<p>" So do you all think that such a publication will be a positive contribution to the black upper class, and blacks in general? Or do you think it will be a negative that will further divide blacks considered upper class and those considered lower class?"</p>
<p>To answer your question directly, the publication may contain information that future historians will find useful. Being included in it also will make some social climbers very happy.</p>
<p>It will not make a whit of difference to black people who are lower class. This is because they aren’t likely to be inspired by stories of successful people whose success was in large part due to having been born to the right parents. </p>
<p>Far more inspirational would be stories of people like Michelle Obama, who was first generation college from the inner city and became a successful Ivy-league educated lawyer and prospective first lady. Another example of someone who may be inspirational to low income black people would be Dr. Benjamin Carson, the world renowned pediatric neurosurgeon who grew up in inner city Detroit with an illiterate mother who worked as a domestic.</p>
<p>Both of these individuals became successful due to their own hard work, not due to being born with a silver spoon in their lives. Their success also has included accomplishments in their field as well as doing lots to personally help others (Many don’t realize that Michelle Obama was a community organizer). </p>
<p>It also could benefit many people if more information was made available about historical African Americans such as Frederick Douglass, who was born enslaved, never knew his own age or his father, had his mother die when he was about 6 years old. Even though it was illegal for slaves to learn to read, he was so hungry for education that he tricked white kids into teaching him to read. He eventually became a world famous orator, abolitionist, diplomat, newspaper publisher, and supporter of women’s rights.</p>
<p>tinkerblinker25 i completely agree with you. I believe this book will do a few things. I don’t think It will matter to the lower classes who will probably either not care to read it or not hear about it. For the upperclass it will make the humble mad and the social climbers happy. I think the middle class will not like it because they will see it as elitist. I think where he went wrong was by putting so much emphasize on your family history. The clubs I don’t mind mention, but don’t think they should hold emphasize. Mention however is fine because they do donate alot of money and volunteer alot of their time. The way Graham focuses on physical features and lineage is wrong. </p>
<p>Northstarmom: I agree it will be useful to future historians, and maybe even current sociologists. Thank you for answering my actual question versus criticizing me, someone who had nothing to do with this book, who doesn’t even agree with the way it is being written.</p>
<p>I agree that maybe a different type of book should be written with emphasize on the people you listed. I also believe however that it is important for everyone to realize that some very successful blacks come from a long line of successful blacks. I’ve heard the “i grew up in the hood” story many times. As soon as someone says I grew up in a tree lined suburb and attended private schools…the black community wants to ignore this. I think both lifestyles need to be shown. So that people can see you can be born low income or rich…you can be successful both ways. While one way may be easier…the other will make you strong. But both need to be represented. I think Graham should have represented both, or not even consider how the person was raised because what matters is that they are successful now, not what their parents did or didn’t do.</p>
<p>I see nothing “inspirational” in lauding the accomplishments of people who so pathetically internalized the racism of white america, that they mimicked (and apparently continue to do so) :eek: the cruel, exclusionary practices of Jim Crow with the use of “skin tests”. I agree with Northstarmom 200%.</p>
<p>poetsheart yes these organizations in their HISTORY made some bad choices. That doesn’t reflect their views currently. If it did I definitely wouldn’t pass the skin test to be a debutante. My mom wouldn’t have passed the test to be an AKA. To say that these organizations still do this is just the result of stereotypes based around people who choose to still hate these organizations. One of my close friends wouldn’t have based the skin or ruler test to be in Jack & Jill. This is the past. I’m not going to hold the current members accountable for their ancestors ignorant beliefs anymore than I hold my white friends accountable for slavery. While they may have excluded people for silly reasons a hundred years ago…they also were major donators of the civil rights movement and the NAACP. Rather they chose to directly participate or not. If you are so caught up on what they use to do…did you attend college. Either hbcu or pwi they would have previously excluded people based on the shade of their skin, but I’m guessing you are ok with going to college right.</p>
<p>I heard Graham interviewed on the radio several times when the book came out. At the time he came off more as an interested anthropologist observing a phenomena, not as someone who was perpetuating it. I haven’t actually read the book though. I did think it was an interesting topic, well worth covering, certainly one the average white person knows very little about. Later I discovered that my son’s kindergarten teacher belonged to a number of the organizations mentioned in the article. </p>
<p>I’m fine with the book, not so fine with trying to compile a list. But I agree with Epiphany there are snobs everywhere. Not something important enough to spend too much time handwringing about.</p>
<p>This has taken an interesting turn. I think it has alot to do with rather or not you believe the rich have a repsonsiblity to the poor, but if they do does that mean the rich nations have a responsibility to poor nations? If that holds true as well many of the people who criticize president Bush actually advocate for some of his plans. I’m not saying rich african-americans shouldn’t help poor african-americans, but to the extent they should devote their lives to it i believe is debatable.</p>
<p>This nonfiction book, “The Senator and the Socialite”, by the same author sounds very interesting: </p>
<p>" the true story of America’s First Black Dynasty, which tells the story of U.S. Senator Blanche Bruce, the first black man (and a former slave) to serve a full term in the Senate. The book is being excerpted by Reader’s Digest and U.S. News & World Report and featured in Essence Magazine, Ebony and Vanity Fair Magazine.</p>
<p>This new book follows 3 generations of the Bruce family, as Blanche moves from Mississippi slave, to rich landowner, to Senator, to a job under President Garfield where he becomes the first black to have his name printed on U.S. currency. He and his wealthy black wife send their son and grandkids to Exeter and Harvard, beginning in 1896, and use their ornate Washington townhouses to entertain the black and white political elite of the 1880s. The book follows the family from the Deep South, to Washington, and to New York in the 1940s where the Bruces work with the Rockefellers and reach their shocking end after their Harvard-educated grandson goes to prison and their granddaughter marries a black Hollywood actor who passes for white."
[LawrenceOtisGraham.com</a> - Home](<a href=“http://www.lawrenceotisgraham.com/content/index.asp]LawrenceOtisGraham.com”>http://www.lawrenceotisgraham.com/content/index.asp)</p>
<p>I actually had the displeasure many years ago of meeting Mr. Grahm and the nicest thing I can say about my conversation was that he came across as a deeply insecure young man propped up by a veneer of elitism. </p>
<p>There are so many things wrong with his outlook that I don’t know where to start, though poetshart and northstarmom have wrapped it up pretty nicely.</p>
<p>I’d just add that in my experience, people who need to constantly take not note of how much “better” they (or their people) are than other folks, usually aren’t, at least in not in any really meaningful way. the other thing i dislike about his project is that it seems so essentailly unamerican. the great thing about this country is that you don’t have to end up where you started out. but according to grahm, if you didn’t get the right start, you don’t count. that’s more than silly. for black people especially, that is perfidious, counter-productive, and dowright dangerous. </p>
<p>i often wonder why he is so eager to ape some of the most superficial aspects of white society and i gguess i’ll never know. my deepest hope, sad to say, is that this unregeneratively snobish project is a complete flop that is totally ignored by all. the real black american elite are the millions of us who have come from from nothing to something solid and still look to help the rest of us who have yet to make that journey. i doubt mr. grahm has enough understanding to write a good book about that.</p>
<p>"I think it has alot to do with rather or not you believe the rich have a repsonsiblity to the poor, but if they do does that mean the rich nations have a responsibility to poor nations? "</p>
<p>Yes, I believe that those who have have a responsibility to help out those who don’t. That was the way I was brought up, and that’s something that was important to both sides of my family.</p>
<p>I also believe that rich nations have a responsibility to help the poorer ones.</p>
<p>After all, we’re all in this world together.</p>
<p>I just read an excerpt of “Our Kind of People” that included Graham’s describing how his grandmother told him and his brother to stay out of the sun so they wouldn’t look like [insert the n-word here].</p>
<p>I also see that the people vacationed at places like Oak Bluff, Mass. Interesting to me, that’s where the mother of one of my cousins spent her final days after presumably vacationing there when she was younger.</p>
<p>She was renowned in my family for having said when she saw her newborn son, “Take away that black ugly thing.” She later divorced his father and basically abandoned her son to be raised by her mother and his dad. She was so light skinned with straight hair and fine features that when I was young, I thought she was white.</p>
<p>I assume she must have been a proud member of the type of e-lite that Graham’s book is about.</p>
<p>When I first saw this thread, I thought that I would have qualified to be included in Graham’s new book, though I would not like to be included in it. Now that I’ve read further about the people who are included, I don’t think I would qualify. While my parents and I have the academic and professional credentials, I lack the light skin, straight hair, fine features and snooty attitude of looking down on African Americans who weren’t born to the purple.</p>
<p>An excerpt from “Our Kind of People” that shows why Graham is so obsessed with the black “elite”.</p>
<p>"All my life, for as long as I can remember, I grew up thinking that there existed only two types of black people: those who passed the “brown paper bag and ruler test” and those who didn’t. Those who were members of the black elite. And those who weren’t.</p>
<p>I recall summertime visits from my maternal great-grandmother, a well-educated, light-complexioned, straight-haired black southern woman who discouraged me and my brother from associating with darker-skinned children or from standing or playing for long periods in the July sunlight, which threatened to blacken our already too-dark skin.</p>
<p>“You boys stay out of that terrible sun,” Great-grandmother Porter would say in a kindly, overprotective tone. “God knows you’re dark enough already.”</p>
<p>As she sat rocking, stiff-lipped and humorless, on the porch of our Oak Bluffs, Martha’s Vineyard, summer home, she would gesture for us to move further and further into the shade while flipping disgustedly through the pages of Ebony magazine.</p>
<p>in addition to his professional accomplishments, my father in law was also on the board of trustees of a HBCU and helped raise lots of money for it. as a youngster at that school, on the other hand, he was so poor–sharecropper poor–that he didn’t have a working pair of shoes when he arrived as a teenager. but he did well. he never had a place in Sag Harbor or a home in White Plains, never made his kids join Jack and Jill, and yeah, that fraternity thing would have defintley been off limits to him with skin closer to carbon paper than paper bags. But he beleived in “no child left behind” long before it is what it is now. pass it on. help someone else who needs it. that is the mark of the elite. </p>
<p>my own father once told me you can always tell about a man by how he treats waitresses and shoeshine boys. if you treat with respect those you could get away with disrespecting and ignoring, you are a real man. (i’d add that the same goes for women, of course.) its another measure by which grahm, i believe, fails miserably.</p>
<p>"my own father once told me you can always tell about a man by how he treats waitresses and shoeshine boys. "</p>
<p>I agree. When I was dating, I always watched how my dates treated people like waitresses. The guys who were rude or condescending or too cheap to leave a tip were guys that I didn’t date any more.</p>
<p>Your father sounds like a fine man, a father to be very proud of.</p>
<p>“From what I have heard and read from my NPHC friends, their memberships do not look too kindly on women who assume they will be an XYZ no matter how connected they are as legacies.”</p>
<p>I’ve read the book, but this is all I can think about on this thread. OP, please do think about changing your screen name.</p>
<p>I had a friend who was part of this category. She once invited me to a social event that her mother had flown into town for. When I asked where her mother was she told me to look across the room at the only woman who looked white. As part of her teen rebellion my friend would sunbathe every day to make her skin darker which absolutely horrified both of her parents. </p>
<p>The premise of the book reminds me of the times when Jewish country clubs and Jewish social societies were the norm. The country clubs were established when Jews were refused admission to existing country clubs. Homes had restrictive deeds that prevented sale of the property to Jews or blacks. There were also restricted membership clubs for those of German, Polish, Scandinavian, Italian, etc. descent. It’s not surprising that blacks also had their own social organizations. </p>
<p>What might surprise most people is that there was even a black elite and how long it has existed. Too many of us do not realize that free blacks owned property and businesses as early as the 1780s.</p>
<p>Those interested in the topic might want to read books like Aristocrats of Color and Philadelphia’s Black Elite rather than Our Kind of People.</p>
<p>Westcoastmon, excellent posting and comparison. Most people don’t realize that there was such a thing as “free blacks.” They were called Free Persons of Color on the census and oftentimes listed as Mulatto. Virginia and North Carolina hosted the majority of these folks, and many migrated north as time progressed. For those who are not familiar with what a Free Person of Color was (as related to African Americans), here it is in a nutshell. A non-slave Black/Native who was not a slave during slavery time, who most times descended from a white female (indentured servant) and Black/Native male. Children during slavery time followed their mothers. You can find these people within the U.S. census prior to 1870. Enslaved individuals were not listed on the U.S. census by name and other identifying information until the 1870 census.</p>
<p>Use the phrase “free persons of color” on any search engine and a wealth of information can be found. One site states that in French Colonial Louisiana free persons of color are mentioned as early as 1725.</p>
<p>Yesterday I had the pleasure of listening to Ellen-Johnson Sirleaf deliver the commencement speech at my daughter’s graduation. In the audience were a range of black families who are members of Jack and Jill, the links, etc. to those who were celebrating the first member of the family to graduate college.</p>
<p>One of the most beautiful things that I saw yesterday was a family of about 25 people celebrating the graduation of one of their family members. They were all gathered around the graduate and you could just feel the love and the pride that the family had in this young woman’s accomplishment. I was so in awe, that I stopped to take a picture of this family.</p>
<p>President Johnson-Sirleaf told the the graduates</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I felt it was a message that reinforced what many of us as parents continually tell our children and at the end of the day, if our children were to remember these things it is more important than anything Jack & Jill, the Links, Sag Harbor and that ilk could have to offer.</p>
<p>So I will leave this thread with a quote from one of my favorite poems Nikki Rosa by Nikki Giovanni, which is another thing that I have tried to instill in my child…</p>