Society
I reject the values of the black middle classes
Published 19 June 2000
Bernadette Gray-Little, an African-American psychology professor at the University of North Carolina, has concluded that low-income black teenagers, far from suffering a self-esteem problem, actually have higher self-esteem than their white counterparts.
The comparison with whites does not concern me. What is crucial is that the idea of blacks being poor, down-spirited victims is out of the window. According to Gray-Little, self-esteem has never been a particular black problem; it was just as high in the days before they got civil liberties in the US. But when the Observer put these findings to British anti-racists, they, always desperate for causes of complaint, argued that discrimination must be even more rampant than they had thought. That, they said, was the only explanation why high black self-esteem did not translate into high black achievement in schools.
The achievers dominate the race-relations industry: ten GCSEs and a degree on the wingspan of a butterfly are but the only measures of achievement. By and large, they send their children to private schools in a neat attempt to perpetuate the culture of the black middle classes as the only measure of progress and development. They jockey for equality with whites.
I have no objection to these ambitions. I fiercely object, however, to the imposition of black middle-class values on the black community as a whole.
More and more, this attitude is being rejected by the black rank and file. I do not wish to expose the details of the lives of my children to the general public, but it is enough to say that, by any measure of black academic achievement, they are failures, and so was I, and so was C L R James.
Only last week, the child of my house approached Mrs Howe and apologised for her lack of interest in going to university. She has taken to the army cadet corps like a duck to water; with a sprinkling of GCSE passes, she expects to make her career as a squaddie and then go upwards. I was pleasantly surprised. She and her friends in working-class Brixton have made the leap from what I describe as vulgar ambition to a confident grasp of what they are and can be. I responded quietly: "You are my girl."
In the Caribbean and other former colonial countries, the only way out of the muck and mire of post-slavery plantation societies was through educational qualification. Hundreds of thousands of us were herded into the discipline of a curriculum fashioned elsewhere. My grandfather would warn that "if you do not pass your exams, you will end up a policeman". Victorian snobbery looked askance at anyone who did not pass this or that, and to have a degree elevated the family socially.
We live in a society that is fundamentally different, but the snobbery lives on. A generation of young blacks without certificates have been made to feel inferior.
Not now. A new generation say that you do not need qualifications to lead the black community. And I believe that their parents - alienated by all the compromises that the black middle classes have made in the long struggle for racial freedom - have generated this new attitude. You only have to speak to them in their homes, their pubs and their churches to get a fair idea of their attitude to those who have their certificates and who spout anti-racism at the slightest opportunity.
The Lawrence campaign changed everything. The Lawrences were ordinary people; they did not need the well-known achievers in their campaign for justice. Our conception of ourselves as working-class communities underwent an enormous transformation. We found that we could forge changes in the most powerful areas of state power without being led by the black middle classes.
Our conception of what counts as achievement changed radically. We found that we had closer ties with our white equivalents of the same class than we had with those of another class but of similar skin colour.
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