“‘Black America’ doesn’t live here anymore” – Eugene Robinson

As the front cover of the book suggests, most African Americans feel like there was a time when there were agreed-upon “black leaders,” when there was a clear “black agenda,” when we could talk confidently about the “state of black America” – but not anymore. Disintegration: the splintering of black America is Eugene Robinson’s response to that gnawing feeling that we all feel at the backs of our necks: maybe things are different? And maybe we aren’t all occupying the same space as we once were?

Eugene Robinson is an American Columnist with the Washington Post, and even before that, he was moving upward through the rungs of America’s class system. in the opening pages, Eugene gives the reader an inside look at an America that rarely gets airtime: The Black Elite. He recounts being at a dinner honoring one of the luminaries of this class, Richard Parsons, the former C.E.O. of Time Warner, and the guest list is a who’s who of America’s bourgeoise. The dinner that boasts attendees like Eric Holder, Vernon Jordan, Valerie Jarrett, Sharon Malone, Debra Lee, Franklin Raines, and the list goes on (I suggest some google searches – these people are amazing).

Instead of one Black America, Eugene asserts that there are now four:

• A mainstream middle-class majority with a full ownership stake in American society.
• A large, Abandoned minority with less hope of escaping poverty and dysfunction than at any time since Reconstruction’s end.
• A small Transcendent elite with such enormous wealth, power, and influence that even white folks have to genuflect (google this word, don’t be a wuss).
• Two newly Emergent groups – individuals of mixed-race heritage and communities of recent black immigrants. People that make us wonder what being “black” even means.

These four groups are, according to Eugene, becoming increasingly distant, and throughout the book, he goes on to further describe all of them and give reasons for their existence. It’s a powerful piece that doesn’t necessarily offer an answer, but rather an evidence of the schism and an analysis of how it happened, and why it probably won’t be fixed anytime soon.

If you haven’t gotten it, go get it!

Akili Nzuri