EMERGE AND THE LURE OF RACISM

“Black America’s Newsmagazine” offers black America the news that it is besieged by a dominant white establishment eager to keep black people down. In stories like “FBI Coverup: How Black Panther Geronimo Pratt was Framed” (June 1994), “Badge of Racism: Blacks Undercover Fear White Cops” (September 1995), and “Double Standard: Is There a Conspiracy Against Black Officials?” (October 1996), Emerge has become one of the chief propounders of the idea that the white establishment consciously uses government authority to harass, persecute, and downgrade American blacks.

“They are — despite what they say — the bully pulpit for the extreme left black establishment and the far-out nationalists,” McLittle says. “And the strangest thing is that corporate America is supporting them.” Indeed it does: General Motors and Kraft Foods have advertised in almost every issue, often with double-page color spreads. Ford, AT&T, General Electric, and Kodak are also frequent advertisers. Emerge has an advertising portfolio many magazines can only dream about. This shouldn’t be the case, according to the party line inside the advertising industry, because Emerge courts controversy, which supposedly frightens advertisers away.

Take, for instance, the magazine’s six-page paean to Leonard Jeffries, who offers the view that blacks are “sun people” and whites are “ice people,” that melanin is responsible for black superiority, and that Jews have conspired with the mafia to degrade blacks in Hollywood. The article refers to Jeffries lovingly as “Dr. J.” and is an almost entirely sympathetic portrayal of a scholar supposedly harassed by Jewish critics, “maligned” and ” labeled anti-Semitic,” and targeted by “death threats.”

“Emerge calls itself a news magazine, but it doesn’t deal with journalism in the way that a newspaper would,” says Gwen Daye Richardson, editor of Headway, a black political magazine, which, like Destiny, is struggling for corporate advertising. “They don’t just present facts. They have their spin. And it is that racism underlies every aspect of black life. They promote that view. And because of that, they like the radicals. They like Farrakhan; they like Ben Chavis; they like Leonard Jeffries. And they hate Clarence Thomas.”

But Emerge, a handsome publication whose slick color ads are matched by its slick graphics, doesn’t look like a newsletter for radicals and black nationalists. It looks more like the Atlantic Monthly or Harper’s and claims a healthy circulation of 161,000. The look of Emerge screams ” mainstream,” and so does its readership. According to a 1994 subscriber study, college graduates make up 88 percent of its readership — a ratio far exceeding the figure for magazine-readers generally (39 percent) and more than triple the figure for black magazine-readers (27 percent). Three quarters of its subscribers own their primary residence, and their median family income is $ 55,200 — a figure that places the readership comfortably within the American middle class, and in the upper echelons of black America. And the magazine’s focus on racism has been one of the hallmarks of its success. It was begun in 1989 as a black lifestyle magazine intended to compete with Ebony, still the most popular black publication in the country. But when Emerge’s editor, George Curry, came on board in 1993, he replaced the staff and got rid of the magazine’s soft, celebrity-driven focus. Since then, sales have surged by almost 20 percent; they are expected to pass the 200,000 mark within four years.

Curry acknowledges that Emerge’s covers are deliberately provocative: ” We’re in the business of selling magazines.” He insists, however, that the magazine is — “balanced,” and each issue does include articles on health care, sports, technology, and the arts, usually written without a political purpose. In fact, even the politically charged cover stories often include a few contrarian quotes. But those are cosmetics. Emerge’s readers are never left with any doubt about the magazine’s stance. Its reportage echoes its covers.

The real question posed by Emerge’s prominence in the black community is this: Is the magazine simply the propaganda organ of a small coterie of black nationalists who are filling the ears and minds of their successful, BMW- driving readers (the magazine’s readership survey tallied BMW owners) with a heavy dose of alienation? Or is Emerge an accurate reflection of the socio-political attitudes of its educated black audience? Do black pediatricians, social workers, and businessmen really think the CIA poured crack into the inner cities? Do black civil-service workers and college educators think blacks are being used against their will for secret governmentsponsored medical experiments? Do black attorneys and accountants believe there’s a sinister FBI plot to discredit black politicians?

In a word: yes.

Just look at the reaction to the O. J. Simpson criminal trial, and the pervasive belief among blacks (the bourgeois as well as the poor) that the Los Angeles police department planted the bloody glove in an effort to frame Simpson. A survey conducted in 1990 found that one third of black people interviewed believed that the AIDS virus was produced in a government germ- warfare lab and released into the air to commit genocide against blacks. The group sampled in that survey was not a bunch of Black Panthers gathered for a 30-year reunion; it was 1,000 churchgoers in five American cities. The New York Times and CBS News, in a survey conducted that same year, obtained similar results: A quarter of black people said that the government ” deliberately makes sure that drugs are easily available in poor black neighborhoods in order to harm black people.” (Another third said they believed such a conspiracy possible.) And 32 percent said “the government deliberately singles out and investigates black elected officials in order to discredit them.” The survey pool — over 50 interviews with black public officials, professors, doctors, students, public-health workers, and average citizens — included a large number of middle-class blacks.

Emerge’s editor, George Curry, is onto something. Recent polling data show that in the last five years middle-class blacks have become the most alienated, most radicalized, and most nationalistic of all black Americans.

The Million Man March of 1995 provides the most recent evidence. If you turned on the television during Farrakhan’s speech and watched as the camera panned the crowd, what you saw were faces of middle-class black men, many of whom came with their young sons in tow. They were not the faces of a disenfranchised underclass.

In a poll of 1,047 participants in the march, Ronald Lester found that attendees were younger (under 45), wealthier (incomes of $ 30,000 or more), and better educated (75 percent college-educated) than black Americans as a whole. The poll detected an undercurrent of racial tension among the participants typical of black nationalists: Half of all march participants said they took part “to send a message to white people.” Six in ten said they had an unfavorable impression of whites, and four in ten said they had an unfavorable view of Jews. Nearly nine in ten said they had a favorable impression of Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam. In fact, the poll found that Farrakhan was more popular than any other prominent black political figure, including Jesse Jackson and Colin Powell.

It may seem paradoxical that those black Americans who have made the greatest strides toward attaining the American dream are the very ones who are most apt to believe that white America is trying to keep them down. It may seem all the more surprising when one considers that things are looking up for the black middle class. According to the most recent census report on poverty, black households, for example, were the only racial or ethnic group to experience real income gains between 1993 and 1994. And black middle-class women have made the greatest advances in recent years. The census bureau reported in 1995 that collegeeducated black women employed as executives, administrators, or managers had median earnings of $ 40,494, 10 percent higher than incomes of comparable white women. Twelve percent of college students across the country are now black — a number proportionate to the black population.

And yet Ron Lester says the evidence of middle-class black anger is incontrovertible. In numerous black focus groups and polls he has conducted across the country, he has found that the wealthiest blacks are the segment of the black population most likely to perceive themselves as the victims of racism. When a national sample of black respondents was asked, “Do you think racism has increased or decreased in the last five years?” the one group that thought racism had increased in the late ’80s and early ’90s comprised blacks earning over $ 50,000. All the other income groups thought racism had leveled off or was declining.

“When you talk about racism in American society, the blacks making higher incomes, with higher levels of education, tend to think that more racism exists than blacks with lower incomes and education,” Lester says. “It seems that the more access and familiarity blacks have with whites, the more likely they are to think racism is a significant factor. They think they work harder than their white counterparts to get where they are. That they have to jump through more hoops. And they’re bitter about it. The lower-income blacks almost dismiss white people because they don’t have dealings with them. Most of them think white people are irrelevant to their life.”

The first sign of this change in middle-class attitudes surfaced in the aftermath of the Rodney King beating. In 1992, UCLA sociologist Larry Bobo conducted 1,000 interviews with blacks, Hispanics, and Asians before and after the first Simi Valley trial, measuring perceptions of racism. When he compared black responses with those of the other two racial groups, he was shocked to find that black attitudes had changed by a full standard deviation — a huge statistical jump. Bobo then re-analyzed the data to see whether there was some sector of the black community where this change was most clearly rooted. It turned out that income was the dispositive factor. Before the verdict, only 50 percent of highincome blacks agreed with the statement, ” Members of my ethnic group just haven’t been treated fairly.” After the verdict, that number went up to almost 80 percent among blacks earning more than $ 50,000.

“The black middle class showed the largest amount of racial alienation, because they were the ones whose expectations were dashed,” Bobo explains. ” Poor working-class blacks had much lower expectations of white society and its institutions to begin with. It was especially the new black middle class who had been assured that the old racial barriers had been overcome and if everyone played by the rules, they were going to get ahead. Following that verdict there was a radical and far-reaching reinterpretation of one’s place and prior experiences for many middle-class African Americans.”

But was the response to the Rodney King trial an accurate marker of a broader change in attitudes? After all, the King beating and its aftermath took place in and around Los Angeles, which is a far more racially charged city than many others in America. In 1993 and 1994, Michael Dawson, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, decided to find out. He tested Bobo’s thesis to see if it would hold true nationally, asking both Bobo’s questions and others that had been asked in national surveys in the ’80s. Not only did Dawson confirm Bobo’s findings, he found that the level of racial alienation among upperincome blacks was even higher nationally than it had been in Los Angeles.

Dawson also found that levels of nationalism were higher among upper-income blacks than they had ever been. He notes that after declining in the 1980s, the number of blacks who said they supported the formation of a separate black political party doubled over the previous five years to constitute 50 percent of the black community. Over half of black Americans, Dawson found, believe that blacks should join black-only organizations and institutions. More than 70 percent agree that blacks should control the political and economic resources of their communities.

According to Dawson’s study, the overwhelming majority of blacks view the American legal, economic, and political systems to be “generally unfair to African Americans” and believe that black people are “owed a better chance than they currently have in American society.” (Sixty-three percent say the federal government should see to it that every person has a job and a good standard of living.) In fact, a staggering two-thirds of black Americans believe that racial equality will not be achieved in their lifetimes, if ever.

“Given the numbers, it’s not surprising that there’s a segment — not a majority — of the black community who find it persuasive when they’re told that they’re in a race war, and that African Americans are losing,” Dawson says. “There’s a broad suspicion of police and security agencies in general, including the CIA. Being nationalistic makes one more likely to believe some of the conspiracy theories.”

It isn’t supposed to work this way, at least not according to the precepts of economic conservatism. Rising incomes and opportunities are supposed to give black Americans a sense of inclusion and a stake in the American dream. Why isn’t this happening?

One reason may be that the black middle class is a different kind of middle class altogether. “The black middle class cannot be compared with some white suburban group because they didn’t get there by the same means,” says Elizabeth Wright, publisher of Issues and Views, a black conservative journal. Black success, she explains, doesn’t have the same foundation as that of other ethnic groups — Jews, Poles, Asians — which circumvented establishment hostility by entrepreneurial effort. The vast majority of middleclass blacks work in government jobs or for non-profit organizations and educational institutions tied to the government by grants. In addition, many are beneficiaries of affirmative action. “They know that their status is artificially attained and therefore they will always feel that they have to band together,” Wright says. “They feel constantly unstable, fearful that it’s all going to be taken away from them.”

Bart Landry, a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland and author of The New Black Middle Class, observes other differences between middle-class whites and blacks. The black middle class, he explains, has deep kinship and social ties to the black inner cities. Many of its members work in public schools, hospitals, and other institutions serving the urban underclass. These contacts generate a high level of cross-class racial solidarity and kinship.

In addition, says Landry, the black middle class tends to feel more vulnerable economically than its white counterpart. Many white-collar blacks lost their jobs in the government downsizing that took place in the late 1980s and early 1990s; those who kept their jobs fear that further cutbacks may hit them in the future. “Many worry that they are four or five paychecks away from losing what they have,” says Landry.

If you ask Emerge’s editor, however, it all comes down to white racism. The glass ceiling for women is the “cement ceiling” for the black middle class. All the education, money, and sophistication in the world cannot free them from the burden of their blackness, or what some middle-class blacks call ” the indignity of the day”: taxis that refuse to pick up black riders, store clerks who follow black customers through the aisles, and police officers who regularly stop young black motorists.

“It doesn’t matter how much money you have, you still will be discriminated against,” says Curry. “So, while you may look at the indicators — the affluence, the housing, the income, and education — there’s still this burden of being black, and that is what white Americans really don’t understand. There’s a heavy burden just trying to get by day after day as an African American. And as a result, the black middle class is less optimistic. They’re disappointed and feel that they have been lied to. They feel that the American dream for blacks is a hoax.”

This combination of perceived financial instability and racial disappointment surely exists, and may partly explain the radicalism of the black middle class. Black people, however, don’t have a monopoly on financial worries or victim status. Many disadvantaged ethnic groups, not to mention blue-collar whites, live only a paycheck away from financial ruin. New immigrants often experience the stigma of racial prejudice, and yet we have not seen a dramatic rise in radicalism within the Hispanic community, for example.

Even after the passage of Proposition 187 in California, withdrawing many benefits from illegal immigrants, MexicanAmerican leaders did not claim that the white “establishment” had used Hispanic children in medical experiments or channeled crack into immigrant communities.

“The stuff Emerge is feeding its readers is poison,” says Armstrong Williams, a conservative black talk-show host in Washington, D.C. “It’s slowly killing people mentally. Making them hateful, resentful; making them feel like they’re being kept down and that they’ll never prosper in this country. It’s like keeping them mentally depressed. It’s very dangerous.”

The real danger is that black middle-class angst will trickle down to the black underclass, whose members have consistently shown themselves in polls to be cautiously optimistic about their future and the future of American race relations. If the pessimism of the black middle class permeates the inner cities, poor blacks may simply abandon the American dream and with it any possibility of upward mobility.

That is one issue affecting black America you won’t be reading about anytime soon in the pages of “Black America’s Newsmagazine.”

Elena Neuman is a writer living in Chevy Chase, Md.