Dreams from My Father

fast cars—images to which I myself was vulnerable and from which I had sought protection. When I mentioned the incident to a black woman friend of mine, she stated the issue more bluntly.
    “What are you surprised about?” my friend said impatiently. “That black people still hate themselves?”
    No, I told her, it wasn’t exactly surprise that I was feeling. Since my first frightening discovery of bleaching creams in
Life
magazine, I’d become familiar with the lexicon of color consciousness within the black community—good hair, bad hair; thick lips or thin; if you’re light, you’re all right, if you’re black, get back. In college, the politics of black fashion, and the questions of self-esteem that fashion signified, had been a frequent, if delicate, topic of conversation for black students, especially among the women, who would smile bitterly at the sight of the militant brother who always seemed to be dating light-skinned girls—and tongue-lash any black man who was foolish enough to make a remark about black women’s hairstyles.
    Mostly I had kept quiet when these subjects were broached, privately measuring my own degree of infection. But I noticed that such conversations rarely took place in large groups, and never in front of whites. Later, I would realize that the position of most black students in predominantly white colleges was already too tenuous, our identities too scrambled, to admit to ourselves that our black pride remained incomplete. And to admit our doubt and confusion to whites, to open up our psyches to general examination by those who had caused so much of the damage in the first place, seemed ludicrous, itself an expression of self-hatred—for there seemed no reason to expect that whites would look at our private struggles as a mirror into their own souls, rather than yet more evidence of black pathology.
    It was in observing that division, I think, between what we talked about privately and what we addressed publicly, that I’d learned not to put too much stock in those who trumpeted black self-esteem as a cure for all our ills, whether substance abuse or teen pregnancy or black-on-black crime. By the time I reached Chicago, the phrase
self-esteem
seemed to be on everyone’s lips: activists, talk show hosts, educators, and sociologists. It was a handy catchall to describe our hurt, a sanitized way of talking about the things we’d been keeping to ourselves. But whenever I tried to pin down this idea of self-esteem, the specific qualities we hoped to inculcate, the specific means by which we might feel good about ourselves, the conversation always seemed to follow a path of infinite regress. Did you dislike yourself because of your color or because you couldn’t read and couldn’t get a job? Or perhaps it was because you were unloved as a child—only, were you unloved because you were too dark? Or too light? Or because your mother shot heroin into her veins…and why did she do that anyway? Was the sense of emptiness you felt a consequence of kinky hair or the fact that your apartment had no heat and no decent furniture? Or was it because deep down you imagined a godless universe?
    Maybe one couldn’t avoid such questions on the road to personal salvation. What I doubted was that all the talk about self-esteem could serve as the centerpiece of an effective black politics. It demanded too much honest self-reckoning from people; without such honesty, it easily degenerated into vague exhortation. Perhaps with more self-esteem fewer blacks would be poor, I thought to myself, but I had no doubt that poverty did nothing for our self-esteem. Better to concentrate on the things we might all agree on. Give that black man some tangible skills and a job. Teach that black child reading and arithmetic in a safe, well-funded school. With the basics taken care of, each of us could search for our own sense of self-worth.
    Ruby shook up this predisposition of mine, the wall I had erected between psychology and politics, the state of our pocketbooks and the state of our souls. In fact, that particular episode was only the most dramatic example of what I was hearing and seeing every day. It was expressed when a black leader casually explained to me that he never dealt with black contractors (“A black man’ll just mess it up, and I’ll end up paying white folks to do it all over again”); or in another leader’s rationale for why she couldn’t mobilize other people in her church