The Complexities of Sustaining Community in the New Century: Challenges Confronting a New Generation of Africans in America by Dr. Ronald Walters

Someone said that each generation has the obligation to fulfill its destiny or to betray it. As I consider the deep truth of this statement, especially as it is addressed to that generation of Black youth coming into their maturity in the 21st Century, I feel the necessity to bring many of the lessons of history to bear on that mission in this essay.

Pressures on the Idea of a Black Community - I would begin by stating that it is important to maintain the integrity of the Black Community as the repository of Black culture and the platform for engaging the destiny of our people. We have traditionally thought of "community" as a way of naming the collectivity that identified peoples of African descent, both as a general descriptor within the United States and as the identity of Blacks in any given location. Both of these are associated with the overarching Pan African idea of the global unity of African descendant peoples.

There is a clear and present danger to the idea of a Black community. We live in an era where many Blacks, feeling a sense of personal liberation, often elevate the value of diversity of personal identity and cultural life style over the unity of their basic group membership. They fail to understand that it is most often the viability of community, which makes possible individual achievement, rather than the reverse. In any case, the notion of the existence of distinct Black people in America is under considerable pressure.

The Mythical Community - The idea that is at the heart of the community is a moderate form of Black nationalism. Ask most people where they came from; they will say Africa. Ask them whether they believe in the dignity of Black people; they will say yes. Ask they if they have a duty to overthrow racism; they will say yes. Ask them if they also have a duty to contribute to humanity by beginning with the social, political and economic development of their own people; they will say yes.

Nevertheless, the mythical idea of Blackness is simultaneously being reinforced and changed most powerfully through cultural symbols of music and lifestyle, often in negative and perverse ways. But without engaging in a critique of this content, it is being consumed by young people, in particular, across cultures, even if they are only partially conscious of wearing a "Black" lifestyle. And even though the origin of this lifestyle emerged from the culture of the Black working poor, it has been adopted as "Black" or "hip-hop" or "street" or "urban" culture, by elements of the middle class as well.

In one sense, it has been adopted by large segments of the Black entertainment class, not only as personal lifestyle, but in relation to their connection to the most powerful market-driving factor in America. Blacks are hired out by whites to play caricatures of themselves, defined in the ways that make those comfortable who consume those images. Blacks who can make white folk laugh or feel good will always have a job; those who don't will always be in danger of rejection and annihilation.

The Black Community as Location - Stemming from oppression by the ruling class, the physically separate location of Black people was fostered by the enforcement of tightly segregated patterns of group residence. However, even as the force of residential restrictions by race have eased, we find that, although oppression still exists in the form of racial steering, manipulation of housing finance and other factors, racial housing patterns are also shaped by the voluntary patterns of white flight from the encroaching movement of Blacks and the natural attraction of Blacks to live with other Blacks. The latter has resulted in the fact that even where new communities are being formed outside of the old Black inner-city Black community, the newer patterns of residence finds Black middle enclaves to be predominant. This has resulted in the existence of two types of community, an older one, under pressure from higher rates of poverty, crime, lower quality of education, housing, services and jobs. This pattern has changed the nature of the Black family, fostering a breach between Black females as single-parents and the head of a household and with Black males under-employed or incarcerated.

The newer ones are sometimes Black gated communities, but most often more open integrated communities with a preponderance of Blacks, where most people commute significant distances to work and where the pressures of maintaining and accessing employment and the attendant lifestyle that the job requires, places economic and social pressures upon the Black family.

The Contradictions - This pulling apart of the older community into two forms of location is putting pressure on the nature of the older mythical idea of Black community and causing some cultural change. One such change is in the emergence of a Black class language, as expressed in the tendency to identify Blacks from the older community as having "ghetto names" or being "ghetto rats" or referring to the stylized behavior of Blacks in general as "ghetto" meaning a negative rather than a positive. This is evidence that many of the children of the Black middle class have constructed a parallel version of the culture of the ruling class, supporting their characterization of inner city Blacks in their project of self-satisfaction at having "made it out" and in their new project of "making it into" the white middle class system, without really "fitting in."

The uneven access to the opportunity structure which has allowed some Blacks to slip through the cracks has always been present, but it has never fostered this degree of class division. In fact, the Black middle class was the warrior class, even where legal tactics to acquire social change gave way to street demonstrations and protest. College educated people formed the leadership of the protest lines and provided the rationale for direct action. However, one has a sense that the level of affluence of the new Black middle class has also blunted the tendency to struggle. Indeed, a trend toward normalcy may have set in which often sees struggle as the enemy.

The Deprecation of Struggle - Some Blacks now openly deprecate struggle as "divisive" or "posturing" or beside the point of addressing Black problems. A group of Black ministers recently rejected protest demonstrations in Florida launched by Blacks on Inauguration Day 2001, to signal the widespread opposition of Blacks to the barriers preventing thousands of Blacks from voting in the 2000 elections. These ministers, instead, sought a dialogue with the new President George Bush, "without posturing" to discuss substantive issues of public policy. So, we have come, not only to the reticence of many comfortable Blacks not to engage in social struggle, but for those Blacks seeking tactical position with the White House to deprecate it as well.

Black Conservatives take an even harder position which is that the focus of the Black leadership class on the poor, on racism, on the lack of inner city development, on Democratic party allegiance and other liberal agendas betray the interests of the Black community ... This view is deceptive, because the value structure of the Black community is not one-dimensional, it honors family and faith, but also has a long memory which involves the knowledge that these same Conservatives have perpetrated the most heinous outrages upon Black people in the name of religion.

The New Demographic - It now appears that added pressure on the idea of Black community will come from the new demographics, the simple formulation of which is that Blacks will not be the "majority minority" and that this position in society will be taken by Hispanics. The more complex formulation of this idea is that there will be a greater cultural melange in America, of different cultural groups with different languages and customs -- and social styles, all because of patterns of immigration. The demographers tell us that the new Americans are tending to settle in major metropolitan areas, adding a layer of culture to Blacks who are already there, while whites move out of the city into the outer suburbs and exurbs ... What this means in terms of their tendency to struggle and the styles of struggle is not clear. It does mean that there will exist for some time to come, allies of the Black struggle which have a similar set of interests, although they are utilized differently.

The Persistence of Struggle for Community Viability - My brief to this generation is to continue to foster priority of struggle for community viability, both in its mythical sense and to some extent with respect to location. Location will be important, because 60% of Black people live in major cities and will not leave, or be able to leave for decades. So, to continue to struggle for the integrity of the idea of community as location is important. In doing so, I do not simply want to offer the 1960s model of protest demonstration as the only style of change ... The 21st Century will need to address its issues through the tactics and strategies appropriate for its time, the only consistency being the necessity to struggle. What are the elements?

Leadership - Leadership is still necessary, despite the nonsense that one hears that we do not need leaders. Whites need leaders, why not Blacks? The leaderless concept is a threat to community, because the existence of community implies some structure of which leadership is vital. The major issue here is the quality of leadership, its growth, activity and accountability. This is a major discussion for the future that is only now beginning to be addressed systematically.(See Ronald Walters and Robert Smith, African American Leadership, SUNY Press: 1999)

Information - Every day I hear Black people complain, whether they be learned individuals, talk show hosts, or just the man in the street, that little is happening in a given area of Black life, in other words, "nothin' is going on" with respect to a problem or a given crisis. However, this is the surest sign that they either do not know where to look for evidence that action is occurring, or do not have the motivation to search for the correct sources. Black newspapers and radio are still the most reliable sources of news and information on what is occurring in the Black community and if these sources are not a part of one's daily pattern of consumption, there is likely to be large areas of ignorance about the life of the Black community in America today ... Black youth, both high school and college, should begin to be serious consumers of news and information rather than just entertainment, and much of the source for this should come from Black entities.

Economic Development - African Americans have experienced considerable progress in the development of businesses during the past decade alone. They have grown by 100,000 businesses since the early 1990s and what is more important, average revenues and employees have grown substantially and the types of businesses have become more diversified. The essential question, however, is if there is no concept of community, then there is no relationship of this growth in economic capacity to improve the quality of life in the African-American community. That is to say, this statistic is relevant only to the personal growth of individuals who are Black unless either their businesses contribute to employment and sales within the Black community, or some of their profits are contributed to community betterment projects.

As I write these words, I have just experienced an encounter with officials of the Nehemiah Corporation in Sacramento, CA, an entity owned and managed by a board Chairman who is 37, a President who is 37, who direct a network of staff and associates with ages in between this and 25, all of whom are Black. They have built an enterprise which finances and manages housing and creates home ownership and they have over a $100 million annual cash flow, a presence in several major markets and a progressive outlook that enables them to contribute serious money to civil rights organizations. Nehemiah represents a model of the future of the role of Black business in the national and local community.

The Pan African Connection - Today, the global identity of Black people or people of African origin as belonging to a peoplehood is widely accepted, but its functionality is muted by the degrees of cultural complexity one finds among such people, both within nations and across nations. Thus, the attempt to easily operationalize a relationship or a common project which involves African origin peoples must overcome barriers of culture, such as language, folkways and such, but it also must overcome the fictional barriers created by the perceptions of each other which are often manufactured by the dominant European culture and that are consumed by African peoples each day through media and other sources.

Nevertheless, the mythical idea of the membership of Black people in a common peoplehood survives because, at one level, the global forces of civil war, economic demand, natural catastrophes and others have created the space for more frequent interactions among people of African origin, forcing them to confront each other, often whether they want to or not. Here, the myth is tested and whether or not it is confirmed, one can say that in the 21st Century it will work itself out because of the extent to which the tests will become more frequent, because desperate peoples of all kinds will become more engaged by the factors which promote more rapid and available transportation, greater common affluence, greater levels of education and the like. The crucial point is that ... the cultural group which controls global power in their own nations and great swaths of the global territory of other nations will continue to be peoples of European descent for the foreseeable future unless and until African descendant people take Pan-Africanism seriously in a practical sense.

Conclusion- The task for youth in the 21st Century cannot be divorced from that of the Black community in general, except that the youth will bring fully into this century what ever becomes the priority set of goals and strategies to achieve them. I have attempted to say here that whatever materializes as discrete objectives for members of the Black community, their success all depends upon the viability of the notion of community and the practical aspects of community building that are the large objectives of struggle. That said, I commend these ideas to you in the hope that they might provide a vision of the fundamental project that must be kept in perspective no matter what particular issues are at hand.

Dr. Ronald Walters is an eminent political scientist and a professor in African-American Studies at the University of Maryland.