From Bourgeois to Boojie: Black Middle-Class Performances

Foreword

xiii E. PATRICK JOHNSON Foreword The Journey from Bourgeois to Boojie Since our arrival on American soil, African Americans have always been marked by our class position. Although we were considered only three-fihs human and had no material possessions to speak of, enslaved Africans’ intracultural relations were shaped by class, for white masters understood the psychosocial dynamics of divide and conquer: give one group access to the master’s house and family and put the other in the fields and forbid them access to the same. Thus the distinction between house slaves and field slaves paradoxically codified a caste system that effectively divided a people along class lines, even though all slaves were subjugated subjects who possessed nothing but their will to be counted as human and to be free. What white slave owners understood was that playing a game with labor assignments would instigate tension among the slaves and keep them fighting among themselves rather than plotting against their masters. This strategy was only marginally successful in allaying slave rebellions and other forms of indirect and direct insubordination, but psychologically the strategy was effective in creating the perception that some members of the community were superior to others—indeed, that some members had xiv E. Patrick Johnson literally become part of an upwardly mobile class. The irony, of course, is that those slaves who were assigned to the plantation home were actually no better off than those in the fields in terms of what they actually had materially . In fact, one might argue that because of their frequent interaction with their masters, house slaves were more susceptible to acts of physical and sexual violence. Nonetheless this division of labor created an image of what we now call the black middle class that remains today. The divide between the “folk” and the bourgeoisie intensified in the years aer emancipation as some blacks became upwardly mobile, instantiating a black middle class materially rather than only in the black imaginary . The ideological differences between working-class and middle-class blacks also intensified in the realm of racial upli discourse—that is, the strategies thought to best move the black race forward: vocation versus education . Moreover, the black middle class became increasingly associated with whiteness and a disavowal of blackness, as the psychosocial ideologies planted in slave culture began to take root in the form of cleavages among blacks around skin color or other physical features associated with black people. Colorism was almost always undergirded by class distinctions —that somehow dark skin and kinky hair signified low class and fair skin and straight hair signified high class. Of course, these psychodramas only sustained the hegemony of whiteness and kept black folks embroiled in intracultural battles about who was more or less authentically black. This class divide also shaped the way black leaders strategized the upli  of black people. Booker T. Washington insisted that learning a vocation was the only way to save the race, whereas W. E. B. Du Bois believed that the education of our people would be the only way to overcome subjugation. This is but one example of how class has shaped black politics. Indeed, in his famous 1926 essay, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” Langston Hughes indicts the Negro middle class as apolitical, disinterested in black culture, subsumed with aspirations of being white: “The whisper of ‘I want to be white’ runs silently through their minds.”1 A similar sentiment is found about forty years later in Amiri Baraka’s poem “Black Bourgeoisie,” in which he says the namesake of the poem Foreword xv does not hate ofays hates, instead, him self him black self.2 In the mid-1970s this image of the bourgeois black who is more interested in competing with whites than helping his people manifests in the form of the character George Jefferson in the sitcom The Jeffersons. The characters George Jefferson and his wife, Louise, leave behind their working-class life in Queens to “move on up to the East Side” of Manhattan, apparently leaving behind as well any political commitment or social responsibility to their working-class roots. Although George brings with him to the Upper East Side his black vernacular speech—shortening his wife’s name from Louise to Weezie and pronouncing it, for instance, with an undeniable workingclass black cadence—and his suspicion of...