The Role of the Black Elite in Outreaching to the Black Lower Class

Black America’s Two-Tier Class System: A Crisis Fault-Line

What the foregoing discussion of the new social class capabilities available to the middle-class and professional sector of African-Americans reveals is that today’s Black America is defined by a two-tier class system. This two-tier class system comprises two main class categories. The lower-tier can be called a “static-stratum”, made up of weak working-class and poverty-level African-Americans. Persons in the “static-stratum” hold a variety of weak working-class jobs in factories (janitors, cleaning machinery, unskilled laboring tasks, etc.). They also hold a variety of unskilled jobs in the service economy — e.g., jobs in food-service business, jobs in cleaning service in hospitals, cleaning in public institutions, and domestic service jobs.

I categorize the upper-tier in Black America’s two-tier class system as a “mobile-stratum”, made up of middle-class, professional class, and capitalist class African-American persons and households. The Black middle-class sector includes stable blue-collar workers, teachers, clergy, barbers, hairdressers, artisans, storekeepers, sales clerks, etc. The professional ranks in the “mobile-stratum” include lawyers, doctors, dentists, nurses, health administrators, college professors, engineers, scientists, technologists, accountants, state/federal administrators, public officeholders, artists, journalists, media professionals, etc.

The ranks of African-Americans in capitalist occupations include a broad range of business persons whose occupations are regularly listed in monthly issues of the major African-American business journal Black Enterprise Magazine. These occupations include the following: construction contractors, automobile dealerships, manufacturers, hotel owners, restaurant franchisers, advertising firms, architectural firms, financial managers, bankers, etc. A selected list of capitalist occupations held by African-Americans is shown in TABLE I.

Today the upper-tier or “mobile-stratum” constitutes, in aggregate, about 60% of African-American households. On the other hand, the lower-tier or “static-stratum” constitutes, in aggregate, about 40% of African-American households. This “mobile-stratum”/”static-stratum” classification of today’s early 21st century African-American class system corresponds to an analysis by Morgan State University sociologist Andrew Billingsley which was done for the National Urban League’s 1990 annual volume titled State of Black America 1990. TABLE II presents Professor Billingsley’s data. His top-three class categories — upper class (9%), middle class (27%), working-class non-poor (34%) — approximate what I call today’s “mobile-stratum” among African-American households. His bottom-two categories – a combination of working-class poor and underclass (28%) — approximate what I call today’s “static-stratum” among African-American households. Accordingly, following Professor Billingsley’s class categories used in his 1990 National Urban League study, in overall terms I classify 40% of African-American households as belonging to the “static-stratum” and 60% belonging to the “mobile-stratum”.

We can gain a sharper view of the “static-stratum” by looking at data from a U.S. Census Bureau survey of American occupations in 2002. That survey reported that low-paying jobs at the bottom of the American occupation ladder (with the exception of “farming, forestry, fishing”) accounted for 4,163,000 Black workers or 28.2% of all employed African-Americans. Returning to Professor Billingsley’s study for the National Urban League’s State of Black America 1990, he provides data on a major crisis-area facing Black Americans in the “static-stratum” — namely, fragile families. Billingsley records that “working-class poor” Black households had a 67% single-parent rate, and that “underclass” Black households had a 75% single-parent rate. This fragile family pattern means, moreover, that over 60% of African-American children are being raised in economically distressed family dynamics. An overall view of these economically distressed family dynamics is provided by national-level poverty data, which show that as of 2005 the poverty rate for African-Americans was 25% (down from 32% in the 1980s), as compared to a 29% poverty rate for Latino-Americans.

The emergence of a two-tier class system in African-American society during the post-Civil Rights Movement era has resulted in what I’ve already referred to earlier as a “troubled Black America.” This is a Black America many of whose citizens now witness their life-chances being strangled by an array of social crises. While the American national economy and the federal government have the major moral responsibility for assisting in remedying African-Americans’ social crises, there is an important contribution to remedying these social crises that today’s Black elite sector can also make. I want to conclude this article with a discussion of what that contribution might be.

Three Suggestions for Black Elite Outreach to Black Crises

As my discussion above of the new social-class capabilities of the post-Civil Rights Movement era African-American elite sector makes clear, that sector now has more resources at its disposal for executing an outreach-to-Black-crises-leadership demeanor than any previous elite sector in modern African-American history. What is now needed is “an expansion of Black-elite will”. A flowering of “Black-elite will” toward remedying social crises among lower-class African-Americans.

One crucial element underlying the issue of “Black-elite will” relates to African-American familial patterns. Namely, the fact that a sizable segment of African-Americans now located in the ranks of the Black elite were the first of their family line to reach middle-class and professional status, so they have family members or relatives who are bordering on or in the weak working-class and poor sector.

In a certain sense, then, there is a kind of generic moral obligation for some Black elite persons to come to grips with addressing Black lower-class crises. The African-American philosophy scholar at Princeton University, Professor Cornel West, touched on the familial issue associated with the question of “Black-elite will” during an interview with the editors of Black Enterprise Magazine ( February 2005). When asked what he thought about the overall education advancement available to African-Americans, Professor West remarked: “I think it’s magnificent for [the] black middle class and above, but it’s a national disgrace for the black working poor and the very poor. There is a class difference that we have to acknowledge. Sure, for my son and my daughter, it’s cool….I have some cash. You know what I mean? But I have cousins and I have friends and relatives who are not as blessed as I am.”

I suggest that there are three basic programmatic-areas of Black–elite-outreach-to-Black-crises that should gain the attention of today’s Black middle-class and professional sector. The three programmatic-areas that I suggest for a Black-elite uplift interface with lower-class Black crises are the following:

A Black Educational Renewal Movement

A Black Educational Renewal Movement can address the twin-problems of deficient educational opportunities (e.g., under-funded urban schools, low quality teachers in many inner-city schools, etc.) and deficient educational outcomes (e.g., high dropout rates, low student achievement, etc.). These interrelated problems are legion. As I noted above, quoting figures from the so-called “nation’s report card” — the National Assessment of Educational Progress issued by the U.S. Department of Education — as reported in USA Today (August 6, 2007), some 59% of Black fourth-graders read below the basic level, as compared with 25% of White fourth-graders.

Black teachers and their associations, Black academics and college administrators can take the lead role in launching a Black Educational Renewal Movement. And contributions to such a movement by White teachers and academics will be welcome. A similar welcome extends to teachers and academics among Asian-Americans and Latino-Americans. After all, Black Americans’ struggles and movements to secure modern citizenship freedom and advance modern social mobility have been overwhelmingly pluralistic in purpose and functioning. This racial-inclusive pluralism principle extends back to the heroic anti-slavery Abolitionist Movement and reaches forward through the twentieth-century Civil Rights Movement.

Among a concrete and broad-reaching enterprise initiated by a 21st century Black Educational Movement might be, I suggest, a revival of the Black youth education role performed by African-American church congregations some four generations ago, during the 1930s. Data on the education role of Black churches and their national denominations (e.g., African Methodist Episcopal, African Methodist Episcopal Zion, Colored Methodist Episcopal, and National Negro Baptist) can be found in the annual volume on Black American life produced at Tuskegee Institute during the 1930s, edited by Professor Monroe Work. The Negro Year Book 1931-1932 reported data on 154 church-based schools and academies for African-American children that had been established by 1930, of which 53 were funded by Black congregations affiliated with White church denominations (Presbyterian, Congregationalist, Catholic) while 101 schools were funded by mainline Black church denominations. These 154 church-based Black schools enrolled some 32,777 Black children — 18,349 elementary, 10,876 secondary, and 3,552 “other students.” These church-based Black schools enrolled 1,449 teachers and they mobilized $1,500,000 annual revenue to support their work.

From today’s vantage point, that nearly 40,000 Black children and youth were being educated over 75 years ago through schools sustained by African-American religious congregations is a fact of enormous significance. I was particularly interested in the 10,876 figure for secondary school Black youth, because a recent article on New York City’s vocational high schools — officially Career Technical Education (CTE) — by the African-American educator and community activist David R. Jones reported that out of 110,000 students in the city’s secondary vocational programs, some 43% are African-Americans and 44% are Latino. (See The Amsterdam News, August 23-29, 2007). Clearly, our 21st century African-American church denominations have much greater financial resources than African-American churches possessed three quarters of a century ago, which means that a Black-elite initiated Black Educational Renewal Movement today could assist significantly in galvanizing Black churches to revive the great education activities that their predecessors innovated in the 1920s and 1930s.

On the high school level in major cities today, a 21st century role in CTE-type schooling by a new African-American church-based education regime could have a significant impact on the life-chances of working-class African-American youth. As David R. Jones observes in his Amsterdam News article titled “Vocational High Schools Need Our Support”:

Clearly, a 21st century new-era contribution by African-American church-based school programs could be stimulated and assisted by a Black Educational Renewal Movement. And if this new-era Black church-based education program focused on something like New York city’s CTE curriculums, a significant advancement of the life-chances of working-class high-school youth would result. Keep in mind that just as most White working-class high-school youth do not attend college and directly enter the job market, neither do most Black working-class youth attend college. It is important, therefore, that our Black working-class youth be prepared while at high school with knowledge and skills that connect them to employment opportunities in solid job-markets like automotive repairs, electronic repairs, fashion industry, graphic arts, computers, etc. Indeed, presently far too many Black youth of working-class and poor backgrounds are high-school dropouts and/or graduate without viable job-market skills. A new-era 21st century contribution by African-American church-based schools – assisted by a Black Educational Renewal Movement – could, I have not the slightest doubt, help to remedy this situation appreciably.

A Black Civil Society Revitalization Movement

The Black Civil Society Revitalization Movement will address a variety of problems associated with the social crises of poverty and joblessness. Problems such as fragile families, teenage pregnancies and unwed motherhood/fatherhood, macho-violence and the related Hip-Hop influenced macho-male “gansta-culture”, massive Black youth homicides spawned by macho-male violence patterns, drug abuse, high HIV/AIDS cases (today disproportionately highest among Blacks in general and Black women in particular), so forth and so on.

A viable Black Civil Society Revitalization Movement will also focus on Black neighborhood renewal and development. Especially as this relates to rehabilitating decrepit physical infrastructure (housing, basic commerce relating to food business, barber and hairdressing shops, restaurants, etc.) in so many urban Black neighborhoods. The new class of Black entrepreneurs, financial experts, bankers, media entrepreneurs (e.g., Oprah Winfrey, Tom Joyner, Tavis Smiley, Reginald Hudlin), clothing entrepreneurs (e.g., Russell Simmons), millionaire sports figures (e.g., Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson), millionaire entertainment figures (e.g., Bill Crosby, Harry Belafonte, Danny Glover, Chris Rock), could take leading roles in launching the Black Civil Society Revitalization Movement.

Another sector among the Black elite should also be identified as potential contributors to the leadership roles needed to mount a viable Black Civil Society Revitalization Movement. The sector I have in mind involves the numerous African-American professional associations that have evolved in the post-Civil Rights Movement era. Associations like the following:

Furthermore, owing to the Democratic Party’s fortuitous victory in the 2006 congressional elections, the political class sector of African-American leadership underwent a ground-breaking metamorphosis. Historic legislative power became available to the 42 African-American U.S. Congress legislators. Above all, 4 African-American U.S. legislators for the first-time ever gained the chairmanship of 4 House of Representative Committees and 16 House Sub-Committees. The long-tenured Black congresspersons are now at the helm of politically powerful House Committees. For example:

In short, when these new advancements in the political attributes of the aggregate
African-American leadership sector are taken into consideration, a somewhat phenomenal “big leap forward” now characterizes the Black elite’s capabilities. This development is, in turn, reinforced by the important advances by African-Americans in upper-tier occupations in the American national economy. There can be little doubt, therefore, that today’s Black elite sector is capable of launching a viable Black Civil Society Revitalization Movement. Let’s get-on-with-it!

An Anti-Racist Criminal Justice Movement

The Anti-Racist Criminal Justice Movement should, I believe, have the status of a political imperative on the African-American leadership agenda. An Anti-Racist Criminal Justice Movement will address the massive and cynical expansion of incarcerated Black males since the late 1970s. Between the 1970s and 2003, the state and federal prison population in America increased from 200,000 to 1,500,000. Today that population numbers over 2,000,000, giving the United States the dubious honor of possessing the largest incarcerated population in the world! Above all, the bulk of the increase in America’s incarcerated population comprises working-class and poor Black males, along with working-class and poor Latino-American males.

The political philosophy scholar, Daniel Lazare, has advanced our understanding of the expansion of incarceration in the post-Civil Rights Movement era and how that expansion has devastated the life-chances of working-class African-American males. As Lazare informs us in an article titled “Stars and Bars”, The Nation (August 27/September 3, 2007):

Daniel Lazare’s article also provides special insight into the wreckage visited upon the lives of working-class African-American males, noting that “By the mid-1990s, 7 percent of black males were behind bars, while the rate of imprisonment for black males between the ages of 27 and 29 now stands at one in eight.” Furthermore, Lazare observes that “surprisingly few denizens of the American gulag have been sent away for violent crimes. In 2002 just 19 percent of the felony sentences handed down at the state level were for violent offenses, and of those only about 5 percent were for murder. Nonviolent drug offenses involving trafficking or possession (the modern equivalent of rum-running or getting caught with a bottle of bathtub gin) accounted for 31 percent of the total, while purely economic crimes such as burglary and fraud made up an additional 32 percent.”

Today in major industrial states like New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, etc., Black males comprise on average between 50% and 80% of inmates in either state or federal prisons. Data amassed by Professor Manning Marable (BC Editorial Board member) of Columbia University show that by 2000 nearly 50% of inmates in federal prisons were African-Americans. Marable’s research also found that the vast majority of Black inmates committed non-violent offenses, most of which were drug-related. The racist dimension of these criminal justice system outcomes for Black males becomes apparent when it is recognized that national data on illegal drug use show White Americans typically using illegal drugs at higher rates than Black Americans. As Professor Marable has observed:

Professor Douglas Massey, a sociologist at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson Center, probes this racist development in the country’s criminal justice system in his very important book Categorically Unequal: The American Stratification System (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2006), a book that warrants a wide readership. Massey’s study reinforces the indings made by Professor Marable — that today’s incarcerated Black males committed mainly drug-related non-violent offenses. Moreover, Massey reveals that the 1980s redesign of America’s criminal justice system in the direction of what Massey dubs the “new war on crime” (the “war on drugs”) was engineered and generated mainly by Republican controlled state legislatures and reinforced by Republican federal administrations, always of course with assistance from conservative Democratic state legislators and Congresspersons. As Massey observed in his important book Categorically Unequal: The American Stratification System:

That Republicans led this new “war on crime” is indicated by the fact that the strongest single predictor of imprisonment rates across states between 1980 and 2000 was a change from a Democratic to a Republican gubernatorial administration. Imprisonment rates are also higher in states with Republican legislatures, and nationally incarceration rates have grown more rapidly under Republican than under Democratic presidents. Richard Nixon’s “war on crime” during the 1970s was followed by Ronald Reagan’s “war on drugs” in the 1980s. In 1986 Reagan signed a national security directive that named drugs a threat to national security and authorized the military to cooperate with civilian authorities in prosecuting the newly declared “war”. Drug offenses that had formerly been left to the states to prosecute were now made against federal law, and mandatory minimum sentences were enacted for the newly federalized crimes.

On the basis of Professor Massey’s and other scholars’ study of the racist dimensions of today’s American criminal justice system, there is a pressing need for today’s Black elite sector to mount an Anti-Racist Criminal Justice Movement. The impact of the criminal justice practices on societal decay in the daily lives and future life-chances of millions of African-American weak working-class and poor citizens is massive. Accordingly, an Anti-Racist Criminal Justice Movement would represent a crucial first-step toward reversing the role of high incarceration rates in the social crises among African-Americans . Another reference to Daniel Lazare’s analysis in The Nation of the political consequences of today’s incarceration dynamics tells us how necessary an Anti-Racist Criminal Justice Movement is. Drawing on materials in a new study by Jeff Manza and Christopher Uggen titled Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), Lazare observes:

Daniel Lazare concludes his discussion of the systemic aspects of America’s monstrous incarceration rates with observations on the prominence of what might be called “moralist deology” at the foundation of today’s criminal justice practices. As Lazare put it:

Conclusion: Obligation to the Civil Rights Movement

Let me summarize my thoughts on how today’s Black elite sector can mobilize a post-Civil Rights Movement era outreach-to-Black-lower-class-crises. First, this can be achieved through initiatives from the ranks of Black professional associations, from middle-class Black civic and voluntary associations, from the ranks of Black clergy and their churches, through the resources available to the new-rich elements in today’s Black elite — wealthy business persons, corporate executives, entertainment personalities, some sports personalities, etc. Accordingly, insofar as new class and new wealth capabilities are available to the new Black elite sector, the next crucial ingredient required for this sector to fashion efforts at remedying Black lower-class crises is what I call a “flowering of Black-elite will”, that modern leadership quality of “elite obligation to popular society.”

Of course, the Black leadership institutions must shoulder the task of galvanizing into action the new middle-class and professional elements at the top of Black America’s social mobility ladder. Primary among these Black leadership institutions that I have in mind are civil rights organizations, Black advocacy organizations, and Black political class organizations. By name, these include the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Rainbow Coalition, the National Urban League, the National Council of Negro Women, the Children Defense Fund, the Council of Black Trade Unionists, the National Caucus of Black State Legislators, and the Congressional Black Caucus. I leave the NAACP as the last-mentioned Black leadership institution because, in my understanding of modern African-American leadership development, the NAACP possesses a kind of “crown jewel” historical leadership status among such institutions.

Accordingly, in light of this perspective on the NAACP’s great historical role as African-American’s premier Black leadership agency during the 20th century, there should be today an important rise in NAACP membership among middle-class and professional African-Americans. Among the literally millions of African-Americans employed in white-collar job ranks — nearly 10 million such Black persons are so employed today. Thus, current membership figures between 400,000 and 500,000 for the NAACP are unacceptable, at least from my perspective. Those figures should be somewhere over one million!

Moreover, the “Life Membership” category ought to be sizable; it costs one thousand dollars and can be paid in installments. Anyway, “Annual Membership” category in the NAACP is under $50 and no one can tell me that a million-plus individuals in the middle-class and professional stratum of African-American life cannot afford such a membership. Such membership by middle-class and professional African-American (and stable working-class African-Americans too) is owed the NAACP. The defense for this statement is the NAACP’s historical legacy as the great warhorse of Black people’s freedom – the NAACP’s historical legacy of persistent and courageous struggle against the White supremacist juggernaut in American civilization.

Furthermore, reports during the spring of 2007 of the NAACP’s financial difficulties — resulting in plans to cut its staff by a third — disturbed me a lot. After all, the Black elite sector today comprises many wealthy individuals — persons with multi-millions at their touch and perhaps a few with billions. Upon reading about the NAACP’s financial troubles, I thought to myself: “Aren’t there a few among that special category of today’s Black elite sector who will make available to the NAACP financial contributions (gifts, loans, or whatever) to ease that historic Black American institution’s financial troubles? There must be. I refuse to believe otherwise.”

One final observation. Although over the past decade or so the NAACP has mounted social-crisis remedying programs relating to the problems of education performance among African-American children and youth, there is a much larger programmatic-platform in the overall sphere of Black social crises for the 21st century NAACP to mount. It can be said, I think, that it is to the leadership credit of the former executive officer of the NAACP — Bruce Gordon — that he clearly understood the imperative need for today’s Black elite sector to design and execute social-crisis reformation programs to remedy the plight of weak working-class and poor African-Americans. It is to the leadership credit of Bruce Gordon that he initiated, in the leadership circle of the NAACP, the topic of fashioning a new leadership profile that interconnects its historic “civil rights advocacy function” and “social-crisis reformation function”. I trust that a full-fledged adoption of such a new leadership profile at the national level of the NAACP is not too far in the future.