys and the dark-skinned women with “bad hair” and bad weaves.

  As I walked farther into the room, I found a young woman who was a daughter of one of my mother’s grad school classmates. She was an outgoing student whom I had last seen at a cotillion in Washington. As my reunited dance partner and I made our way to the center of the room, somewhere beneath a large unlit crystal chandelier, I found the creamy center that existed at every one of these blue-vein parties.

  Dancing around us, taking up the central core of the ballroom, were the long-haired, yellow-skinned leaders of the young elite. Some with nose jobs, some with thinned lips, some with naturally green eyes and naturally straight hair. Tania from Atlanta, Crystal from St. Louis, Julie from Washington, Brooke from New Rochelle, Cheryl Lynn from Los Angeles. Each a daughter of some light-skinned doctor, banker, or judge who belonged to some chapter of some organization and who had gone to some school before marrying some woman who belonged to some sorority, and who lived some kind of nice life that had “our kind of people” written all over it.

  As many privileged black kids come to discover once they leave the safe confines of their parents’ home, I then realized that several hundred miles away from my own home and the people I knew—here on a small campus in suburban Massachusetts—were my kind of people all around me, all intact.

  As I stood there dancing to the crossover semirock, semirap song, I found myself feeling a little bit smug and a little bit scared. Although I should have been used to all of this after so many years of seeing it, it frightened me—perhaps because it seemed so predictable, or maybe because I felt there was so much to keep up with and there were so many others being shut out.

  One can find both pride and guilt among the black elite. A pride in black accomplishment that is inexorably tied to a lingering resentment about our past as poor, enslaved blacks and our past and current treatment by whites. On one level, there are those of us who understand our obligation to work toward equality for all and to use our success in order to assist those blacks who are less advantaged. But on another level, there are those of us who buy into the theories of superiority, and who feel embarrassed by our less accomplished black brethren. These self-conscious individuals are resentful of any quality or characteristic that associates them with that which s
eems ordinary. We’ve got some of the best-educated, most accomplished, and most talented people in the black community—but at the same time, we have some of the most hidebound and smug. And adding even further to the mix are those of us who feel we need to apologize to the rest of the black world for our success and for being who we are. For me, the black upper class has always been a study of contrasts.

  CHAPTER 2

  Jack and Jill: Where Elite Black Kids Are Separated from the Rest

  “Well, what I’m really hoping is that she’ll become a litigator or maybe some kind of judge,” uttered a woman, with total confidence, as we looked out over Central Park from a Fifth Avenue apartment in the East Seventies. Dressed in a conservative linen suit, the forty-three-year-old mother adjusted her Chanel scarf in the reflection of the large living-room window. “We scrapped the idea of banking because the industry still won’t be ready for a black woman, and we’re steering her away from medicine because she’s only getting B’s in the sciences.”

  “What about something more creative, like advertising or a career in the entertainment business?” asked one of the mothers.

  Although I didn’t know the woman in the scarf well, I instinctively knew that she would find this a ridiculous question.

  “Entertainment? We have enough black girls doing that. I expect more from Laura than advertising or entertainment,” she added disdainfully.

  Looking across the room at twelve-year-old Laura, I shrugged my shoulders in sympathy. This was exactly why we had all been enrolled in Jack and Jill as kids. So that we would quickly accept the fact that each of us was supposed to do great things.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” the woman with the scarf added as she glanced over at the other mothers, who were sipping ginseng tea and eating cookies with their adolescent sons and daughters. “I’m not turning my nose up at advertising or entertainment, but Laura needs to be a professional. I’m a professional, her father is a professional, and three of her four grandparents were professionals. Everybody she knows is at the top. She’s not going to start her life off by setting us back two generations. She’ll like being a litigator.”

  It was a Saturday afternoon and we’d all just arrived from a Jack and Jill career day held in a series of classrooms at Collegiate, a private school for boys on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. The day’s events had begun with a presentation by Jack and Jill alumni who discussed their different professions with current Jack and Jill children and parents. The children—all of them from private day schools like Horace Mann, Spence, Riverdale, and Dalton—then stood up and told about their high school activities, followed by a description of their career ambitions.

  Afterward, the students lined up to collect business cards from the group of alumni, of which I was one—two lawyers, two physicians, a state assemblyman, a Fortune 500 executive, an architect, and an investment banker. “So, did you really know what you wanted to be when you were fourteen?” asked a ninth-grader who was attending Horace Mann. For half a second, I considered avoiding the question in order to prevent the increased anxiety that my affirmative response would, no doubt, elicit. But, then I remembered where I was. Of course I’d known what I wanted to be at fourteen. In Jack and Jill, it was expected. Not only had I known I wanted to be a corporate lawyer, I knew where I wanted to attend law school. The same had been true for all of us, including Carla, the Jack and Jill girl I dated back then. She wanted to be a physician. And now, after four years at Harvard and four more at Yale Medical School, she’d done what we’d all expected.

  “Okay, now I want all the alumni and the children to mix,” announced one of the mothers, who was acting as moderator for the career day event. “I want each of you children to pick one alumnus—three kids to an alumnus—and spend five minutes with that person to learn as much as you can about them. Find out what they do, where they went to school, how they became successful, the steps they took, the mistakes they made, and what they like most about their careers. Take notes if you want, but ask lots of questions!” said the woman, who happened to be a clinical psychologist and the mother of a rather gregarious fourteen-year-old boy.

  “When I ring this bell in five minutes,” she continued in a voice not unlike an announcer at a prizefight, “I want you—all of you—to switch to the next alumnus and ask the same kinds of questions. Over the next thirty-five minutes, you will have gotten to meet all seven of them up close. So don’t miss this opportunity to ask what you want. This will benefit you immensely.”

  As I looked around at the twenty teenagers, I breathed in about thirty-five minutes’ worth of air and smiled faintly at the state assemblyman standing next to me.

  The bell sounded. “Okay, children, go!”

  A fourteen-year-old boy in a green cotton turtleneck raised his spiral notebook toward me as he and two fifteen-year-old girls approached to shake my hand.

  “Did you know you wanted to be a lawyer before you started college?” asked yet another boy, who approached me from behind. “Or did you make up your mind once you got there?”

  “Well, you really don’t have to make all those decisions when you start. You can make up your mind after you get there.”

  “That’s not what my father said,” responded one of the girls, who eyed me suspiciously. “He said that if I wanted to be an obstetrician, I should start setting up my summer internships at hospitals now, instead of waiting until everybody else gets in line at college.”

  I nodded. “That may be true, but you may get to college and discover you don’t even want to be an obstetrician.”

  “And what?” the other girl asked. “Be a podiatrist?”

  “Or a dentist?” the boy asked with a snide laugh.

  It took me about six seconds to recognize the sarcasm in these kids’ remarks. Their sophistication and elitism were mixed so adroitly that it was like listening to conversations between me and my friends at age thirty-five.

  The second girl cleared her throat. “What would really be helpful is if you have some friends who could give us advice on one of those six-year or seven-year premed programs where you get your bachelor’s degree and your medical degree from the same school without taking the MCATs and having to apply to medical school too.”

  Over the next hour, I shared advice on how to write a cover letter to a future employer, how to rehearse for a college interview, and how to deal with a bigoted guidance counselor. One or two of our participants seemed exhausted by the details and the suggestions, but most of the students were just as I had been when growing up in Jack and Jill—determined to show our parents that we would leave no question unasked, no teacher unchallenged. Determined to live up to the ideal Jack and Jill child, we had all been convinced that we were as good as, if not better than, the smartest white kids at school.

  Later that afternoon, the whole group moved on to one of the Jack and Jill members’ apartments on Fifth Avenue, where mothers and kids were having tea and dessert snacks while partaking in a discussion of black role models and getting a tour of this member’s family art collection. A cynic would dismiss this as a pretentious, nouveau riche display. But these parents and kids were sincere, and the purpose of the visit was genuine and necessary. Just as my mother and father had done in the 1960s and 1970s, these parents were cramming as many experiences and as much information as they could find into their young black children. Nobody questioned whether it was too early for the kids to digest it. The attitude was, “Show it to them now so they’ll be ready for it later.” Everyone smiled and pretended to be easygoing, but just underneath the surface was ambition raging to break through.

  As I stood there with those kids and parents, it occurred to me that I was barely ready for what was on display in that apartment: this was the first time that I’d seen a Renoir, a Beardon, and a Picasso in someone’s living room. It was the first time I’d been served by a butler who poured tea with white gloves. The whole day was a consummate Jack and Jill experience. It was one of the reasons that Laura’s p
arents had wanted her to be a part of Jack and Jill, and it was one of the reasons that my parents had made the same decision for me and my brother over thirty years ago.

  Founded on January 24, 1938, Jack and Jill of America has long been one of the defining organizations for families of the black professional class. It has 218 chapters throughout the United States and Germany, and its membership includes more than 30,000 parents and children. A nonprofit service organization, it focuses on bringing together children aged two to nineteen and introducing them to various educational, social, and cultural experiences. In addition to sponsoring public service projects in their communities, the various Jack and Jill chapters raise money for local nursing homes, shelters, hospitals, and educational institutions.

  “One of the major reasons why parents want their kids to grow up in Jack and Jill is the social and educational benefits,” says Shirley Barber James, the group’s fifteenth national president. “Even if you send your children to the best private schools and colleges, it doesn’t mean that they will get to meet black role models who inspire them and make them feel that they can succeed in a white world. That’s what Jack and Jill can do,” adds James, a Savannah parent whose son, Robert, grew up in Jack and Jill and later graduated from Savannah Country Day School, Howard University, and Harvard Law School.