“You see, there were two Harlems. There were those who lived in Sugar Hill and there was the Hollow, where we lived. There was a great divide between the black people on the Hill and us. I was just a ragged, funky black shoeshine boy and was afraid of the people on the Hill, who, for their part, didn’t want to have anything to do with me.”
– James Baldwin interviewed by Julius Lester, the New York Times Book Review, May 27, 1984
“You got 1 percent of the population in America who owns 41 percent of the wealth… but within the black community, the top 1 percent of black folk have over 70 percent of the wealth. So that means you got a lot of precious Jamals and Letitias who are told to live vicariously through the lives of black celebrities so that it’s all about ‘representation’ rather than substantive transformation… ‘you gotta black president, all y’all must be free.’”
– Cornel West interviewed by Joe Rogan, July 24, 2019
In December 2014, Chris Rock
said of Hollywood:
“It’s a white industry. Just as the NBA is a Black industry. I’m not even saying it’s a bad thing. It just is. And the Black people they do hire tend to be the same person. That person tends to be female and that person tends to be Ivy League.”
Rock published his thoughts as the second wave of protests was ending in Ferguson. By January, #OscarsSoWhite was issuing a clarion call for popular culture
to do something, and six months later, the culture’s victories were being tabulated.
Essence Magazine dedicated its May issue to five Black women who were said to be “changing the game” in Hollywood: Shonda Rhimes (
Grey’s Anatomy), Ava DuVernay (
When They See Us, Selma), Debbie Allen (
A Different World), Issa Rae (
Insecure), and Mara Brock Akil (
Girlfriends). Between them, at least three attended private high schools, at least three had parents with college degrees, and all of them attended college themselves—Stanford, Northwestern, Dartmouth, and UCLA are on the list [1]. Had the
Essence article come out a few years later, Courtney A. Kemp (
Power) would have assuredly made an appearance; Kemp received her bachelor’s at Brown University and her master’s at Columbia, attending not one but two Ivy League schools.
To go back to the 2020 National Book Award nominees for a moment, three of the authors were Black and two were Black women. Deesha Philyaw
graduated from Yale, and Brit Bennet
from Stanford. Jesmyn Ward—a Black woman, and the only woman to twice win the NBA for fiction (2011, 2017)—
attended Stanford and then the University of Michigan, the latter considered a sort of public Ivy. In 2020,
The New Yorker had
nine visibly Black contributors (of which seven are men). All nine graduated from four-year colleges, and more than half gained their credentials at elite universities [2]. Based on publicly available biographies, compared to their non-Black peers, Black contributors had a higher rate of Ivy League attendance and were twice as likely to be college faculty.
Most of the time, the assumptions that can be made about the backgrounds of white creators can be safely applied to their Black counterparts. Any time an elite education appears in a Black creator’s biography, it is likely that it was preceded by exorbitant privilege. The writer Colson Whitehead—born Arch Colson Chipp Whitehead—was raised a wealthy Manhattanite. His family owned a home in the Hamptons, and he attended Trinity Preparatory School which sends nearly half of its students into the Ivy League in exchange for a tuition of $58,500 annually. Whitehead graduated from Harvard in 1991 and went on to win a National Book Award before becoming the Pulitzer’s only back-to-back winner in fiction. Pop culture wunderkind Roxane Gay has written memoirs,
New York Times Op-Eds, and Marvel Comics. Gay was, until her junior year, educated at Yale and attended Phillips Exeter before that; the latter is the kind of uber elite New England preparatory school fictionalized in
Dead Poets Society. Tuition for students boarding at Phillips today is slightly less than $60,000 per year, though a deal of $44,960 per annum is offered to young persons content with life as mere—and lowly—day students.
Above-average privilege, particularly in terms of income, is the norm for successful creators both white and Black, but the ignorance that obscures the economic privilege of the latter group provides a bitter irony when you’re a formerly impoverished Black person operating in a highly educated milieu. The only time that someone recommends Colson Whitehead or Roxanne Gay to me—really, the only time any Black creator outside of music is recommended to me by a white person—is when the person I am talking to learns that I am from the Black underclass. Being Black and from poverty, I am what white Americans imagine they are learning about and “standing in solidarity” with when they imbibe popular culture’s Black offerings. But it never occurs to them that Whitehead and Gay come from a very different class to begin with, and are not necessarily standing in real solidarity with
me.
