#SlaveryWorked
Yes, because they by virtue of racialized segmentation and social class (poverty, working class) are or have the least protections. One of the predominant protections one has as one moves from middle Class to higher is education. Unfortunately education is such a broad word for such a myriadical and varying depth-effect experience. But the simplistic way of looking at it, I’ve found, is that I’m lumped in with other African Americans here in America in specific places I’ve been so far—-NYC, the South, Buffalo, the West Coast one by the surrounding Blacks or by being with a group of Blacks.
I’m differentiated out when alone or in a specified group about some sort of work-intellectual product. When I stand somewhere—-say a school I’m consulting at or doing a presentation or a workshop and the presenter says: “Kyle from Columbia”, I can feel the audience noticeably shift. I become by virtue of the Class Rank (Middle Class, Upper Middle Class, Rich to Wealthy) of the Columbia University provenance. I then also gain a level of intellectual superiority projection—-I must be smart (code: worthy)—-by being attached to Columbia, teaching on campus, being their representative. I don’t stop being “Black” but I become a different kind, caliber of Black, based upon those things. Teacher, author of books, TV show host, I’ve watched all of it change how I am viewed by folk—-of all races—-from the moment before. I can add that most times I’m in a suit and tie but not always.
The same thing happened singularly or in a group at a conference, with 60+ other Black men in California a couple of years ago. People actually came up as the conference attendees wandered around the town of Guerneville and asked—-”What are you (Black men) doing here en masse?” Separately, the night before, I walked the length of the town by myself, window shopping, waving at cops, etc. and no one stopped me or asked me a question.
But how does that attribute into racism?
I don’t feel as much of the brunt of racism, having grown up one in a diverse NYC, lived in mainly middle to upper class neighborhoods; then in Pennsylvania in a gated community after vacationing in the Poconos and country clubs for years. Race and social class and more importantly, how one feels or feels the projections of/from others does a lot of explaining how those of lower castes might feel.
In many ways, going to high end restaurants, having educated parents, living in nice surroundings—-I imbued to myself a sense of not simply belonging but rightness. Even now when I go to events—-the opera, art shows, concerts, parties, events, networkers—-specific events where there will be more mixed company—-professionals, wealthy folk, etc.—-my nervousness is not at my being the racial or class outsider. At most, sometimes I feel out of place because it’s not something I do regularly—-like a winetasting. I'm not a big wine drinker so it was a personal event for me to go to the event, buy a $50 ticket, and socialize while learning about various wines.
But I'm “used to” high end events—-is the only way to explain it—-so the content/context weren’t what created any anxiety for me. At best it would be that I only vaguely, in passing knew a few people there——so who would I talk to?—-that’s how I felt I would stick out—-not from race but from being alone and not knowing anyone. (But even within that one has to then consider that I was raised in such a way as to go and be sure that I could make friends.)
Comparatively, when I take students from lower classes, social class speaking, or listen to various friends and coworkers of color—-a lot of their anxiety stems from—-bluntly, what are the White people thinking of them?
Further, when I mention something I’m doing—wine tasting, horseback riding, networking, art show—-there’s a fear, covered by race of “nonbelonging”—-which is in fact social class showing itself that they haven’t had the social experiences/exposure to the variety of venues/events I may have.
To put experience into longer range context—-my mother produced movie premieres at Lincoln Center so when I was about 15 I was on stage with her, in a white tuxedo (my choice) with Harry Belafonte and other stars. Helping with little tasks, I was often her assistant for the months it took to pull together in concert with AT&T, so I not only got to see “behind the curtain” but I was in corporate spaces watching my mother operate in a leadership capacity.
One of my stepfathers, Terry was a highly talented chef so he worked at several country clubs and would routinely have my mother and I join him for the weekend—-we were treated like guests with full run of the place; so later when we went to country clubs without a work connection, it was natural to be there as guests. Again moving through social class levels and arenas while being Black, with being Black being no hindering point to the movement.
When I talk and listen to others about their upbringing—-one it didn’t involve concerted cultivation—-from Annette Lareau a Race/Social Class scientist.
It is by the Wikipedia explanation:
- Concerted cultivation is a style of parenting. The expression is attributed to Annette Lareau. This parenting style or parenting practice is marked by a parent's attempts to foster their child's talents by incorporating organized activities in their children's lives. This parenting style is commonly exhibited in middle class and upper class American families, and is also characterized by consciously developing language use and ability to interact with social institutions. Many have attributed cultural benefits to this form of child-rearing due to the style's use in higher income families, conversely affecting the social habitus of children raised in such a manner. A child that has been concertedly cultivated will often express greater social prowess in social situations involving formality or structure attributed to their increased experience and engagement in organized clubs, sports, musical groups as well as increased experience with adults and power structure. This pattern of child rearing has been linked to an increase in financial and academic success.
- A concerted cultivation approach encourages children to see adults as their equals. Children start to form a certain sense of entitlement because of their early comfort interacting with adults. Children also become more comfortable questioning adults, and it is easier for them to see themselves as equals.[1] With concerted cultivation, the practices often infiltrate into the family life. Frequent gatherings provide opportunities for further cultivation such as eating at the dinner table together.
- American middle class parents engage in concerted cultivation parenting by attempting to foster children's talents through organized leisure activities, which theoretically teach them to respect authority and how to interact in a structured environment. Learning how to interact in a structured environment much like a classroom gives students a head start in school because they are identified as intelligent or 'good' students. Other aspects of concerted cultivation include emphasis on reasoning skills and language use. Parents challenge their children to think critically and to speak properly and frequently, especially when interacting with adults. These skills also set the child apart in academic settings as well as give them confidence in social situations. By learning these traits, they are advancing themselves in their surroundings. Another difference is the involvement parents have in their children's lives. Parents are much more involved in following their children's academic progression. Through this process children from a concerted cultivation upbringing supposedly feel more entitled in their academic endeavors and will feel more responsible because they know that their parents are highly involved.
Ethnic differences in parenting
- Though there is evidence that ethnicity is linked to class, in parenting, ethnicity has a much lesser impact on a child's development than social class. Social class, wealth, and income have a much more of an effect on what child rearing practices will be used, rather than the ethnicity of the parents or children. The correlation between ethnicity and social class comes from the perpetuated inequality in the distribution of wealth in the United States of America. The lack of money is the defining factor in the style of child rearing that is chosen, and minorities are more likely to have less wealth or assets available for use in their children's upbringing. Wealth and connections among middle-class parents also defines how these children enter the labor market, with or without help in finding jobs.
Inequality
- Inequality exists in the opportunities that lead to different child-rearing practices but they also cause many other differences, such as the quality of schools, as a result of differences in wealth, income, and assets. The schools in the wealthier neighborhoods have more money to hire better teachers, staff, and materials that improve education. In addition to having better teaching and materials, the schools have more money to make renovations, have a better appearance, and the children develop a sense of confidence and entitlement because they feel that they are learning in an environment of excellence. The quality of the parents work life varies dramatically as well, and this plays into how much time and energy parents have to spend engaging their children. If inequality was not such a powerful force in America, resources, funds, and schools would be distributed more evenly.
Yes, the above is a broad way of detailing how I was raised because my parents were educated and their educated manifested as more resources from higher paying jobs in broader environments than their parents and siblings were raised.
I know about race and poverty as less highly resourced from family, peers, coworkers who grew up in projects, ghettos, etc.. The closest I can equate to growing up in ghettos is that I grew up in NYC, which is more directly urban than the places I’ve lived in PA, Charlotte, Buffalo, California, the Caribbean. I understand the difference but often in talking to people of color have to demarcate that difference—-one coworker amongst a group, we were relating our childhoods and I mentioned living in a building in Yonkers—-he asked was it the projects? because of how I initially described it—-then I explained no, it was a duplex apartment with outdoor terraces and such and then further it was an upgrade from another high rise we’d lived in—-a 3 bedroom duplex—-in Brooklyn. The first the 12th floor, the second the 15th.
I think of them as buildings with terraces but when I compare my memory of floor to ceiling windows, multiple bedroom, fully carpeted, a 3rd bedroom solely as a library of my parents desks and bookcases, separate dining rooms, enormous kitchens, etc.—-I can see the “difference”. I have visited projects once for a party as an adult, and once with an adult student, to visit his family. In fact when I was in the projects that time, I actively thought that it was as Lareau and Ruby Payne described the projects-ghettos.
Race has given me access to others of the same racial classification as me—-but as soon as I open my mouth, or describe my upbringing——(or even further, I’ve noticed from coworkers)—relate how I spend money, earn money, have money—-I become a shifted other.
As the observer though, I see their paranoia around race, their constant attachment of raciality to every sleight, to every misfortune, to every non-Black person’s attention—-positive or negative—-to them. From my perspective, I see bias, discrimination, racism, as yes, global in mass ways but personally—-I see it in very specific ways. It’s a close equivalency to Spanish vs Spanglish.
Racial Health Disparities, COVID and Me in Grand Central Station
An example—-I was at Grand Central and there was a set up by the Department of Health for COVID booster shots about a year ago. With the booster shot you got a free MetroCard. I happened to pass by, and one of the nurses said it only takes a few minutes—-in and out, free MetroCard.
So I came back about an hour later and got on line. Ahead of me were a small White group of foreigners, a Black woman, me, and then two White ladies behind me. So it’s a queue of one point to another. The attendant goes to the White group and for ten minutes, helps them understand and translate how to go to the next station, sign up and get the shot. The Black lady had hailed down another attendant—-she’d already been through earlier, she was just there to pick up a pamphlet—-that attendant went away to find the manager with the pamphlet. She stayed in the queue, patiently.
We’re all standing there and the managing attendant, after helping the White group looks directly at the Black lady and me and walks over to help the White woman behind us. I’m like: “Hey, wait a second you’re missing not just me but her.”
He was incensed I called him out (he was Latino) and I pointed out it smacked of a racial bias which folds into the whole racial healthcare disparity.
Now for arguing that he had silently skipped us brown folk, over comes the manager, a young Latina, and a young, educated Latino guy. They explain to me that bias/discriminations can’t occur with them because they’re Latino.
In the teacher-patience voice I take with students, in their 20s, who’ve proudly read a few books—-I explained, it just had happened. They couldn’t understand it. Mainly because it was a microaggression (Microaggression is a term used for commonplace daily verbal, behavioral or environmental slights, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative attitudes toward stigmatized or culturally marginalized groups.) of discrimination—-attending to White people first—-and not an overt action of racism—-like say, lynching one of us.
But because I’m a Black man arguing, the manager calls over a police officer—-I’m of course filming the whole thing now—-and the Black lady is like—-”Hey, can she just get her pamphlet?”; I’m like: “Who’s your manager—-direct report?” (which is a total Social Class—-Middle and Upper/Karen-White entitlement move)—-at which point, though I was in a shirt, vest and slacks—-the workers realized I was not just Joe Negro.
(Which often happens when I start speaking and clarifying and not cursing but summarily ripping folks a new one.)
The manager actually ran away to hide herself from the camera and the others demanded I stop filming; at which point I explained about public filming, state and city laws and the cop—-an Asian man said——he can film you all as much as he wants in Grand Central station, city streets—-so I got good footage of them to report to the Department of Health.
Two of the guys began yelling as I was filming—”We do not consent to being filmed!”—which the police officer kept repeating to them, was legal.
What was all of that?
It was me, the workers being of similar ethnic/cultural groups—-they viewing it as the absolute same; me knowing we’re culturally, socially and social class different and them not understanding that bias based upon race often has less and less to do with the culture of the perpetrator and the receiver. We’ve ALL been taught since Day One, Racism 101.
Therefore, we are all racist to varying degrees and depths, consciously and unconsciously.
When teaching about this in the nice, bright Columbia classrooms or in presentations—-folk listen and let me run down the info—-in public, I'm not there to teach but I am still conscious of the differentiations between bias, discrimination, prejudice, racism, etc.. But if you’re from a lower—-Working to Poverty—-class, you’re probably not.
If it’s soup then all soup is chicken soup even if there is no chicken. I know that there are varieties of soup and that there can be chicken broth in a soup that has no chicken meat. and therefore chicken is still present. Social Class advancements through education allow me to recognize differentiation, specificity, subtlety, unconscious bias.
What the workers were doing was a form of biased discrimination——-honestly, I wouldn’t have brought it up, if it wasn’t so glaring. But to my Middle to Higher Class sensibilities—-it’s subtler than outsized discrimination.
To me it was a racialized social class example of racial health disparities based upon who was deemed more important for the shots by race FROM an ethnic group that is just as discriminated against but from young adults who don’t understand racial microaggressions. So while all of that is happening, I recognize all of it, I am not always Super Teacher to enlighten the world—-sometimes I’m just Kyle who got a plate of discrimination and will challenge it, but not seek to elucidate all the participants.
Back to Guerneville.
Strolling along midday as the 60+ Black men left the resort, about 500 feet from the town, into the town, Yes, a white man boldly walked up to a group of Black men, eating on the porch of a café—-and asked what they were doing in town? My departed friend, Michael—-who was a teacher at the Museum of Natural History and I often brought my classes to his classes there from Columbia—-saw my ire about to laser target the affront and grabbed my arm.
Here’s how it was offensive.
In a relatively free America, randomly walking up to a person and demanding—-without introduction, preamble, a how do you do?—-STOP eating and talking and answer me, a White man, justify your presence in MY (town) space.
Now here’s the Racial-Social Class difference between those Black guys, me and Michael.
- They answered the White man, explained to him about the conference and their attendance.
- I would not have answered him in quite that way without challenging his right to question me. (That sense of righteous indignation and self-sovereignty is born yes, in entitlement which is informed by non-lower class status or embedding of low self esteem/White accommodation based upon being in a lower class.)
- Michael, adopted and raised by a White family, saw what the White man did wrong but also saw that I did not come from the space of just answering White people because they deemed to demand/ask me a questions.
I’ll offer, and I observed and Michael and I talked about, that the Black men who answered came from a different social class context than us——where they were immediately subservient, accommodating. I do not. I would not expect anyone randomly in public to answer my question about their presence in a public space just because I asked. Mainly from proper manners, but whether it was a woman, child, man, Eskimo, Jesuit, Samoan, clown—-there would still be not simply resistance or offense but befuddlement to engage at such a social faux pas. lol
But I’m on a planet where the infection, the virology of race has been seeped into billions. But far fewer have reduced it. Those who are most imbued with it, are those who’ve had less exposure to White people as human beings, as servants in stores and restaurants, as peers, as coworkers, as lovers, as even family members, as yes, equals. They have generally been discriminated against and not had the words, education, agency to speak up as I did in Grand Central Station—-and other places—-discrimination happens to me in social ways because I can match dollars and intelligence. But other Blacks and Latinos are slighted in intellectual-educational ways, in monetary ways, in barring's from spaces and opportunities. I’m in the liminal of choice to the opportunities because I have some minor pedigree, degrees and provenance——weapons ultimately, social—-occasionally like stilts——to step over low racialized discrimination.
I fit in to an image of an educated man of color and from there I’m generally given space to do a mental dance, to present, to discourse with—-I’m seen as potentially more valuable than the ones I’m standing next to. And there have been times where I felt guilty and ashamed about that—-the preferential class based treatment over other minorities and there have been times when I walked away from jobs (I was one of two Black managers at a restaurant where the managers were all White, the staff mainly Latin and African and the owners White and Asian. I could not dismantle the thicken, near solid racism and discrimination. But let’s break down the difference between social class difference—-I was making $9 an hour—-a job to cover school charges. But I walked away, originally thinking that I could do it overnight and study-teach during the day. But social class allowed me to leave that job so casually because I knew I could take a consulting position—-based upon Columbia educational provenance—-to make $65 an hour. That was not available to the other minorities—Latino cleaning staff, Black manager, African and Latino kitchen helper.) I know that I profit, that it's easier for me because I’m like James Baldwin—-I give access, erudition and voice to a world that other cultures want to know, understand, study.
I know, and am related to many within the millions who are casually dismissed—-that concerted cultivation, creating privilege and entitlement has had me curse out cops, challenge judges in court, demand answers of doctors, speak casually to billionaires and even rip a few professionals a new one—-in the office. My wilder 20s lol.
But I do know I am privileged, I hear from some coworkers what sounds to me like a low level groveling, a self-diminution of their thoughts, experiences, a terror at the displeasure of White people as a while. I tell my students, friends, colleagues quite simply, spring boarding off with Frantz Fanon: slavery worked.
#KylePhoenix
#TheKylePhoenixShow
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