Class Mobility and Blackness

Okay- I'll admit it. I'm solidly middle-class and upwardly mobile. I can access greater class privilege than my parents, who each certainly appreciated greater class privilege than their parents. But, I forget that I wasn't raised poor. I have enough memories of struggling with money, or not being able to afford something, or having friends with ____'s that I wanted, or whatever in my ecology of memory (I learned that phrase in seminary, and I love when I get to whip it out!) that I can pull together a convincing "raised poor" argument; persuasive enough to convince myself at least.


Beyond the references above, which could easily be just as descriptive of any episode of "Sweet 16," I have memories of not having electricity, or being humiliated because I was starving and didn't have the money for food, or countless other memories I could detail. But, what I realized, or perhaps accepted, is that those were mostly my college experiences which where fueled by a financial practice of buying my wants, begging my needs, and being too proud to ask for help. Not the same as being raised poor. In fact, although I think that Ruby Payne has some incredibly shortsighted and even harmful analyses offered in her book, "Understanding Poverty" (utter crap!) I will pull her phrase "situational poverty" to describe my relationship to poverty. I simply made a decison to stop electing to be poor, and framed my life differently. I don't think that qualifies me as raised poor.


I can pass for raised poor though. I think. Maybe I've only been fooling myself and unobservant white folks all these years? Who knows?


In any case, I've started reading again and it feels GREAT! I just started Harold Cruse's "The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual," and one of the thoughts that I'm chewing on is that bougie black folks are requisite for revolution. (Here, I mean bougie in all of its pejorative connotations, as well as its class privilege.) Cruse likes to use the term economic nationalism which highlights a gap in the Black Nationalist movement, or at least as I came to understand it, with its critique of middle-class and wealthy Black folk. Participation in, and deriving benefit from, capitalism, which is the root of the systemic racism responsible for the horrors continually visited upon Black folks is treasonous; not exclusively because the accumulation of wealth is libelous- we all want money. No, but because the accumulation of wealth in America requires participation in a culture imbued with values and judgements, and those who successfully participate in such systems are influenced by them. White supremacy is no respecter of persons; Asian people, Black people, Sub-Saharan African people, Indo-Norwegian people can support thinking and institutions which advance white privilege and culture at the expense of all others.


And, the US has seen more than its fair share of upwardly mobile Black folks turn back to berate the "Black Community" for their refusal to apply themselves so that they too could escape the confines of oppression. Speaking, perhaps for the first time, with the full weight of America's central institutions behind their words and conviction, these bougie folks serve a role in the maintenance of oppression. "See? Black folks even acknowledge that the reason their lives aren't better is because they refuse to stop being victims."


We get the opportunity to be mouthpieces for some of the most virulently racist accusations in exchange for our class privilege. We get to let white folks off the hook by not forcing them to say these heinous things; at least not publicly. The rewards will take you all the way to the Supreme Court, and will make you a global force to contend with as the Secretary of State. You can become a university president, a department manager, the smartest teacher in your school, or just the only one who "really gets it" no matter where you are.


So, bougie Black folk, we get to be mouthpieces in service to oppression, reinforcing the veracity of fucked up belief systems, and despised by our broader communities, all the while disconnected from ourselves. Or, we can always choose what's behind door number 2: "I'm apolitical." It's just safer to keep my opinions to myself, or even better, keep them from myself. "I simply don't have any thinking about that. Wanna talk about shoes or the game?"


Well, Cruse briefly outlines a history leading up to the Harlem Renaissance, and sets it parallel to the Greenwich Village renaissance; noting the absence of a Mabel Dodge. Without a figure, or figures with the resources (financial, social, and otherwise) to provide the leadership necessary for success, Cruse suggests that the Harlem Renaissance was eclipsed by the potential of what its collective talents could have accomplished.


To be clear, I'm not arguing toward DuBois' vision in service to the Talented Tenth, or the co-optation of the Black liberation struggle by class-privileged folks. Nope. I'm offering that middle-class and wealthy Black folks have a central role in the liberation of Black folks, or at least the transformation of systems of oppression targeting all of us. I contend, based on brand new thinking birthed only a few moments ago, that this role is to support institutions which cultivate and produce Black expressions. Expressions of thought, expressions of art across its myriad forms, expressions of anger and rage, expressions of hopefulness, expressions of criticism and critique aimed at highlighting the limitations of our current and past political struggles. It is in these institutions that the next steps toward our eco-socio-political liberation is being birthed and aborted.


Beyond "support black owned" establishments, far beyond, the accumulation of material wealth (or just some financial resource) comes with the opportunity to participate in our struggle against oppression in new and innovative ways. We can help to sustain spaces that produce liberatory thoughts, movements, and people who are free to conceptualize blackness as broader, freer, and more powerful than any in recent memory.

Have you ever tried to build a program fueled exclusively by impoverished people? Without vigilance, insufficient financial resource impoverishes your spirit. Poverty robs you of your energy, your time, your desire, your hopes, even your ability to dream, as your focus is honed on survival with laser-sharp precision. Organizers in communities of color constantly complain about the struggle to stave off well-meaning white people, to regulate the number of students, and to increase the actual representation (or better yet, leadership) by community folks who are intended to be the direct beneficiaries of these efforts.

Oppression takes it toll, even on your ability to show up, or know that it matters whether you do or not. Building and sustaining infrastructure is a beast when your core contingent struggles to hold onto the knowledge that it matters whether they show up.

We need some class-based vertical linkages in this liberatory struggle, which inform our analysis, our movement-building strategies, even the language and that we use, and the way that we frame our history. Class privileged folks cannot pursue liberation on behalf of anyone but ourselves, as much as we would like to think otherwise. It's not a limitation, no one can liberate another. We can give them what we think they deserve, but without their participation what is birthed is not indeed their liberation.

Under-resourced black folks are too small in number to effect change on a systems level, and a violent uprising would quickly get quashed, all the while feeding more workers into prisons to serve as cheap labor for an eager market. Since, we are interested in the same ultimate objective, and can't be successful independently, we may as well work collaboratively. Not incidental collaboration, but planned collaboration that is thought out, sought, and brings us closer to our shared goal as a liberated people with the agency to self-determine the nature, scope, and desires of our humanity; leaving room for the dynamic nature of human beings that shifts and changes over time.

Certainly there are other ways to plug-in and participate in the ongoing freedom struggle, but never have I understood the Black middle-class as the source of wealth and resource required to fund and support the institutions necessary to serve as the backbone of a successful liberation struggle through our participation in them. Certainly, "cut a check" is nothing novel, but the vitality of a Black liberation struggle resting squarely upon the participation of class privileged Black folks, whose eventual recognition of these systems as theirs too, protects and insulates them to increase their longevity- I haven't heard that as an argument against attacking and ultimately including class privileged folks in the struggle for all of our liberation.


So, I'm middle-class ya'll. Always have been, even when I made decisions to choose poverty over class mobility, because I feared becoming a sell-out, a Black Republican, or loosing my connection with my Blackness. My Blackness encompasses James Cone's constructs and so much more than that. It's interesting to me that we have a richness of what Blackness can mean in poverty, which dissipates into assimilation and ultimately non-existence with class privilege.


Ballers and balla's, have been with us for some time in many forms that hearken back to the enslaved Africans dancing for white slave owners when they brought company into the slave quarters to be entertained. And, all manner of minstrelsy have been with us for some time. These are depoliticized, however, and have not actively been understood as roles for those interested in "the struggle." So, too are today's athletes and industry elites characterized as roles that stand outside of the liberation struggle against oppression and all of its accompanying eco-socio-political responsibilities.

What does it mean to have a liberation struggle that doesn't stop with class divisions? Hard? Yup. A pain in the ass? Yup. Required to suffer paternalism and the constant onslaught of internalized oppression wreaking havoc in our midst? Happens already.

It just occurs to me, as I accept my middle-class upbringing, and my upwardly mobile future, that class privilege does not have to mean a death sentence for a revolutionary. Right, Eldridge Cleaver?