No Problems with Police
I have no problems with the police. I have never been pulled aside for a drug search or even touched by an officer. Actually, I have found it pretty easy to talk my way out of several moving violations, and the only time a police officer has stopped me for anything besides those was a black officer in Oakland who turned out to want to tell me how much he liked Losing the Race!
Only once do I recall ever being tailed in a store, and since so many blacks complain about this tailing, I have always watched for it. And my experience was that when I was about sixteen, a black friend and I dropped into a tiny Slavic bookstore in Philadelphia because I, as a language freak, was just intrigued by the place. The woman behind the register, a probably Polish-born middle-aged woman, was obviously terrified, and the store was so tiny that her displeasure was overwhelmingly present to us, to the point that we left the store. But that was not quite what most blacks complain of. After all, it was likely extremely rare that young black men entered that store, and what's more, it was just on the edge of a sketchy black neighborhood, such that we might suppose that the woman assumed that since aging books in Polish are rarely of interest to young black men (or most Americans), we might have been in there to rob her. I know I am supposed to simply decry her as "stereotyping" but I cannot. She was just human, reacting to a highly unexpected presence in a store located in a bad neighborhood, and as a foreigner from a country where blacks are virtually nonexistent, unlikely to be attuned to the factors of dress and demeanor distinguishing class among blacks.
Nor have I ever gotten the sense that a clerk considered me too poor to afford higher-end itemsrather, I have the typical mainstream experience of having to ward clerks off from trying to get me to buy more expensive merchandise to up their commissionsthat is, the same experience whites have. And despite my occasional television appearances, I have nothing approaching the public recognizability that would make such clerks think of me as a celebrity, and besides, I didn't have such experiences even long before I had ever been on television. No cashier has ever, to my recollection, asked me for an extra form of ID.
Not once has any white person questioned me to my face as to my credentials for engaging in an activity or profession. The barriers to promotion that many blacks report in corporate life and law firms have been unknown to me in academia. There, black faces are so "welcome" that on the contrary, being black often makes it easier rather than harder to get tenure. Possibly racist bias makes it harder to advance in some other fields, but definitely in linguistics during my experiences,being black has been nothing less than an advantage in employment and promotion. No whites in my earshot have said anything suggesting that they were "impressed" that I did something despite being black, despite Cose's interviewees regularly reporting such experiences. Indeed, I have occasionally felt that when I did a talk that was merely bread-and-butter, I got praise a little beyond what I deserved, and that this was definitely based in a quiet sense that it was great that I had been up there with my black face, showing that linguistics is an equal-opportunity realm. But I cannot see this as damning my existence or worthy of "rage," especially since I have never experienced this to a degree that could be considered outright condescension.
A Harvard Law School grad whom Cose interviews when she has advanced to a teaching position "feels ambushed whenever she hears a cutting racial remark," but my personal experience in almost two decades of life in academia gives me, in all sincerity, no idea what she is referring to. No one in academia has ever said anything like, "There goes that black stuff again" or "It's great to see a black person do a good job like you're doing" when I could hear it. I have recounted elsewhere that the one person who ever called me "******" was a drunken laborer reduced to mumbling it as I went back into my apartment after I had bested him in an argument, which I could only see as a desperate belch from a bested opponent whose life no one would envy and that mine had already soundly surpassed. I suppose I might also recall a little guy at a day camp when I was about nine who called me "blackey" once or twice, but in clumsy jest, and I am afraid that this experience in 1974 did not arouse in me any "rage," especially not of a sort that I would still harbor thirty years later.
I also feel it necessary to note that I consider my life's experience a conclusive case against the idea that to be black and middle class is to live with white abuse as an everyday threat. The nature of the issue is such that there is no survey necessary: I'm black, have been for a very long time, am not nearly light-skinned enough to look anything but, and these things simply do not happen to me. I am even told that I tend to look rather "serious" when walking down the street (I tend to be outlining and writing paragraphs in my head)my default demeanor is not a smiley, gentle-looking one. Again, it doesn't matter that I don't look or talk "street" because the Cose idea is that the nastiness falls upon blacks of all "profiles." My life has taken place in Philadelphia, New York, Oakland, and San Francisco, all fertile breeding grounds for the Cose perspective. I also lived for years in Palo Alto, as a graduate student at Stanford, when I made extra money playing cocktail piano in wealthy white homes in surrounding towns. I therefore was often driving around those enclaves in a beat-up old car late at nightbut was never once stopped as a suspicious figure (and officers could not have seen how "clean-cut" I was just seeing me through the car window, nor could they hear my tragically "proper" speaking voice). Also, I am a night owl and no stranger to bars;[ my favorite one in New York is in an area where late at night, "streety" young blacks congregate selling drugs and making a lot of noise. On countless nights I have made my way home from that bar in the wee hours, but never once have been bothered by an officer. If Ellis Cose had for some reason sought me out to fill out the anecdotes in his book, I would have come up with nothing to support the idea that white people bedevil me constantly with racist actions. This means something.
I Am Not Alone
And I might also add that my life lends me my own "anecdotal" collection of "interviewees" who would concur with me. I know about eight black Americanssome friends, others long-term acquaintanceswho readily agree with me that the middle-class black life of constant racist abuse that Cose and his friends depict is not theirs. No, they are not lower-class or blue-collar people; predictably, I tend to be closest to people with histories and lifestyles similar to my own. Nor, however, are any of them scions of the black elite, nor are most of them light-skinned, nor do all of them even have college degrees or significant bank accounts. But then, again, these things technically shouldn't even matter, as we are told that this abuse is aimed at any black person between about ten and sixty, regardless of demeanor, class, or accomplishment. And I can honestly attest that "whitey" just does not torment these people, or me, in the ways that Cose describes. The Rage of a Privileged Class got around quite a bit among reading blacks in the mid-nineties. I have no statistics to offer, but I have lost count of how many times I have asked middle-class black people, "Is what that book describes your experience?" and had them answer, "Well, no." Everybody has a story or twoor three. But "most of what life is"?
Sure, Racism Happens Occasionally
However, as noted, it's not that my friends and I have not experienced racism. It's there indeed. For example, I know my racism when I see it and am not possessed of a fragile sort of pride that makes me reluctant to admit when racism has been imposed upon me (i.e., I have no quiet sense that racism is only something that should happen to, you know, those kinds of black people).
When I got my BA at Rutgers in the early eighties, a great many of the white students were products of lower-middle-class New Jersey families, their parents being products of pre-Civil Rights Act America. Even at that time, overt expressions of racism were taboo on campus, but it was impossible not to suspect that a lot of those kids did not have the most savory feelings about "the blacks." I recall a late-night debate with a white guy from Paterson, New Jersey, hardly a hotbed of racial progressiveness, in which it became clear that he considered blacks' overrepresentation in the ghetto to be due to their mental and even biological inferiority. I talked him into a logical corner in which he had to quietly but testily admit this in a word or two, and I just let the exchange stop there.
I'm saying though KTL / HL can't really define what "black middle class" is.
at this whole story. I actually got tougher in the 'burbs fightin' off racists. Sometimes I had to fight off 3-4 dudes. I will say that there was a black chick in my class who nobody bothered, but she was super quiet, other than the fact that she breathed, you would barely know if she existed or not. I think it depends on who and where you are, but overall 
'in