Detroit is in ruins. Unemployment amongst African Americans is well past that of other nationalities. Suicide rates amongst African American males between the ages of 18 and 35 is also increasing. Most people, who live inside Wayne County, have to drive an hour for fresh fruits and vegetables. Even on Black in America, it was revealed that it is easier to obtain a gun in some Black neighborhoods than a fresh tomato.
How did this happen? When did this happen? How could we just sit by and let it happen?
It has been my privilege to spend my days teaching and discussing African American/diasporic literature. For the past two semesters, I've been focusing on Black people and our quest to achieve the American Dream. First, I ask my students, who are normally between the ages of 20 and 60, what they think the American Dream is. The answers include: a nice home in the suburbs, plenty of designer clothes, and at least one luxury car. Next, I ask them if they think the myth of American prosperity is true. If my class consists of mostly middle class white students, the answer is overwhelmingly "no." If my class consists of mostly Black and poor white students, the answer is "yes." These students really and truly believe in the American Dream. And they believe that it is achievable, one way or the other.
The next sector consists of me teaching them several texts written by Black people that are related to the American Dream. My major text is "A Raisin in the Sun," the groundbreaking play by the late Lorrain Hansberry. Here's the thing about their answers and the play that disturbs me the most, and these notes are also part of my lecture to the students.
I notice that in their answers, nobody said anything about getting a better education. Nobody says anything about having more time to properly raise their children. The answers were solely materialistic and having the ability to buy bigger and better material goods. "A Raisin in the Sun" also has an interesting subplot. There is a generational/geographical shift between the mother, Lena Younger, and her children, Walter and Beneatha. Lena Younger and her husband, Walter Younger Sr. migrated from the South to one of our Northern industrial centers. Like the millions of African Americans to do so during the Great Migrations I and II, they were filled with hope and joy at the prospect of earning fair wages. But like so many, their hopes turned into the nightmare embodied by the ghetto in which they lived. Walter Younger, Sr. had to die in order for his family to earn enough money to even think of leaving that ghetto. I notice that, in the play, neither one of the children mourned their father. They were totally focused on that $10000 pay check, and what it meant for them individually. Lena sees this tendency in her children, but cannot quite articulate the trouble with them. Asaigi, the African boyfriend of Beneatha, did. He, like so many readers of the play, found it odd that the children argued over money that their father died for, with no mention or thanks to him.
Here's where I come in. With the Great Migration II, African Americans became mostly urban people for the first time in history. People were glad to get away from the cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta and the sugar cane farms of Louisiana. I cannot blame them. Share cropping is another name for volunteer slavery. These people took with them horror tales of white supremacy, Blues, jazz, quilting, church, spirituals, hair braiding, soul food, and jive. They told their children stories of how they were so poor that they could not afford new shoes and clothes; how they could not get their hair pressed every week; how they did not even have enough to eat most days. Suddenly, it became fashionable to poor and Black from Mississippi. Children, once seen as sources of wealth because added hands meant added labor for the farm, became an inconvenience. Women, like Ruth Younger, did not want added mouths to feed because they had to think about the children that were already here. Abortions became a blessing, and not a taboo.
What these people failed to take with them was family history. Yes, Jim Crowism was bad, but what about the uncle that always outsmarted the white man or the passive aggressive aunt that told her white woman employer, "I don't know about this strike Ms. Dorothy, but I'm gone stay off them buses until this mess get straightened out." What these people failed to take with them was a sense of pride and dignity. Yes, people were share croppers, but walking with your shoulders rounded is not worth anything man can offer. No, people did not have the best houses or the trendiest clothes. But the houses and the clothes that they had were kept clean and neat. Being poor does not give us a reason to live like animals. Cleanliness is next to Godliness.
So the thing that came down between Lena Younger and her children was a lack of teaching and too much teaching. The South was bad. Mississippi was everybody's nightmare, but being next to the soil taught survival skills, dignity, family unity, and pride. The Baby Boomer generation, most of them having grown up in the South, or least visited with their grandparents from the summer, still have some of these skills. In the name of "progress," or in the name of achieving the ever-elusive American Dream, either wanted to forget these things or failed to pass them on. And look at what the forgetfulness, the lack of teaching has wrought. Look at Detroit. Look at Chicago. Look at Memphis. Look at New Orleans. Look at Houston. Look at Richmond. Look at Oakland. The next time a Baby Boomer asks, "What's wrong with the young people?" Look in the mirror.
In breaking the glass ceiling, in becoming the first this and the first that, in becoming middle class, in achieving the American dream, in racing to be my competition because you do not want to retire and become irrelevant, have you failed to teach me, my elder?
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