Yes, I experience it all the time and am often torn between allegiance to a capitalistic ideology and a social construct delusional one.
I agree that a large percentage of AAs don't move or know beyond Middle Class or their vision of Upper Class is The Cosby Show or more contemporarily, Black-ish.
I grew up closer to TCS than say Good Times , which other family members due to more children, lack of marriage and less than college level education, did. In fact I, an only child, was in some ways purposefully separated from my peer-cousins. When visiting I wasn't allowed to eat some of what would be considered poverty food….scrapple, chitterlings, pigs feet, Spam, etc. Because my mother was a decade younger than her closest sibling, she’d gone to college, where she met my father, and purposefully used birth control in all of her other marriages besides my father. She explained when I was older, that she did so because she’d seen the limitations it created for her siblings, having multiple children by multiple folk.
My maternal grandmother also appeared AA but wasn't, she was White and Narragansett Native and married a darker West Indian man when she moved from Rhode Island to DC, and then to Harlem. Her family, in the late 1800s and 1900s were also not poor, definitely over middle class. One day coming home from high school with her bestie they came around the corner to a grand piano being hoisted into the 3rd floor of the family brownstone. Just for my grandmother; she had 6 other siblings. It was 1926.) She was also a high school graduate and excessively erudite, reading 5 books a week for years.
My grandmother also had extensive etiquette training that I just took as her being fastidious. She died when I was a teenager so I got to hear her stories and now sieving them through my understanding of social class, understand why she was different. And from there, how such concentration and education shifted my mother.
My mother chose in my father and a second husband, a professional chef, High Value Men who were skilled-educated and high earners. She herself worked full time in IT and then produced movie premieres at Lincoln Center while slowly starting a fashion business/modeling agency. Eventually she created a non profit for domestic violence victims and in-between was a paralegal, and finally a pastor. All of her work requiring advanced education, so I’ve never found it to be foreign, as 90% of my cousins have, to go to school, continuously.
I'm the one they've come to for careers in education, not jobs. I have three cousins, out of about 60+ family members, who have attended college. One of them being the cousin who introduced my parents in college. The other a college educated second cousin that I was able to immediately place in a career teaching position due to my position in the school system. Those things and faculties being Middle Class and Higher—-Upper Middle Class abilities and structures, utility as a man to others through a network.
It wasn't until I was teaching a large cadre of poor students-adults that I saw poverty as a culture and was able to compare my upbringing to a social class chart. When I did so, I was able to see and understand the gaps I felt between myself and them, my cousins, in regards to education, motivation, support systems, etc..
Residences/Antiques/Art
Going further into my upbringing things that actively happened were we had two residences in two states—-an apartment in NYC and a house in the country; my mother bought and left me original artwork (I remember the artist an old man coming to residences to match paintings to décor);
Money Management
Going to the bank with my parents—-I watched it, money, be divided up into savings, checking, money market, and then annuities—and met the financial planner; we regularly, for several years, would go on vacation to the country club where my stepfather was a chef and stay the weekend and then we would go ourselves to a country club my mother joined, and eventually bought a country house near;
Food
Food was never scarce and was always of high quality—-I remember being a child, under 9 and taking the subway/ferry to meet my parents for dinner at 4/5 star restaurants because it was often easier to involve me in adult affairs as I was well behaved, than arrange babysitting;
Clothing
My mother’s interest in fashion pushed me as a teen to working at department stores as I had developed a clothing eye by my teens and even now, 20 years later I still buy quality, classic styles, less trendy things, more refined/I can never remember my mother not having minks, my father and stepfather high end suits and regularly wearing them (even Terry the chef wore a suit to work, changed to kitchen scrubs and returned home in a suit and tie); my closet always having multiple suits/tuxedo because I was constantly at events as a child, a teenager, and prepared to be in the Business Class, as an adult.
Time/Traditions/Education
time was considered against traditions and ideals and education wasn’t simply for learning subjects—-my mother pressed me to get involved in student affairs/gov’t—-to take over student clubs, combine it to my business interests, but to use OPM—-Other People’s Money—-to experiment with publishing, which I did; on breaks from school my mother would have me flown in for weekends to supervise/manage her modeling projects/shows, accompany them to West Point, be the only other hands that touched money and even later when I would arrive in the small mountain town by the 2nd house—-I once got off the bus and my mother drove me a few short blocks to a real estate school that she was working with selling properties, so that I could attend a week long class to prep for real estate licensing—-not for the license, but to understand the ins and outs of what she was doing in acquiring a real estate portfolio;
Noblesse Oblige
I was raised to help others in small and eventually big non-profit, philanthropic ways; my parents and grandparents always spoke in a formal structure; they talked about to some degree destiny/decisions for one’s self and expectations;
Love
I dated a girl, Cheryl Cash who I took on a date to Trump Tower in our teens. She met my mother and then off we went. When I got home my mother explained that Cheryl, like her namesake, was fast and would try and dupe me into getting her pregnant as I had a future. True to form Cheryl was fast and manipulative and I cut things off with her. Not only because of my mother’s observation but I had learned to hold my parent's opinion in high regard and not rebel just for the sake of rebellion.
The same level of adult discussion had been used with me often, Annette Lareau refers to it——for Middle Class and Higher as Concerted Cultivation of children to adults and how adults interact with children. My mother and 2nd stepfather, Jesse, at 14, gently but firmly quizzed me about being a virgin to open discussions and he even offered to hook me up with a pretty but loose girl. I wasn’t a virgin, having lost it with my mother’s best friends’ daughter. But though I thought they were intrusive then, in retrospect, I see my brief stepbrother having a girlfriend, being slightly older and sexually active was probably the impetus. Also this being after my bio parents divorce, we’d gone to family counseling and the therapist talked about potentially my not being exclusively heterosexual—-she was right, my defining it as omnisexuality. So my mother and fathers were on the look out for burgeoning sexuality in me.
But this also lead to frank discussions about sexuality, non-heterosexuality, sex, birth control etc.. And even a frankness when Jesse misused funds and my mother bluntly explained that good sex wasn’t a reason to overlook someone’s character issues.
Love was discussed—-even after I came out—pragmatically and in relationship to social class. My first high school male love John, when my mother realized and understood why we “broke up”—-she then sat me down and explained about eagles and pigeons—-eagles soar alone then mate, pigeons flock together—-succinctly she put it : Fuck up, don’t fuck down.
She then reiterated it about a young man, Nick who drove me home one break to the house in the mountains (which is in a secured gated community, patrolled by armed guards and home of several celebrities)—-she saw the awe from him at the grounds, the house, etc. I wasn’t as wholly aware.
What she meant about John and Nick was that she knew John’s family was on Welfare and that Nick was Middle Class, flabbergasted, at how we lived—-in a second home in the mountains as Black people—-compared to his White family middle class home in Brooklyn—-near our co-op. By then she expressly understood social class differences though she didn’t have anything like the below chart to explain it through. She said he wasn't’ going to be a keeper because of the limitations he had projected upon us/Black people, stemming from his deeply dysfunctional family—-she was right again! and I walked away from him after that. However she did have a “serious” talk with me a couple of years before about not “discussing money, where we lived, living two places” at college, because I chose to attend a State school. She also promptly took away my trust fund for not attending an Ivy League school undergrad in lieu of the State school. i offer this to suggest that my parents were learning how to manage money and shifting classes with me as I grew so there was 80/20: good sense and control-dysfunction.
What I will say as a digression to my mother’s multiple marriages is that yes she was trying to overarchingly design a marriage similar to her parents 37 years, before my grandfather died suddenly. But one, he and my great grandfather had addiction issues, which briefly led to my mother’s. So her “picker” was off in some ways and accurate in others. She also tried to stay culturally racially “loyal” to dealing with Black men though by my late teens she did date a White doctor—-she simply expressed no chemistry with him.
All 5 of her husbands had some sort of addiction issues—-I think because she was trying so hard to remain loyal to race and didn’t meet the other 4 in a clearing ground——like college as she had my father. Her last husband Mike, approaching her in an AA meeting—-having just gotten out of jail for selling crack to an undercover cop. By that time she had a burgeoning business, huge sums of money in the bank and was a mature 40+. She chose him over a younger manager, who truly adored her, frightened of the 10 year age difference, and in almost revenge, completely emasculated and controlled Mike—-using him as a puppet and avatar male for her business dealings. He didn’t work for 7 years, she doling out money, controlling him completely, but at the same time, his imbalance eroding them as a team, and financially.
But I got to see this and honestly, I left for school at 21, my trust fund taken away for doing so and her buying him—-to control—-my escaping being her son-husband. And years later when she essentially gave up on life and was terminal, I saw he’d taken the bullet for me—-he had no life, future, vision, dreams or even money, to show for his sacrificing to her.
Again, I watched this assiduously from a distance, her often complaining about his lack and making a couple of half attempts to get rid of him. Her most savage, moving in a 28 year younger boyfriend with them for awhile. Without Mike’s permission or agreement. Yeah, they were a matched set.
Political/Relationships and Humor-Colorism
My mother was happy when I achieved positions at school of Editor, President, etc.. Then career positions—-always asking very directly how much I was being paid and pressing for me to be direct in negotiations. She was elated when I got my first political appointment here in NYC but not so excited when I left corporate America (though she didn’t like it herself) for non-profit world.
Her angst was that I’d stopped and started development on several national/international businesses since my teens, and hadn’t poured my profits into real estate, instead pouring it into more Ivy League education.
With my grandmother, a lot of her humor I realize in retrospect, was class based. She would often talk about her first few months in Harlem, at a butcher, where a Black woman asked the butcher for :”Dem dere po’ chops!”
We laughed and laughed.
Me thinking she was mimicking a Southern accent; my grandmother was actually talking about someone talking in such a Negro dialect—-a social faux pas, such poor grammar and lack of manners. Ironically, she named my mother Patricia and even in her small life, my eventually coming to understanding that marrying my grandfather, extremely dark skinned, had been the ultimate taboo in her family and she’d been exiled by the Upper Class Lincoln's—-she held a perfectly firm, well-mannered hand in dinner on Sundays, supper other days, a place set table, politeness and manners and racially her deep concerns about where my darker cousins—-her preference to her children going from dark to lightest (my mother)—— and their being able to move in society.
I would eventually understand she meant a point of colorism, and to some degree favored my mother and I, because we were light skinned like her—-though I now understand, she wasn’t Black/African American.
Below are the dimensions of Social Class and one can rank one’s self, which I’ve done and purposefully, taught students, so that they can understand what they are striving for and what benchmarks will look like.
Hidden Rules of Poverty
Race and Social Class
I have always “come across” to Black folk as different. Because of historical lack of knowledge or inclusion to spaces like Boule, Jack & Jill, the Alphas, 100 Black Men, etc. most—70% of Black Americans—-are not aware of there having been Black folk —-pointedly, 7 families—-who were never slaves here in America, who are truly wealthy, who are simply not translated down to the masses of Black people.
The greatest weapon of racism has been propaganda, pointedly in the past century through TV. Black people understand they are misconstrued by media but wholeheartedly believe in media, idolize it yet in no way control its’ output.
Also to the degree of how social class movement occurs—-through the use of ingenuity, relationships, education, money—-not everyone will like you—-is something one learns to accept outside of certain Class levels. And Black people work hard within Black circles to be amenable—-not necessarily to one another, but pointedly to White people—-because so much of our existence has meant getting resources and favor from White people. That constant survival-modality means that Black people then turn to one another with resentment, antagonism and judgment (which is where we get the idea that intelligence, manners, erudition, education is “White” in nature) from such genuflecting, capitulation for survival—-but one cannot take it out on the White boss/company/system-government.
This has meant from within my own family network, resentment, anger, abuse (physical, emotional and sexual) because I was “different”, raised differently—-bluntly, had more opportunity, than they did because my mother practiced birth control, educated herself, met and married skilled-educated (3 out of 5) men and sought out opportunities that simply weren’t within her neighborhood-community or family.
In having written about this before, there have been questions and comments about my mother and her ambitions, the same from my father and stepfather—-but not as derisive towards the men. There is some racial and genderized judgment of a woman being so deliberate to not be poor, to not associate with poverty, to not be relegated to it. Black feminism in prosperity being marginalized where White feminism isn’t.
One of the things that Black people seem to also idolize is poverty, keeping it real, representing where you come from (neighborhoods)—-such insanity has never been part of the lexicon of how I was raised. I’ve lived in every borough of NY, now in Manhattan, which I prefer, but I’m not “repping” any neighborhood. Nor do I think that my lifetime, conceivably 80 to 100 years, should ascribe loyalty to a neighborhood (or even a nation). Yes, Upper Classes do have marked individualism which suggests that I’m not agreeing to a herd mentality.
Recently there was a CNN report that said that 93% of African Americans identify their core identity to being Black. Which I can tell you is wholly problematic, in a multicultural world—-when the culture you so deeply ascribe to has none of the tenants of a thriving culture.
Now I both digress and prove my point—-thinking ASIDE from Blackness is often a threat to that 93% unfortunately.
There’s a prescriptive lock step—-relegated by the surrounding White culture—-that designs Black cultural parameters and enforces back—-yeah, Frantz Fanon, went into this—-how Black people regulate other Black people based upon the constructs of White privilege and profit.
As An Adult
As an adult, there are still differences because my work in education means that I sort of surf along through many social classes—-
- Ivy League at Columbia—-Middle, to Upper to Rich to Wealthy classes;
- at non profit projects the students/adults are in poverty, working, lower middle class;
- the workers/managers or teachers at most of the schools I work with are working class to middle class;
- when I’m dealing with political settings—-boards, meetings, city planning—-middle class, upper middle class, rich;
- when I go to events, cocktail parties, networkers—-middle, upper, rich, wealthy.
Now what I have learned and am sometimes frustrated by or amused by, is what people project at me based upon what they believe themselves to be and therefore what they believe I can be. I say I write books or I’m carrying one, editing it—-and invariably Black people, ask me: “The whole thing?” Depending on how I feel I might answer “Yes”; “No, just the squiggly black letters” or “No, several White people help me with the multisyllabic words.”
Because it is insulting.
It’s insulting to the fact that I am a person, an individual, who has grown up, not as a mass of people who are relegated to one modality. I am capable of what human beings are capable of. My skin color in no way connotes limitation, but Black people often project an agreement to White Supremacy that being Black, does connote inherent limitations.
See, here’s a HUGE idea to digest—-Poverty is not natural. Therefore it is not endemic to everyone. It not being endemic to everyone means that every Black person did not grow up in it nor is mired in its’ limitations. Black people far more question my “authenticity” in education, professional capabilities, skills, resources, etc. because of their belief in limitations or their own limitations. With other cultural groups it’s generally not as pronounced or consistent, though yes, the limited projections do exist.
My Experiences Within Poverty—-Black World
The first time I was ever in the Projects was at a party I’d been invited to in Harlem in the early 2000s, the next time was a decade later a student invited me to his aunt’s Thanksgiving dinner. When I got there—-extremely high buildings, small elevators, dark hallways, then cement walls and low ceilings, furnishings sparse and centralized—-the first thing I thought was: “This is exactly how the textbooks describe projects/poverty!”
Do I then choose between Social Class (Upper/Rich/Wealthy) vs. (Delusional Construct) Blackness?
Yes, I do and I notice it, note it and sometimes disregard and other times feel self-conscious, because of it.
This week, a few days before writing this—-I went to a professional networker at a slightly swanky night club—-membership fee on a yearly basis, populated by 100–200 LGBTSGL folk. However perhaps only a dozen of them were Black, another dozen Latino, another dozen Asian. Mostly, yes, White men. Met some great people, good discussions, I have done lucrative business with several of them. Good network builder.
Yes, less Black people. I notice that but I’m used to noticing that because I am regularly in spaces where there are less Black people so you get used to the fact that there are less Black faces and more of the White and Asian and Latino ones become familiar and friendly and interested in me.
Same at Columbia functions, several times a month; same with political functions around NYC and some of the art, dance, opera events I go to.
Check this: not everything I associate to or with is Blackity Black Black in its’ function, title or constituency.
Yes, I have belonged to several Black organizations and found that the emphasis on Blackness tends to erode purpose, if the focus is on the (delusional identity construct) of Blackness. There has to be something else that a group is about.
And so I surf——between groups, over groups, beyond groups, because I’m a smidge more than the projected designation of Black-ness so I enjoy things—-foods, clothing, service, experiences, travel, discussions, art—-that are sometimes culturally Black and sometimes not. (I’m reading biographies on Mao, Napoleon and Kahlo now—-for the heck of it, they interest me. Me—->Kyle.) I just cooked a beef/pork rigatoni with an arrabbiata sauce from Rao’s (one of the great restaurants my parents would take me to).
See, some of social class is not simply more or exclusionary—-it s also about freedom—-freedom to explore the world (my mother was a Francophile); to try out new things, to be eclectic in what I appreciate (yes, that includes interracial (miscegenationary anti-constructs) and relationships.
What I can tell you is I find other people out there who like these things, are passionate about them, are well versed in them—-and they’re often not Black, and they don’t always assume that my Blackness informs my interests, my Self expands to include new things.
What I can add is that yes, I do sometimes feel constrained or judged or analyzed or exhausted by Black people surrounding me, trying to penetrate all of my perspective with simply Blackness. In teaching a workshop on interracial dating, the men all questioning why so many well heeled Black men chose to date others—-I was able to summarize—-It’s easier. Oh, God, it’s so much easier.
See, I know how to deal with racial bullshit. I’ve taught for decades, read the books, written the papers and presentations and actually teach teachers how to navigate cultures. And you know what I don’t want to do on a date—-listen to another Black person go on and on and on about race—-a delusional social construct. Hell, I’m not your lgbtsgl therapist either. What I have noticed of entitlement and privilege is that it bemoans less, bitches and barks less and can simply enjoy existence more.
Sometimes Kyle just wants to enjoy the steak, watch the film, enjoy the event, have a drink, laugh—-without having to navigate, politicize, extrapolate, extricate on the race bait issue of the moment. or answer for race. or answer to race.
See, race is some fucked up shit created centuries before I existed. That doesn’t mean, even as yes, it is applied to me, that my every waking moment in this lifetime, for all I know my only lifetime, do I want to experience my life through that construct, thinking about that construct.
In social class, middle class and lower seemingly ALL they talk about is different facets of the Struggle—-as the oppressed, the oppressor, the drudgery, the pain, the tropes, the stereotypes. is there nothing else to life, that I, Kyle can have besides this racial bullshit?
And if it is bullshit, as everyone keeps saying, why do you focus on it so much, if I’m dating through the rainbow—-wouldn’t the eradication of racism be the eradication of race?
Maybe that’s the terror to so many, Blacks included who believe in race as a construct and identity. What would you be WITHOUT race?
Social class traversing to some degree offers that as lived experience and you find that race and identification within people is to degrees not totalities.
To a final point, I often challenge Black folk back with—-equality, equity, parity—-we want those socially, right? But what will that look like for the individual. See we can’t achieve equality without lots of integrationality and intersectionality with the rest of humanity that is not designated nor identifies as “Black”. So we’re going to have to give up some tropes and concrete ideas of “Blackness” for humanness.
We all can’t live together, continue to only eat the same foods (don’t get me started on how limited Black food is in my family and how expansive it because from my parents and stepfather, Terry the chef, comparatively so) or believe the same ideas.
The biggest threat to Blackness is the desire to be human and that’s what the world offers.
Comparatively speaking, to the limited point—-my extended family didn’t offer resources, education, college, none have them have ever purchased nor read my books (though many have asked, lied, stolen and even tried to sue me for money), they haven’t been supportive of my relationships and sexuality though you couldn’t wall paper a bread box with marriage certificates from dozens of them, plenty of illegitimate children, children born from affairs, children who’ve done drugs, prison time, are active pedophiles and children who were abandoned on many levels and given up not for simply foster care but to the farm in upstate NY for severed parental rights children; none have come to my graduation or awards ceremonies.
What I do have/have received is I’ve been regularly raped by cousins as a child, beaten, hurt, misused, abandoned, stolen from, maligned. And yes, thanks to therapy (my mother was a psychology major at Baruch so she got us into family therapy after my parents divorce) I’ve learned, grown and healed beyond those incidents. But I’ve also learned to put up non-negotiable boundaries.
One of my rapist cousins reached out to me a few months ago. I haven’t seen him in 27 years. To let me know he loves and misses me. The last time I saw him was at his mother’s house when she’d died and he stole savings bonds and went on a crack bender. At the funeral, that he missed, I was was mistaken for him several times. Does Blackness mean I should…invite him over to my home, around my family? He’s spent 30+ years in and out of rehabs and prison. How about this? In the interest of Blackness, I’ll give any Black persons who thinks he should be given a chance in a stable family members life $1000 to have him over to YOUR house.
Oooh, ooh, how about his sister who tried to bamboozle me out of money a decade ago subletting an apartment—-then refused to move—-so I moved out a month later—-taking months get back onto my feet. She’s the one who terminated parental rights to her sons (in and out of prison now) but used them as an excuse that after paying her I had to leave so she could be their mother at 19 years old.
I explained to her I knew the whole truth, she’d never been and never would be a mother, and moved out a few weeks later—-I had to call the police on her to be able to leave peacefully. I had gotten there after a year of my family convincing me to sublet to help her move off of Welfare and down South, which she never did.
She and her wife then were transporting drugs in Massachusetts and got stopped and ended up in prison then homeless shelters upon release and finally after being on Welfare for 20+ years, in prison for a couple, she’s back n Welfare for the past decade. She used to come to my job just to hang out until I no longer worked there.
See sometimes educated, smart, normal people….who happen to have melanin and have built up resources have other mellinated relatives that because of all of the ills of poverty and lack of opportunities, are pathological and dangerous—-to my life, my children, my sanity. And we remember that prejudice we were treated with, rapes, violence, stealing from us, insults, and must erect boundaries for sanity and safety’s sake. We remember those transgressions as human, not Black humans who use the Blackness to wash away sin but as humans who just want to live, dance, be happy.
I feel bad about that. I have felt guilty in the past about having more, editing family out of my life, staying away from funerals and extended family drama. Then I remember that Blackness is not like a bank account where I get something from the Blackness Fund for my Black related actions and fealty.
Blackness is a construct, created by White people FOR Black people, to designate sectionality and segregation. It is individual relationships and human kindness, regardless of designations that I focus on, and yes, social class allows me to fly over, ignore, not participate always based upon designation.
And I wouldn’t change nothing for my journey now.
#KylePhoenix
#TheKylePhoenixShow
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