Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America - By Eugene Robinson Page 0,3

days are the sons and daughters of African immigrants.5 This makes sense when you consider that their parents are the best-educated immigrant group in America, with more advanced degrees than the Asians, the Europeans, you name it. (They’re far better educated than native-born Americans, black or white.) But their children’s educational success leads Mainstream and Abandoned black Americans to ask whether affirmative action and other programs designed to foster diversity are reaching the people they were intended to help—the systematically disadvantaged descendants of slaves.

The second Emergent phenomenon is the acceptance of interracial marriage, once a crime and until recently a novelty. A University of Michigan study found that in 1990, nearly one married black man in ten was wed to a white woman—and roughly one married black woman in twenty-five was wed to a white man. These figures, the researchers found, had increased eightfold over the previous four decades.6 Barack Obama, the man who would be president; Adrian Fenty, the mayor of Washington, D.C.; Jordin Sparks, a winner on American Idol—all are the product of black-white marriages. And the boomer-echo generation, raised on a diet of diversity, has even fewer hang-ups about race and relationships.

In a sense, though, we’re just headed back to the future. Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. recently produced a public-television series in which he used genealogical research and DNA testing to unearth the heritage of several prominent African Americans. When he sent his own blood off to be tested, Gates discovered to his surprise that more than 50 percent of his genetic material was European. Wider DNA testing has shown that nearly one-third of all African Americans trace their heritage to a white male ancestor—likely a slave owner.

So forget about whether the mixed-race Emergents are “black enough.” How black am I? How black can any of us claim to be?

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This gradual but relentless fragmentation—economic, geographic, psychological, cultural—is by now undeniable. In 2007, a remarkable study by the Pew Research Center came up with a finding that made my jaw drop: An incredible 37 percent of African Americans agreed with the statement that “blacks today can no longer be thought of as a single race because the black community is so diverse.”7

To someone like me who grew up in the Jim Crow era of separate but unequal, this is profoundly unsettling. I left the South at sixteen to go to college and, like many of my peers, went through a process of interrogating my identity. But that phase ran its course long ago, and I knew without the slightest doubt who I was: a black man in America. Now is there some question about what being “a black man in America” even means? Has a true-false exam suddenly become multiple-choice?

The Pew study found that black Americans whose incomes placed them in the vast, struggling middle—earning between $30,000 and $100,000 a year—were the most likely to believe that black people no longer constituted one race. Black Americans at the top of the scale, with incomes of more than $100,000 a year, were most likely to cling to the more traditional view that “blacks can still be thought of as a single race because they have so much in common.” Perhaps we should begin to think of racial solidarity as a luxury item.

As a thought experiment, wind the clock back precisely forty years and try to imagine how different that evening at the Jordans’ would have been.

In 1968, it was possible to defend the generalization that black equaled poor—and easy to defend the statement that black certainly did not equal rich. With only 2 percent of black households earning the equivalent of $100,000 a year or more, there simply wouldn’t have been many African American families that could afford to host such a lavish social event, complete with liveried waiters and a well-stocked open bar.

Even in 1968, though, Washington was a magnet for the upwardly mobile black middle class and the tiny black upper crust. The city has been home to a significant black elite since before the days of Frederick Douglass. Of the modest number of black Americans in 1968 wealthy enough to entertain in such grand style, some definitely would have lived in Washington.

They wouldn’t have lived where the Jordans did, though. Chez Jordan is in one of the city’s most expensive, most exclusive neighborhoods, a leafy enclave tucked next to Rock Creek Park. Forty years ago, the area would have been literally exclusive: By unassailable tradition, if not by binding legal covenant (such