CONCLUSION
In 2009, the New York Times reported that job-seeking African Americans were “whitening” their job résumés. For example, businesses were not returning calls for job interviews to Tahani Tompkins, a Chicagoland resident. A friend advised her to change her name to T. S. Tompkins to better her chances. Another Chicagoan deleted information on her bachelor’s degree from Hampton University, a historically black college. Additionally, she removed details on a previous position at an African American nonprofit and reshuffled her references to ensure that that the top names were not black-sounding. According to the article, the practice of hiding or downplaying blackness was common among college-educated African Americans.1
“Whitening” the résumé was not a choice born in paranoia or deceit, but rather an often-agonizing compromise to the American racial order. One study of hiring practices in Boston and Chicago in 2004 showed that applicants with “black” names received half as many callbacks as people with “white” names.2 In 2009, the unemployment rate for black male college graduates twenty-five and older was close to double that of white male college graduates.3 The Great Recession worsened the employment outlook for young African Americans. By 2013, the unemployment rate for whites who did not finish high school was lower than that for blacks with some college education.4 Though many Americans believed that affirmative action and government quotas mandated that employers give preferences to minorities, in truth blacks had to contend with severe disadvantages in hiring. Three generations after employers compelled European immigrants to “whiten” their résumés to be considered for mainstream occupations, black Americans still felt this burden.5
The measures taken by African Americans to find employment were not rejections of their racial heritage. In response to persistent disparities, many middle-class blacks perceived that their life chances were intertwined with those of other African Americans.6 Blackness was not a liability; rather, the affluent enjoyed being black and being part of a larger community, and they were determined to maintain their racial identities.7 Moreover, in spite of their accomplishments, most blacks could not escape their race even if they wanted to. Offhand remarks, slights, tokenism, and incidents of blatant racism connected them—distressingly—to a larger African American experience of marginality. Additionally, blacks faced resounding pressure to take responsibility for their less fortunate brethren, a compulsion that white ethnics discarded as they assimilated into the middle class.
As black Americans arrived in Chicago, they encountered blatant racism that made it tremendously challenging to achieve their educational, occupational, and residential objectives. The emotional weight they carried in their bruising struggle for upward mobility led to imaginative schemes to get ahead, and they formed a modified rendering of the American Dream that openly acknowledged the extra burdens of achieving success in a society that did not want them to succeed. Many were frustrated by the seemingly insurmountable barriers, and those that made good often faced criticism for their decisions that Chicagoans of other races never had to consider.
Class divisions were present since the earliest days of Chicago’s Black Belt, but they widened significantly with civil rights triumphs in the 1950s and 1960s as educated black Chicagoans pushed open doors. Nonetheless, severe discrimination continued to constrain their search for full inclusion and unencumbered opportunity, and societal pressures insisted that the black middle class take on responsibility for racial progress. Some rejected this obligation and sought to distance themselves physically from the poor and psychologically from the burden of elevating the entire race. Others advocated the time-honored mantra of “lifting while we climb,” but they could do only so much to improve the prospects of blacks confronting deep-seated systemic impediments. The black middle class grew, but in the 1970s the black working class began collapsing. Deindustrialization, government cutbacks, automation, and enduring discrimination deprived many African Americans of the springboard of working-class stability.8 Any fixes to the crisis in the jobless ghetto went far beyond the resources of the black middle and upper classes.9 By the turn of the century, many began to give up on what was once called the “Promised Land.” From 2000 to 2010, Chicago lost 181,000 black residents, with many relocating to the suburbs or back to the South.10
As urban neighborhoods faltered, the black middle class continued the long tradition of attempting to move away from the disorder and limited means of high-poverty areas and carve out exclusive residential spaces.11 In 1987, Ebony magazine noted that Chatham, the South Side middle-class incubator, was “more than just a neighborhood. It’s a symbol of hopes, dreams and progress, and it has been that way for the 30 or so years that the Black middle class has occupied the area.” There was tremendous demand for homes in the community, which ranged from affordable bungalows at $50,000 to luxurious mansions that fetched $500,000.12 Though almost all whites left, black residents had largely succeeded in preserving it as a desirable place to live.
Twenty years later, black Chathamites felt besieged as the city dismantled public housing and the country largely discarded strategies to alleviate poverty. Maryellen Drake, whose parents moved to Chatham as part of the short-lived experiment in integration in 1957, had served as vice president of the Chatham–Avalon Park Community Council, then in existence for fifty years. In 2011, though, Drake saw a troubled neighborhood. “This is a class issue,” Drake concluded. “It’s not just about income. It’s about the standards that you are accustomed to. . . . Barbecue grills on the front lawn. Ten and 12 people piled up on the front porch. Opening fire hydrants instead of going in the backyard and getting in the pool or under a hose.” She was not sure where the newcomers were coming from, but “I know that—by the way they behave—although they look like me, we are very different.”13 Blacks were not immune to the politics of personal responsibility, and many blamed the poor for their difficulties. Additionally, middle-class blacks often held themselves responsible for not achieving parity with their white peers, reflecting a broader neoliberal focus on individual solutions for social problems.14
However, the emphasis on personal agency masked the profound structural issues plaguing the black middle class. For Chicagoans in “gilded ghettos,” the legacies of segregation, redlining practices by financial institutions, and capital flight made their neighborhoods perilous and diminished investments in housing. Between 1980 and 1983, Chicago’s suburbs got twice as many home loans and three times more loan money as the city, even though the suburban population was only one-third larger than the city’s. All twenty-two Chicago neighborhoods classified as “credit-starved” were predominantly minority, including Chatham and three other black middle-class communities with median family incomes at or appreciably above the citywide average.15 Black families accrued much less return on their residential assets, which contributed significantly to the generational wealth gaps between the black and white middle classes.16 Laverne Hayes owned a two-bedroom bungalow in Avalon Park. It had nearly doubled in value from 1990 to 2005, but Hayes estimated that if her home were in another neighborhood, it would be worth considerably more. Her assumption was correct, as similar homes in a white community on the Northwest Side sold for 126 percent above those in Avalon Park.17 In Chatham, the impact of demolishing public housing high-rises, the sluggish economy, and a disintegrating housing market led to more crime, a jump in unemployment, and decisions to leave. The low points came in 2010, when Chicago police officer Thomas Wortham IV was shot to death at his parents’ house by thieves attempting to steal his new motorcycle. Three months later, assailants shot and killed another Chicago cop, Michael Bailey, in front of his home while he polished his new car.18 The homicides were stark reminders of the hazards middle-class blacks faced in places once considered havens.
The disparities between the black middle class and its white counterpart starkly demonstrated that race still mattered and that the country had not entered a post-racial era. The African American middle class doubled in size in the 1960s as agitation and equal employment laws opened new opportunities.19 While some optimists stated that blacks had achieved economic parity by the early 1970s and the media often featured accomplished African Americans in glossy spreads and television specials, civil rights lawyer Vernon Jordan cautioned that “the vast majority of blacks are still far from middle-class status. Let us not forget that the gains won are tenuous ones, easily shaken from our grasp by an energy crisis, a recession, rampant inflation, or nonenforcement of hard-won civil-rights laws.”20 Jordan’s warning was prescient, as economic malaise and a conservative counterreaction pushed back progress in education, in the workplace, and in residential capital.
Education, which helped propel so many into the middle class in the twentieth century, has remained inequitable for most African Americans.21 Intractable whites blocked true school integration in Northern cities during the period of civil rights momentum. The Supreme Court gradually retreated from and terminated integration plans, while the Reagan and Bush administrations expressed hostility to desegregation orders. In 2011–12, a study of education sixty years after Brown v. Board related that the states of New York and Illinois were the most segregated for black students. The Chicago area, the study reported, “combines extremely high residential segregation and a metropolitan area fragmented into hundreds of separate school districts with a sharply declining white share of the school age population.”22
Segregated inner-city schools not only denied students opportunities for networking, but tended to have strikingly fewer resources, third-rate facilities, and more inexperienced teachers.23 The white privilege of middle-class flight had lasting negative effects for educational equity. When whites left, urban areas lost social, political, and economic capital, producing large gaps between urban and suburban districts.24 Public education “reformers” responded by subjecting urban systems to market-based standards, including touting charter schools and supporting private school vouchers.25 Increasingly, elites raised doubts on the value of a broad education for the masses while doing everything in their power to assure that their own children had access to the best instruction possible.
Momentum in the workplace also subsided. Blacks made stunning gains in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the corporate world through the power of social movements, government action, and the tenacity of qualified blacks seizing the moment.26 However, this burst was brief, slowed by a stumbling economy and shifting political tides. Black careers in corporate America stagnated or even regressed in the 1980s, and many frustrated managers left to start their own firms.27 Even as the number of African American managers grew, companies still placed most of them in less influential positions.28 Moreover, black male college graduates experienced an acute decline in relative earnings in the late 1970s and the 1980s.29 New Right and neoliberal cuts to government employment hit the black middle class hard, as African Americans had long been overrepresented in these jobs due to lower levels of discrimination and growing urban political clout.30 Blacks in corporate jobs advised young aspirants that their work must be “impeccable,” as employers still expected blacks to be “super-negroes.” As a frustrated executive remarked in 1987, “We are still playing on an uneven playing field.”31
Political support for redressing racial discrimination ran dry in the 1980s. The Reagan administration’s disdain for affirmative action emboldened recalcitrant managers. One consultant observed that many were contemptuous of black men, and they ascribed African American advancement to “reverse discrimination.”32 A pharmaceutical executive noted that at discussions over diversity, white supervisors asked, “Why are we doing this when the outside environment has cooled to these programs? Why are we wasting the money?” Strikingly, the challenges faced by black managers were familiar to the pioneers of the 1960s. At a company cocktail party, an official told a black executive, “Most of my people would find it extremely difficult, almost counterproductive, to work for a minority individual.”33 This frankness made it clear why many blacks could not attain promotions: truculent whites still could not tolerate blacks in authority positions. As Wall Street Journal reporters concluded in 1992, white-collar blacks “walk a tightrope in corporate America, where they’re expected to blend with a culture that never fully accepts them.”34 Few black managers rose to the top spots, and the historian and real estate magnate Dempsey Travis’s interviews with Chicago’s black executives revealed that not one was a member of an establishment country club or could lay claim to being a part of the city’s “good old boys network.”35
Affirmative action programs became politically untenable, easing the bureaucratic impulse for change. Aggrieved whites generally succeeded in convincing the public that they tainted merit-based processes by artificially inserting race. Some African American managers, seeking to conform to the corporate ethos, also questioned the wisdom of affirmative action.36 Corporations shifted to “diversity” and “inclusion” rather than targeted advancement programs, contending that the presence of minority employees was not as important as being “culturally competent” and making everyone feel valued.37 Black initiative, though vital to entry into the economic mainstream, could only go so far.
Residential integration also foundered, despite some notable exceptions in areas where denizens overcame long-standing restrictive practices and integrated through the managed strategies proposed by liberals such as Thomas Gaudette in the late 1950s.38 These hard-won bright spots served as evidence that equal-status contact worked, while often eliding the excruciating process.39 In most cases, Chicagoland remained stubbornly segregated. The patterns of pioneering, panic, and flight in suburban Matteson in the mid-1990s remained eerily similar to those in previous decades. An influx of black middle-class home buyers led to a mass sell-off by whites, even though the newcomers were of the same, if not higher, socioeconomic status. Those exiting reflexively claimed that the schools were getting worse and crime was rising, despite test scores and crime rates remaining unchanged. The debacle attracted the attention of the national media, startled by the realization that most whites were still unwilling to live next to blacks.40
African Americans had torn down the “Chicago Wall” and moved into a host of suburbs, yet recurring white flight meant that these relocations were not a panacea. Suburban middle-class blacks usually lived in areas with sluggish home values, less access to good schools, and greater distance to high-paying careers. A study in the mid-2000s found that 94 percent of blacks dwelt in “low-opportunity” suburbs around Chicago, compared to 44 percent of whites.41 Indeed, to maintain diverse communities residents needed to pay close attention to anxieties over schools, delinquency, and commercial vitality, because whites perceived integration to be risky and unstable. In an attempt to stabilize housing markets and sustain diversity, Matteson residents launched an aggressive marketing plan to woo white home buyers, turning back to a strategy employed thirty years earlier.42 Meanwhile, skeptical African Americans suffered from integration fatigue, tired of the repetitive cycles of flight and having to prove themselves as “acceptable.”43 Though many Americans still believed in equal-status contact, research indicated that increasing neighborhood diversity did not necessarily produce hostility, but rather mounting distrust of neighbors and social withdrawal, regardless of class.44 Throughout the twentieth century, blacks persistently moved to communities to upgrade their living conditions and gain access to resources, only to watch those amenities fade into renewed segregation.
The resulting inequalities in the workplace, neighborhood, and schools calcified the stubborn American racial divide. Since the 1950s, Americans regularly judged racial progress by the size of the black middle class. The visible presence of minorities that “made it” was crucial to the country’s legitimacy as a place of egalitarian ideals and fair play. In times of crisis, whites turned to them as “reasonable” junior partners with a stake in the system. But as journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates bluntly stated, “America does not really want a black middle class.”45 Whites often claimed that if blacks only achieved a higher status and adopted more customary behaviors, then they would find acceptance. Yet they denied blacks access to housing, schools, and jobs that secured upward mobility. The contradiction was hardly new to the United States, but it was difficult for a nation that prided itself on merit, hard work, and tolerance to acknowledge. Many whites looked back on their own journeys to the middle class as the model and faulted African Americans for not taking these routes, thereby erasing how earning whiteness had been a major factor in their achievements.46
Even as they faced stubborn prejudice, the American Dream still enjoyed wide currency among black Americans.47 Moving on up emerged as gospel for the aspirational classes. They could look back at centuries of subjugation and inequality, yet still marvel at the developments at hand, including the election of Chicago’s own Barack Obama. The confidence in advancement exerted a strong force, urging Chicagoans to emulate and strive for the feats of the city’s black elite. Unlike white Americans accustomed to the skewed benefits of racialized state capitalism, blacks had a more clear-eyed view of what it took to get ahead.48 Neoliberalism, austerity, and deindustrialization changed the social and economic landscape for many whites, but African Americans had long been aware of the harshest edges of free enterprise. The United States always promised more than it could deliver. Yet faith continued, spurred on by triumphant examples. Their achievements suggested that if they played the game right and caught a break, blacks could move up and move out.