Debra Dickerson

Generations

Cecille Isidro — Sun, 09 Sep 2001 00:00:00 -0400

Founded in 1881 in an Atlanta church basement by two Yankee missionaries, Spelman College is America's oldest school for black women. For decades, it turned out a steady stream of Latin-quoting teachers to staff America's segregated classrooms. In the parlance of the day, Spelman women were a credit to their race, lifting as they climbed. But like that of the larger African-American community it served, its vision grew grander over time. By the 1990's, Spelman was rated one of the best liberal arts colleges in the South and among the top 10 colleges for blacks.

Like invoking Harvard, Yale or Princeton, announcing oneself as a Spelman grad, at least among college-educated blacks, turns heads. But it can also narrow eyes and arouse suspicions: among its other distinctions, the college developed a reputation as a haven for upper-crust, stiff-lipped, proper African-American ladies of a certain class and skin tone. Through it all, however, Spelman has clung to its mission of helping "students to discover their own power and to prepare them to wield that power in a positive way." Spelman's student leaders are an elite within an elite, a small group chosen to guide and inspire the brightest of black America. Their lives, and the changing ways they viewed their roles, provide a unique glimpse into how black women's experiences and expectations, as well as their relationships to power, have evolved. And so, I spoke with five former senior-class presidents from the past six decades (Arnette Sayles Atkinson, 1951, died in 1973).

"Society was putting a lot of pressure on young women to find husbands," says Sadie Sims Allen, president of the class of 1941. "But my father insisted that I go to college because he believed in higher education for women." Allen recalls that, like her father, Spelman affirmed what few other voices in America dared suggest: that black women could have it all. Though Allen married the day that she graduated and reared four children, as her children grew older, she returned to Spelman in a variety of capacities, including registrar and eventually dean of students.

Amid the great social upheavals of the 1960's, Spelman's conservative tradition of dress codes and mandatory church services eventually gave way to a less restrictive and more politically charged environment. Gwendolyn P. Maxie, class of 1961, joined other young activists in working with the newly formed Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. She prayed with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. before marches and sit-ins and credits Spelman's focus on spirituality with allowing her to "replace fear with prayer," even while being spat upon.

By the 1970's, talk of revolution was commonplace. Doris Sims-Johnson (class of 1971) shared in some of that fervor and realized that while societal racism was one problem in her life, the college that stood in loco parentis was another. "I went to hear Stokely Carmichael, and then I went back to march on campus," Sims-Johnson says. "I wanted to change Spelman. The administration's answer was to ease the curfew restrictions if our parents agreed. Not many did," she says now, laughing.

With their agitation on behalf of students, Maxie, Sims-Johnson and future presidents sought to reconcile Spelman's traditions with the new wind of black and female empowerment blowing through America. Indeed, in 1976, students locked Spelman's trustees in a boardroom for 36 hours, demanding that, after 95 years, they at last appoint a black woman president. It took 11 years for that demand to be met.

By the 1980's, the struggle for integration and equality was settled. America's corporate doors had been officially forced open, and Spelman updated its mission to prepare its students to compete with any college graduate in the country. "We weren't being trained to excel solely among blacks," says Cynthia E. Jackson, president of the class of 1981. "Instead, we were taught to see all of America as open and available to us."

Nobody came to embody the modern Spelman spirit more than Johnnetta Betsch Cole, who in 1987 was named the college's first "sister president." According to Angela C. Hill, class of 1991, Cole's appointment took Spelman's tradition of sisterhood and service to another level. "With Sister Cole, there was an open door policy," Hill says. That spirit continued with the appointment of Audrey F. Manley in 1997.

For Ashley Hibbett, class of 2001, that meant working with the admissions office to recruit top students. Hibbett, who is headed to Harvard Law School this fall, also worked to build alliances with Atlanta's black community, helping to ensure that Spelman's long tradition of scholarship and stewardship will continue to have an impact in the New South.

As the lives of black women have evolved and opportunities for power have expanded, Spelman College has reflected the evolution. For Jackson, and for scores of others, it remains "a positive environment where young black women can flourish," she says. "It's not the absence of men and whites that makes Spelman graduates feel unlimited and successful; it's the bonding of black women."

The Ripples of Race

Cecille Isidro — Tue, 27 Mar 2001 00:00:00 -0500

Sometimes, it's easier to see the full implications of some of our race-related social problems by looking at them not directly but with our peripheral vision. Sometimes it's the ripples that tell the story and not the rock that set them in motion.

For instance, it's not nearly as difficult to joust with one's political opponents about our incarceration rate and its disproportionate effects on the poor and racial minorities as it is to hear young, black comediennes do heartrending but hilarious schticks about what it's like to have every male member of your family in jail. "That's why I keep my hair so short," jokes Angelique Cope. "Somebody's got to be the man of the family."

Or to read a book called The Prisoner's Wife. Written by asha bandele, whose husband is serving a long sentence, the book is part memoir and part "how to" for the millions of family members with incarcerated loved ones. "Keep his picture prominent. Send him his children's pictures and copies of schoolwork. Aim for balance in the parenting roles."

That last piece of advice is perhaps the most wistfully pathetic I have ever read. What other civilized nation needs such "art"?

Some of her advice is dead right, as in, "Set aside a special fund for phone calls." Nationwide, departments of corrections make hundreds of millions from prisoners' collect calls home (the only kind they can make). The states award mutually lucrative monopoly contracts to communications companies that set the price for inmates' calls at well above market price. States then receive commissions of 20 to 63 percent. This, some say, amounts to an unfair, regressive tax on the mostly poor family members of prisoners. Tough, respond corrections officials, our budgets are insufficient.

Illinois prisoners recently lost an appeal which charged that the high price of calls violated their families' free speech rights. On the other hand, though, Troy Campbell, president of the North American Communications Group, has been indicted on graft charges stemming from the alleged scamming of millions from collect-call systems he oversaw in prisons around the nation.

Even the "ripples" that are clearly either blameworthy or illegal shed meaningful light on the dizzyingly difficult issues we face and the many strands of sociopolitical conflict they encompass.

An African illegal alien turned her impending deportation into a cause celebre taken up by the likes of Gloria Steinem, Julia Roberts, members of Congress and the former first lady. But the "Queen Mother" of her tribe who would be brutally circumcised when returned and found not to be a virgin turned out to have assumed someone's else identity and was merely trying to avoid returning to life in a poor, futureless country. Worse, the identity she assumed was of a fellow citizen who had been afraid to report her passport stolen and lived every day here with the fear of her own deportation back to a poor, futureless country.

The Denny's restaurant chain has been reeling since 1994, when it settled a $ 46 million class-action lawsuit filed by hundreds of black customers, to at least some of whom it had refused service. It's been easy pickings for unscrupulous blacks ever since. Fed up, it began its own strategy of massive resistance. When two black Miamians filed suit last year, Denny's lawyers produced the restaurant videotape.

Let's just say that the story line was less Selma's Edmund Pettus Bridge than a bunch of greedy children staring at a locked cookie jar. The plaintiffs' lawyer swiftly withdrew. Stubbornly committed to the noble cause of civil rights, the plaintiffs hired another lawyer, who had a similar reaction to viewing that video his clients had told him nothing about.

At the height of the 1980s crack wars, black businessmen went door to door in violent neighborhoods with tales (and photos) of innocents killed in the cross-fire; they were selling children's burial policies to terrified black parents. In the '00s, two new trends: "articles" on the danger of racial profiling that turn out to be sales jobs for pre-paid criminal-defense insurance policies. Why pay for an ad when you can use the white bogeyman to scare clients into your office?

Also, reparations scams. Blacks are conning their brothers with enticements of $ 43,000 to $ 500,000 tax rebates, all for the low, low price of a $ 50 to $ 100 "filing fee." Cunning to the last, these con men caution the filers not to contact the IRS because "they don't want you to know about this."

Obviously, hucksters read the papers religiously. Soon, I suppose, we'll start seeing scams involving phony black churches (like Flip Wilson's Church of What's Happening Now) bilking the government out of faith-based-initiative money. Or a[acute] la the human genome project, phony DNA information purporting to identify blacks' ancestral African homelands. Of course, all will have been chiefs or Queen Mothers and will receive an ornately scripted certificate (suitable for framing) "proving" their royal lineage. Just call the 1-800 number and have your credit cards ready.

The GOP's 'Good' Blacks

Cecille Isidro — Tue, 13 Mar 2001 00:00:00 -0500

For all their scoffing at former president Clinton's "I feel your pain" oversentimentality, Republicans seem to have fallen prey to the same affliction. One can't help wondering, though, about this sudden respectful compassion for certain blacks in the wake of a divisive election and a weakened Democratic Party.

First came Mayor Rudy Giuliani's boast that, by ignoring the city's black leaders, he'd been blacks' dream mayor. "[T]he things we've done are better for the community than the things they've been fighting for the last 20 to 30 years," he crowed. Until he'd emancipated them, blacks had kept other blacks "enslaved" and "oppressed." With aggressive policing, an inhospitable welfare system and opposition to affirmative action, he'd saved blacks' villages by burning them.

At the other end of the emotional spectrum, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush was overcome as he addressed a black conservative group recently. "I'm not crying for me. I'm crying for you, Leslie [Steele], and others who have to make the ultimate sacrifice," he wept, as she brought him a tissue paper onstage. Steele, an African American, claims that blacks harass her because she works for a governor only 8 percent of them approve of. "Leslie has to take grief for me, not because of the truth but because of perceptions," he wept.

To paraphrase Eddie Murphy in his infamous "Saturday Night Live" performance as an undercover white: what silly Negroes. (My former editor) Andrew Sullivan advises the GOP against "[k]issing up to" Jesse Jackson. To do so "would be a slap in the face to the brave 10 per cent of blacks who voted for W."

Blacks are better off under Giuliani, whether they think so or not? Working for a Republican is the "ultimate sacrifice"? Voting for one makes you brave? Tugged heartstrings notwithstanding, one might well smell a divide-and-conquer strategy emanating from the VRWC (vast right-wing conspiracy) these days. Political machinations, however crafty, are nothing new and certainly not inherently blameworthy. But this particular one, while indisputably brilliant, is laced with equal parts contempt and condescension.

How else to interpret such fulsome bootlicking except that with blacks there is always danger, even for deviating from the party line? How else but that only the paltry few free-thinking blacks smart enough to escape Pavlovian party loyalty and a self-destructive liberality are deemed worthy of whites' all-important respect? One can't object to black Republicans. One can, however, object to a political equation that deems the only good black a Republican one. By patting them on the head and affixing spit-sticky gold stars to their foreheads, the GOP is gambling that those so rewarded won't notice they've been promoted to mere credits to their race. One wonders when Colin Powell or Condoleezza Rice will shout: "Ixnay on the ave-bray crap! Just treat me like a Republican."

Every good conspiracy proceeds on multiple fronts, so it wasn't long before more stout-hearted Republicans took their cues for Phase II of The Plan. This phalanx, the Whites Who Can Say No Team, is making it clear that no more Negro nonsense will be tolerated. In agreeing to detente last week with NAACP chief Kweisi Mfume, wily House Leader Dick Armey flipped the script on him. He insisted they also discuss the "all too-common practice [of spreading] unfounded, racially charged falsehoods against Republicans for political advantage." He used ingenious phrases like "reverse race-baiting" and "racial McCarthyism."

Former speaker Newt Gingrich went even further. "Jesse Jackson doesn't want an honest debate," he told black reporters. Neither does Mfume. "They are going to yell racism," something Republicans are incapable of exhibiting, apparently. This gambit we shall designate the "I know you are, but what am I?" offensive.

If one thing is certain as the victorious GOP contemplates world domination, it's that the concept of "racism" must be gnawed to jabberwockian meaninglessness when uttered by a minority. All such a wackily brazen strategy requires is cojones the size of the president's home state and an utter belief in the purity of a Republican heart. How can it fail?

As the final tentacle of the GOP/VRWC strategy to neuter any black leaders it can't woo, President Bush has showered attention on urban America's shock troops, the bridesmaids of black political leadership -- the ministers and community activists on the ghetto's front lines. Through his faith-based organizations initiative and the strategic appointment of highly visible and very brave minorities to his administration, he's engineered the perfect end-around the entrenched black political class.

Once you've reduced the Rev. Jesse Jackson to statements like, "the magnitude of America's unfinished business is above the church," your work as an apparatchik in the VRWC is done. Time to collect your 40 acres and that mule. Not bad for a president who needs to get hooked on phonics. Maybe those are tears of joy in Republicans' eyes.

The Truth About Troops on Food Stamps

Cecille Isidro — Tue, 27 Feb 2001 00:00:00 -0500

The current concern about those who serve in the military -- especially their pay and quality of life -- is a good thing, but also a little misguided in places. Sure, defending America is not a job to be foisted by the better-off and well connected onto the low-paid help. But unfortunately, the widespread ignorance about military life in a society where we don't have the draft anymore makes informed discussion of the subject difficult.

For example, much is being made of the fact that some 5,000 military families receive food stamps. But this actually comes to about one in every 200 families, a considerably lower number than in the civilian population, and much of it is due to an accounting glitch concerning how housing allowances are tallied, which makes some GIs appear to earn less than they do.

The Pentagon proposed replacing the food stamps with debit cards for use only on-base. Instead, Congress opted for a targeted cash payment of up to $ 500 monthly. GIs and their supporters should find this troubling.

What is rarely acknowledged about these former food stamp recipients in uniform is that they are recently enlisted, very junior personnel with lots of children. These people chose to have children they couldn't afford and (very responsibly) joined the military to improve their standard of living. Their personal choices, not hard-hearted America, impoverished them. As one active-duty friend said, "Who told them they didn't have to wait until they were established to have a family?"

This is where America's lack of veterans causes a disconnect in the public discourse on defense issues. The guilt of avoiding military service inflicts on civilians a psychological inability to disagree with or doublecheck those who serve. That's why this line of reasoning (no extra money for extra kids) comes so naturally when the subject is welfare recipients but induces gasps when it refers to an airman first class.

As one who has been there, I can assure you: GIs study the pay tables like John Ashcroft studies the Bible. Central to every "fruit salad" medal display on a dress uniform are longevity medals. In my Air Force days (1980-92) you got the basic ribbon at four years, then a "device" (a little brass bug) for each subsequent completion.

Outside of job performance and special circumstances, rank and time in grade are everything to pay and promotion. You know from Day One exactly what you'll earn, exactly when you can be promoted, exactly how much extra you'll receive for going airborne or to a combat zone or a special duty assignment at an embassy.

One of the things that GIs hold dear is that a captain is a captain is a captain. Whether running a motor pool, performing C-sections or interpreting for foreign dignitaries, one captain is paid like any other, based on rank, longevity, (limited) number of dependents, job performance and special duties.

If you want more, it's there to be had, because all the things that earn you extra pay are things the military sorely needs done but lacks enough troops to accomplish. But you have to work for it.

The fairness issues abound when we start treating GIs like welfare recipients -- that is, more money for having more kids. For instance, for service people with a security clearance, "financial irresponsibility" is a legitimate reason for loss of access to classified information (and with it, career). Why punish a GI with bad credit but reward a teenager who didn't practice birth control?

Like civilian control, the military's evenhanded structure of rank and pay helps make it the source of social stability and upward mobility that it is. It's what helps to keep it one of the few institutions in American life that nearly everyone admires and trusts. Where else could a mediocre student born of West Indian immigrants have risen to such high office as has Colin Powell?

I'd hate to think that simple political expediency and cheap Dem-bashing by some Republicans in Congress is starting to get in the way of that hard-headed, up-by-your-own-bootstraps GI mentality.

More troubling is that America lacks enough veterans in public life with the experience to know when something complicated is being oversimplified for political gain.

Are You For Us -- or Persecuting Us?

Cecille Isidro — Fri, 02 Feb 2001 00:00:00 -0500

The Ashcroft nomination flap ushered in a new religious correctness.

Often and vehemently, Christians in public life bemoan the lack of respect--if not the outright scorn and persecution--they endure. The recent backlash against John Ashcroft, confirmed Thursday as President Bush's attorney general, is the latest embodiment of this phenomenon. We've heard the lamentation from the faithful, who seem convinced that they and their religion are being oppressed.

The Wall Street Journal's William McGurn, writes, sarcastically, "Any government effort that does not view organized religion, especially Christianity, as a Threat to Our American Way of Life risks breaching the hallowed Wall Of Separation that puts us, of course, on the verge of becoming Another Iran." Says Sen. James Inhofe, a Republican from Oklahoma, "John Ashcroft is guilty of one thing. He is guilty of having an inseparable love of the Lord." One would think crosses and thorn crowns were being stockpiled on the Mall.

Let's put aside for a moment the utter disrespect McGurn and Inhofe show for those who disagree with them and address the real issue: How does one respect a religion one doesn't accept? How would a well-intentioned secular humanist or Wiccan respectfully respond to a Bible-based argument against abortion or no-fault divorce laws?

On the one hand, dismissing Christian views is considered disrespectful, but the opposite--engagement and critique--are considered equally oppressive. The Washington Times editorialized: "[Ashcroft] has been caricatured by Senate Democrats, special interest groups and the media elite as one blinded by his faith to law and reason." McGurn agrees, "Reminds me...of all the people who find Ashcroft unbalanced because he believes in Revelation but subscribe to the [New York] Times because it is Authoritative."

McGurn may have been speaking facetiously, but the point lies between "believe" and "subscribe." I subscribe to the Wall Street Journal and The Washington Times, but I don't live by them, or proselytize others to do the same.

When, in a 1995 book, Christopher Hitchens alleged that Mother Teresa was hypocritical and misused power and money, it endeared him to few of the faithful. But consider: He took her stated beliefs seriously enough to write about her translation of them into activism. To this day, Hitchens is roundly condemned--indeed, assumed to be getting W-2s from Beelzebub--but debated? Proved wrong?

Surely, Americans must be allowed, as rational human beings, to point out inconsistencies in the beliefs for which Christians demand respect. Otherwise, "respect" really means "sacrosanct," "unquestionable."

Hence, the emergence of "religious correctness": The implicit assumption, first, that religious dogma outranks the preferences of nonbelievers. Respect Revelation; sneer at The New York Times and the secularity it represents. Second, that religious beliefs, however directly inserted into public policy, are undebatable. "Gospel," so to speak. But no one is accorded this level of certainty in our system. Ashcroft must be equally ready to persuade as the rest of us.

Nonetheless, Senator Robert C. Smith (R-NH) deems Ashcroft a victim of "religious profiling." "There's a long line of people who on the basis of their position on life couldn't be attorney general," he notes. "We could start with Jesus Christ himself." Janet Parshall, of the Family Research Council, argues that, "To suggest that strong personal faith disqualifies someone from public office...represents a type of genteel bigotry."

Leave aside the notion that bigotry is ever genteel: Why is opposing a conservative evangelical seeking public office opposing his religion? Evangelicals are turning public scrutiny of beliefs--politicized by no one but themselves--into persecution. Rejecting Jesus Christ as our personal Attorney General makes Grand Inquisitors of us all.

It's often said that the nonreligious and liberals "can't understand" evangelicals. Odd, this argument, coming from a group that so often trivializes its own beliefs. So much energy is expended on ostentatious prayer at high school events, or in splashing the Ten Commandments across public spaces. One need only linger near the office fridge to be regaled with pious stories of how Jesus helped a co-worker get a good deal on a used car, or concerned Himself with the outcomes of sporting events. It is difficult not to hold such silliness against mature believers.

Ashcroft, meanwhile, trivializes his attachment to his beliefs by promising to countenance laws that directly contravene them. We often hear arguments about personal responsibility and deferred gratification from the Christian right. Must Ashcroft not accept that one must sometimes sacrifice for one's beliefs, including high public office, if that office would put one in mortal peril (never mind go against established policy)? Neither the Mahatma nor Martin Luther King had a government job, perhaps because each knew it would be impossible to serve both their religion and their worldly ambition.

American history is replete with examples of religion successfully injected into the public realm--abolitionism, the civil rights movement. Whatever the springboard of one's beliefs, by all means, let's hear them. But don't expect reverence, because, as we used to say when I was growing up a Southern Baptist fundamentalist expected to accept an assertion at face value, "Your lips don't flap like Bible leaves."

Insulting Our Intelligence

Cecille Isidro — Fri, 12 Jan 2001 00:00:00 -0500

Let's see if I've got this right: We're supposed to believe that the high-living Rev. Al Sharpton has little in the way of assets or income with which to pay the $ 65,000 judgment he owes the man he defamed, even less ability to raise it. Clarence Thomas, a Yale law grad, appeals court judge and believer in natural law, never thought about abortion before his confirmation hearings. College boy Clinton didn't inhale. And now, that a nominee for labor secretary who generously harbored and paid a beleaguered illegal immigrant actually believes she was forced to withdraw her candidacy because of mere partisan bloodlust. What next? That every vote counts?

Americans who do not live and die by the political cycle, who have lashed neither their resumes nor their identities to either party, who are not indefatigable partisans making judgments based on the ideological affiliations of the parties involved -- surely they are weary of the insulting liar's poker marathon that ensues every time some member of the elite is shown to have stuffed a few socks into the codpiece of his public persona.

The gust of wind produced by millions of eyeballs simultaneously rolling heavenward during Linda Chavez's painful "love me, love me do" news conference was stronger than El Nino's. No wonder voter participation rates are so abysmal here given the familiarity-bred contempt that the well-informed but nonideological voter must battle.

When will our leaders stop insulting our intelligence? When will someone at the height of public life stand and admit to lapses of judgment of the type any decent person might make and trust the rest of us to let the knucklehead off with the noogie of a few Letterman skewerings?

Naive? No. Who would have thought that puritanical America would keep President Clinton's personal failings separate from his triumphs in the capacity for which he was hired? And what of Christine Todd Whitman in her first gubernatorial bid, when she admitted to employing and housing an illegal immigrant couple for five years? She told the truth, paid substantial fines and has been Madame Governor ever since. Likely, she'll soon be Madame EPA Chief, her transgression atoned for and long forgotten.

Consider John McCain, whose maverick presidential campaign this season caught fire in part because of his refreshing willingness to speak frankly, admit mistakes and take criticism seriously.

Obviously, no one can expect to survive admissions of either purely self-serving or criminal acts. Also, the lapse of judgment would have had to cease at least a few years before the admission -- the longer, obviously, the worse the mistake. Certainly, no unshriven transgressor could criticize others for committing the same transgression, regardless of time passed. One would also have to do nothing to cover up the act, or pressure others to do so. Most important, one should come clean at the first meaningful opportunity. An FBI background check is probably as good a time as any.

Thankfully, we have a few positive examples of character -- Whitman and McCain, however strategic or unavoidable their choices may have been -- to stoke our forlorn hopes for both leaders of character and parties that might someday encourage (let alone require) such character. Because we can't go on choosing leaders this way, not if we don't want voters to become ever more disaffected. Every clash can't be framed as instant judgment -- that is, if the alleged behavior occurred, the conversation ends and the next player takes the stage. Life is more complicated than that, and politics ought to be, too. The correct question ought to be, "Even if the behavior occurred, how disqualifying is it, really, in context?"

Eventually, someone at the height of public life is going to have to stand up for everyone who's ever pulled something boneheaded -- all of us, in other words -- and demand that acknowledged mistakes be kept in perspective.

Let's play a game. Let's say Anita Hill told the truth. Clarence Thomas admits to having been a pig in the early 1980s, before society had made clear its taboo on such behavior. He expresses sincere regret, reminds us that he never laid a hand on her, helped rather than hurt her career and had truly not understood how his actions made her feel. He de- and renounces sexual harassment, swears not to have practiced it in a decade and not to tolerate it if he witnesses it in the future. Patricia Ireland shakes his hand, accepts his apology on behalf of women everywhere and refocuses the debate on his judicial opinions and writings. Who needs psychotropic drugs?

Back in the real world, the question remains, how can a country ever grow up when no one ever talks to it like an adult? But then, I still believe that every vote ought to count.

Blacks Judging Blacks

Cecille Isidro — Sun, 24 Dec 2000 00:00:00 -0500

When I was in Air Force Officers' Training School, we briefly hosted cadets from the Air Force Academy. We didn't get along well. Capping off the visit, we played a very strange baseball game. Both sides kept cheering, "Go Air Force!"

No matter how often we brought ourselves up short in confusion, neither team could divorce itself from an understanding that it, and only it, could represent the Air Force. Messianic and self-absorbed, we had yet to learn what the Air Force proper would teach us--respectful coexistence with other "zoomies" from strange disciplines whose worlds overlapped and conflicted with ours.

Now that the Republicans are in charge, Democrats are going to have to learn that same lesson. In particular, blacks have a turbulent period of cognitive dissonance ahead. With the nominations of Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice to the highest posts ever occupied by minorities, it's just become a whole lot trickier to be black. Whom are we supposed to cheer for and against now?

Black Republicans still nonplus other blacks, so the demands for their excommunication haven't yet found a rhythm. Thankfully, there's still time for us to think this through, because the black commentariat is only beginning to nibble at the conundrum Powell and Rice present--family members to weep with pride over but who won't use their power as the family directs. "They're not the kind of champions that would be helpful, and they don't have a following," said Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-Fla.).

Not helpful? Why? Because they aren't liberal Democrats? And why don't such superstars have followings among blacks? The point is what Hastings means, not what he says, because when it comes to intraracial whipcracking, it's all about the subtext.

Blacks legitimately lambaste America's use of racially coded discourse (for example, "urban," "underclass," "too stupid to mark a ballot correctly"), but now that Republican ideas will be coming from black faces, many blacks will respond with this same kind of encrypted talk.

"Unhelpful" = traitorous.

"No following"= not really black.

In other words, black Republicans are, oh, dear, Uncle Toms, a schoolyard taunt we refuse to outgrow that's meant to coerce conformity.

Though the clock ticks, murmurings about Rice are barely audible yet. This is due to ignorance, laziness and insecurity. There was some attention to a messy sex discrimination case at Stanford while she was provost there, and to her star turn at the Republican convention this summer, but her specialization in international affairs and defense issues has largely kept Rice off most blacks' radar screens.

Soon, though, she will be skewered for her lack of interest in Africa and the Third World, her choice of Russian instead of Swahili or Creole, and her opposition to humanitarian intervention. All will be interpreted through the shopworn prism of her self-hatred and need for white approval.

Clausewitz, let alone Kissinger, is unlikely to come up. Colin and Condi may be free of overt white control, but the black Politburo calls dibs on the souls of black folks. A sister needn't be large to feel its undertow.

Last year the magazine Black Issues in Higher Education ran a heartbroken letter from doctoral candidate Cheri Wilson, a Russian studies professor. Fluent in French, Russian, Spanish and written German, she pleaded for articles on "scholars of color [in] nonethnic studies" because they are "discouraged . . . by many scholars of color. " She'd spent months attempting to join an association of black women historians only to be cold-shouldered because of her specialty. She finally forced her dues on them but was never further contacted. No newsletters, no conference announcements. Nothing. Her calls went unreturned.

"If a black, female graduate student cannot turn to the professional association earmarked for black women in her field, to whom can she turn?" she wrote. "I thought [this group] was for black women historians, not only black women who do African or African American history."

It gets even more bleakly silly. Venting about a lifetime of black intimidation, Wilson can laugh now about her two turns in the Ms. Black U-Conn. pageant where, among other things, she recited Voltaire in French. "All they wanted to know was whether I'd been to Francophone Africa or Haiti like I'd been to Europe. Even my singing was too white."

Wilson, who lists Rice as a longtime role model, has given up on black associations. "At least the mainstream groups treat me like a scholar," she says with a sigh. Not like a sister, though, something else she has in common with Rice. Sisterhood is something they've both learned to live without.

Powell, Rice and Wilson (who's only 30) are the wave of the future: blacks who believe that Americans marched and died to free them to follow their desires and talents wherever they lead--that wherever they go, whatever they do when they get there, they'll still be black.

The rest of us need to learn what I did on the humid baseball diamond at Lackland Air Force base in 1985: Either way, the team wins.

An American Story

adminn — Tue, 19 Sep 2000 00:00:00 -0400

Selected reviews of An American Story are featured below:

The New York Times

Sunday, October 8, 2000 It is a startling thing to hear an American speak as frankly and un-self-servingly about race as Debra J. Dickerson does in "An American Story," her memoir of her first 35 years, in which she lurches from ghetto misfit and two-time dropout to Air Force trainee, Pentagon junior officer and Harvard Law School graduate. The book traces her journey across borders… more

The Silence and the Fury

Cecille Isidro — Fri, 01 Sep 2000 00:00:00 -0400

The Day after a jury exonerated the officers who shot Amadou Diallo, a group of women got together to make 100 black veils. Their quiet vigils have haunted the streets of New York ever since.

Managing to be at once ingenious and eerily metaphoric, two women escaped the living death of slavery by draping their skin in the true blackness of mourning. Layers of black skirts inches deep. Veils so thick midnight swirled around them. Massa tracked them to the railway platform, mere moments before their freedom train. He even lifted their bonnets. But years of loss had given them strength, and they did not crumble. He did not recognize them. Such is the power of pain, the fury of mourning that transmutes bereaved women into implacable creatures of pure portent. Beware the woman who's lost everything that matters. Beware the woman in basic black.

Those brave fugitives would be desolate to know that their great-great-granddaughters have yet to shed the mourning clothes. A century and a half later, Amadou Diallo's killing at the hands of New York City's police has driven the black community, and in particular its women, mad with grief. Not that police violence against blacks is new. In fact, the problem is its very lack of novelty. We have "overcome," or so we are told, yet the death count rises. Those humiliated, harassed, and hospitalized at police hands are too ubiquitous to enumerate, through Abner Louima, Tyisha Miller, and Rodney King stand out. The simple act of driving becomes an act of courage.

Something must be done, but what? Praying for justice has failed. Shame and the nail-gun gaze of bereft black women are all that's left. So in widow's weeds, Women in Mourning and Outrage bear solemn witness to their people's unearned suffering. They appear at police brutality rallies in New York, holding aloft happy-faced photos of the martyred, the wry international symbol of a mother's broken heart.

Women who did not even know Amadou Diallo mourn because it could have been their son. It might yet be their son. Pain that cannot be assuaged hardens to a dagger's point as they solemnly count off the 41 gunshots it took for four police officers to feel safe against one unarmed black man.

A young man, one they may yet have to weep over, rollerblades past their haunting phalanx and yawns, "Another day, another protest." He doesn't know what they know: When your loved one's heart stops, so does the clock. Let the politicians move on to other business. Mother's know that the strong-backed refusal to get over it is their final weapon. They rightfully have no faces because they are living ghosts. They are the nagging regrets that fuel insomnia, the ache that will not cease. They are everyone's unfinished business.

Throughout history, in every language living or now dead, outraged women in mourning have moaned, wailed, shaken angry fists, and demanded to be heard. They may be most dangerous, however, when silent. Like death. With a mother's patience and a hanging judge's lack of mercy, they hold the scales of justice.

Balwant Singh for President! Inderjit Singh for Vice President

Cecille Isidro — Fri, 18 Aug 2000 00:00:00 -0400

America is reveling in its open-mindedness in (more or less) embracing the Democratic vice-presidential candidate's Judaism, but is giving ketchup a chance after an entrenched tradition of mustard domination really so bold?

In a nation where the number of non-Judeo-Christians is already formidable, steadily rising, but intractably invisible, the question ought to be: When will America be ready for a Wiccan, a reincarnated Buddhist, or--Vishnu forbid--an admitted atheist in the White House?

Judeo-Christian domination of political life in America is so well established, adherents rarely notice how dismissive they are of other religions. (And let's not even discuss atheism: The standard reply to any such self-identification is a goggle-eyed "How do you get up in the morning?") Jesse Jackson, in signaling African-Americans to support Lieberman, wrote:

"As Americans, whether Catholic, Jewish, or Protestant, we live in our faith, and we live under the law...and Senator Lieberman has remained true to this standard. We must shift the discussion from religion to his role as a credible moral leader." Given the first sentence, "religion" here can only be code for "non-Christian-but-grudgingly-acceptable." More important, it is also a socially palatable way for Jews and Christians to divide the spoils of cultural domination--redefine a universal term narrowly. Exclusively. Somehow Jackson, the champion of the marginalized, managed to misplace an American or two. It is Judeo-Christian privilege, pure and simple, in defiance of the America religious landscape as it truly is.

Did you know that there are more agnostics and atheists than Unitarians (1,186,00 versus 502,000)? More Muslims than Jews (3,950,000 versus 3,137,00)? In fact, there are more "non-religious" people (13,116,000) than Jews, Unitarians, Buddhists, and Hindus combined. Thirteen million non-religious, and we're all either "Catholics, Jewish, or Protestant"? Judeo-Christian triumphalism may be the real story in the Lieberman controversy. Surveying the delegates to the convention makes the point.

Trying to locate convention delegates and official participants who are neither Jews nor Christians is a thankless task (DNC officials don't collect that data). In contrast with the Republican convention a few weeks ago, racial diversity is everywhere here. But where are the saris? The turbans? Dreadlocked Rastas? The foreheads of Muslim men deeply indented by prostrating themselves five times daily to Mecca? There are Samoans in ceremonial bare chests and skirts, but is that a religion? In polling random delegates for anyone in their delegation who is neither Jewish nor Christian, repeatedly one hears either stumped silence or a duh-inflected, "Well, Bob's a Catholic...wanna talk to him?" Why not diverse diversity here of all places?

But it just might be that non-Judeo-Christians in America are simply a pragmatic and patriotic lot who understand that dues must be paid. Eventually, I spotted and pursued a coterie of turbaned Sikhs; none were delegates, but all were long-time party activists. Dr. Balwant Singh, wearing an orange turban with matching short cape, has lived in Pascagoula, Miss., since 1978. He served three times in the Mississippi Electoral College and was a delegate to the 1992 and 1996 conventions. Now, he's on the Standing Committee, a national party panel. He claims to have never encountered religious discrimination. Ever. In Mississippi. In 1997, he lost the school-board election in Pascagoula to a Republican. "Not to a Christian?" I asked. He looked at me strangely. "No. A Republican." His religion, he says, never came up.

"If you think you'll be discriminated against," he says forcefully, "you will. If you're at peace with your beliefs, people see that. They see that you care about the children; that's why I want to be on the school board," says the retired teaching veteran of 32 years. He gave me a searching look and said, "We should never, in the name of religion, try to hurt each other. Anyone who thinks they're superior doesn't know his own religion. No religion tells you to lie, to steal, to hurt. We all have the same soul." He told me of a co-religionist of his who serves, turban and all, as the chairman of a school board in Connecticut. When they talk business, its party business, not business related to the problems they face as Sikhs in public life.

Inderjit Singh, executive chairman of the South Asian Community Council and assistant to the director of the New York City Housing Authority, agrees. He's running for the Queens City Council and also says that his religion has never been made an issue. "I don't see the system as in conflict with my beliefs," he says, "because my beliefs tell me to be a good citizen, a good husband, and to do my duty in life." His beard and turban (all Sikh men wear them) have sometimes become an issue, he says, but ascribes those issues to lack of knowledge, "which is easily rectified with an explanation."

An example was when the Transit Authority tried to force its Sikh employees to wear the hard hats required of all transit workers. "It was a delicate situation. We could easily have bumped heads with the city, gotten legal. But we went in and explained that quite a few Sikh engineers work in construction in India without a higher rate of injury on the job," he said. Of course, the Sikhs did agree to release the city of liability from any injuries that could have been prevented by a hard hat. "Accidents will happen," he acknowledges. And when they do, the Sikhs will take care of their own.

For all his pragmatism, Inderjit Singh is not about to take a back seat in public life. Neither Mr. Singh was very interested in my queries about Jews and Christians monopolizing public life and the political legitimacy that those religions confer on them here. They're not bitter, but neither are they passive. "I came here from India in 1957. Half the population was born after I got here." Says Inderjit Singh pointedly. "I have as much claim as anybody else."