Audrey Edwards' article, "Making the Case for Teaching Our Boys to ... 'Bring Me Home a Black Girl'" is useful for many things. She's provided a textbook case in misusing statistics (for example, when she conveniently forgets to mention that interracial marriage was illegal in much of the USA in 1960, but cries out in alarm at the increase in interracial marriages between 1960 and 2002). She's great at quoting experts who are speaking outside their field of expertise (for example, citing a sex therapist's opinions on economics and cultural change). The most interesting thing about Edwards' article, though, is that she doesn't know what she is talking about.
Edwards is worried that an increase in Black men marrying White women (she capitalizes the races as if they are political parties or religious denominations) will lead to a "weakening of the culture and economic resources of the Black community." The issue she raises is how to "ensure our cultural and economic survival as a people" (341).
I'd counter with the question, "Who is Black?" As far back as Frederick Douglass, interracial unions were producing "a very different-looking class of people" (Douglass 14). (Douglass' mother was Black and his father White.) Barack Obama is often cited as a model for the new generation: a black man who can run for president. Obama's DNA, however, is only about fifty percent African, and his Black father was an immigrant from Africa (so never had any experience of American Black culture). Edwards is terrified that Blackness will vanish, but most American Blacks have some White blood. Edwards seems to worry that when a black man and white woman (I'm dropping the capitalization because it's much too political) have a baby, the child will be lost to the black community, but her instructions to Ugo ("Dark, light, shades in between—it don't matter to me as long as she's Black") show that she buys the idea that a mixed-race child is black (340). Not white, not 50/50. She calls a "light" girl Black. We've made a lot of progress since the North Carolina legal definition of "Negro" (which I found in my trusty 1919 Funk & Wagnalls dictionary): "a person who has in his veins one-sixteenth or more of African blood." (that's one great-great-grandparent), but Americans seem to agree with Edwards—blackness sticks with a child more than whiteness.
My daughter-in-law is from Central America. She was adopted as an infant by a family in Ohio. Her maiden name is decidedly north-European. She doesn't speak a single word of Spanish. Is she a "person of color"? Is my son in a mixed marriage? Only if you do a DNA test; culturally, they are identical. This brings up an interesting point: does culture follow skin color? What is Black culture? Is it the conspicuous consumption of a rap star covered with gold jewelry? Is it the single mother in the ghetto struggling to raise her children in a neighborhood filled with gangs warring over drug territory? Is the gangs themselves? Is it John Lee Hooker, playing blues from the rural Mississippi delta? Is it Maxwell Manning, assistant professor of social work at Howard University? Is it the African Methodist Episcopal Church? Or perhaps the Black Muslims? Or maybe a more traditional Muslim group? Black culture isn't monolithic; about the only thing my examples have in common is that people with dark skin are part of them. I suspect that Manning, Hooker, and a hip-hop singer wouldn't find much to talk about over dinner—in fact, they'd have a difficult time understanding one another at all because of language and cultural differences.
Or perhaps there is another question: why is anyone worried about black culture vanishing? Listen to American popular music, not just rap and hip-hop, but almost anything written since 1900, and you are very likely to find African roots. George Gershwin, good Jewish boy that he was, couldn't have written "Rhapsody in Blue" without including its jazz roots—roots that go right back to Mama Africa. Or look at American teenagers. I'd wager you'll find more white boys in clownishly oversize clothing with a waistband near their crotch and a sideways baseball hat (styles that came directly from the black ghetto gangs) than you will find black boys in Dockers and polo shirts. The typical customer for hip-hop music is a young white male. He buys the CD after watching his hero, a black basketball player, sink a three-pointer. We may love it or hate it, but African culture is the engine that drives much of our music, clothing style, and speech patterns. (If you want to get all of the Africa out of your speech, just try to stop saying "OK"—a slang term directly from west Africa.) The white supremacists may have a point about white culture vanishing; the black supremacists don't.
White supremacists and bigots may abound in our culture (alas), but Edwards and her mouthpiece Valerie Williams don't seem to know much about them. Williams claims that "there's not a White person in America who doesn't feel superior to a former slave" (Edwards 344). Perhaps that's true—I haven't interviewed all the white people in America (as Williams appears to have done—but she missed me). I do have a pretty intimate experience of white bigots, however. I've been a blue-collar worker for most of my life and have a fair number of family members who are less than generous in their opinions of black people. I've heard a lot of talk about black people (much of it very insulting), but "former slave" isn't on the list. Lots of other insults are there, often focusing on intelligence or cleanliness, but slave status just never occurs to the bigots.
I realize that this essay wasn't aimed at me; its target audience is young black men—or perhaps their mothers (which may explain why it was first published in Essence, a magazine for black women). They may see the black community as a hermetically sealed enclave that tries to keep its money and marriages for its own, a place where culture and color are pretty much equivalent. I suspect, though, that most people who read this essay echo the concerns of Martin Luther King, and want Edwards (and her stepson Ugo) to learn to look at the heart, not at the skin. Edwards knows this too, and she really does agree. After all, with lots of historically black colleges to choose from (She must be aware of Howard University; she quotes an assistant professor), Ugo ended up at a predominantly white college. Why? Presumably because Ugo (and Audrey Edwards herself) wanted more from a college than a simple color match to his skin.
Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself. Ed. William L. Andrews and William S. McFeely. Norton Critical Edition. New York: Norton, 1997.
Edwards, Audrey. "Making the Case for Teaching Our Boys to ... 'Bring Me Home a Black Girl.'" 75 Arguments. Ed. Alan Ainsworth. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2008. 340-44.
"Negro." Funk & Wagnalls American Dictionary. 1919.
