Question of Class

Summit, senate, impromptu steam-letting, call it what you will, but a very loose emergency session assembles--fast--just outside Eso Won Books, overlooking La Brea Avenue at the dividing line between the flats and the point where the road drifts upward toward Baldwin Hills--L.A.’s nouveau turn on a black Sugar Hill.

No better an introspective intersection; a perfect point of metaphoric departure.

Here at this crossroads, this mostly young, well traveled, degree-toting African American assembly begins tugging at an issue too often silenced to even be considered elusive: that volatile cocktail of class, allegiance and racial authenticity.

“I mean, you know, I was interested in what the brother had to say,” says one young man, referring to Eso Won’s evening speaker, Lawrence Otis Graham, author of “Our Kind of People” (HarperCollins), a look at black America’s upper class. “I mean, I went to school with some of those people he named in the book, and they were cool with me. They never made me feel different, inferior, because I’d come from South Central.”

“Well, I grew up in Washington, D.C., went to St. Luke’s, but I was too dark to spend time in Hampton Beach,” says a woman whose skin is the color of blended honey, taking her keys out of her Coach bag. “The upper class didn’t share their information outside of those who weren’t of their class structure.”

“There is so much damage,” whispers another woman. “So much damage.”

“I know when I see Negroes like him,” says Tony Wafford, a community activist, eyebrows arched, “. . . I think they are very angry at white America. I think they are angry with black America, and they have a love-hate relationship with themselves. So I wanted to see if he was serious, or was he just Larry Elder of the literary world.”

This, mind you, is the mild stuff.

Since publication, Graham’s six-years-in-the-making gilded social history has inspired an anything-but-ambivalent grab bag of emotions. While some say they feel “a sense of pride that I hadn’t felt before,” as one Amazon.com reader put it, many others see Graham italicizing and thus perpetuating a dubious if not damaging moat of class distinctions--especially those calibrated by skin color, lineage and pedigree.

“He is still living up to someone else’s standard,” fired off another Amazon.com reader. “Lawrence, be your own measure of a man!”

And so, not only do some members of the “elite” (as Graham deferentially has dubbed them) feel that the uncommissioned portrait is blemished if not distorted, but those “outside” see Graham as “so desperately” wanting “in” that he is neither tough enough nor clear enough on some of the divisive intraracial and class-based bigotry of which his subjects may be guilty.

An uneasy place to be.

Rather than controversial, says Graham, 37, who makes his home in Westchester County, New York, “I thought it was going to be more surprising to people. I didn’t think people would take sides on even the issue of talking about . . . the existence of a black upper class. That by virtue of even talking about it suggests that we should be aspiring to this. Well, for me it’s an issue of fact and history. It’s not an issue of deciding whether you want to aspire to this. Class distinctions exist.”

With that as his thesis, his desire was to set down the often-eclipsed history and influence of the country’s black upper class--from all-black boarding schools and summer camps to such venerable social organizations as the Links, the Boule, Jack and Jill; august institutions of higher learning--Spelman, Howard, Meharry, Fisk; the creme de la creme of fraternities and sororities--Delta Sigma Theta, Alpha Kappa Alpha, Kappa Alpha Psi . . . organizations known, especially in the early years, as much for their good works as their exclusivity.

For the expose that put him on the map, “Member of the Club: Reflections on Life in a Racially Polarized World” (HarperCollins, 1995), Graham went undercover as a busboy at an all-white Connecticut country club that had denied him membership. But this time Graham--an attorney as well as an author--is for all practical purposes a member of the exclusive club of which he writes.

“I . . . knew that there was an us and them,” he writes as point of introduction, “There were those children who belonged to Jack and Jill and summered in Sag Harbor; Highland Beach; or Oak Bluffs, Martha’s Vineyard; and there were those who didn’t. . . . There were those families that made what some called ‘a handsome picture’ of people with ‘good hair’ (wavy or straight) with ‘nice complexions’ (light brown to nearly white), with ‘sharp features’ . . . and there were those that didn’t.”

It was upon this design that Graham constructed his frame for discussion--who stands on one side of the line, who stands on the other, and why: “And along with recording those flattering aspects of the group,” Graham explains, “there were also going to be some unflattering memories and messages that I was going to be sharing.”

While some may pick up the book simply to thumb through its index to check for the inclusion of their family or organization, others may find themselves dizzied by the insider-ish lists of social and academic affiliations that follow so many of the attributions--resume/registry-style lists that make the book seem less like investigation or scholarship and more like a humid veranda crowded with gossip.

But Graham says it wasn’t the notion of expose or score-settling that sent him off on this journey. It was a conversation with the late multimillionaire Reginald Lewis, a high-powered businessman who ultimately acquired Beatrice Foods and became the wealthiest black man in America. Lewis was looking to provide his daughters--who were growing up in an all-white, all upper-class environment--with a culturally supportive and nurturing social circle.

Graham, who over the years had been mentored by Lewis, began telling him about organizations like Jack and Jill of America, founded in 1938, an invitation-only, nonprofit service organization that would provide a structured environment where his daughters could mix with black children and not lose sight of their identity. It wasn’t lost on Graham that someone as powerful and well-connected as Lewis was coming to him looking for advice. There was work to be done.

One of his goals was to broaden the minds of both whites and blacks, “the ones who really relied on the popular conceptions,” Graham says. “For most whites and most blacks, to be authentically black in America meant ‘Good Times’ and ‘Sanford and Son.’ If you didn’t fit that, either you weren’t ‘real’ or you weren’t really black. That’s what I was trying to address. This group didn’t just appear; they’ve been around since the turn of the century.”

*

A desire to augment history, broaden popular perception, celebrate long-hidden accomplishments--all noble aspirations, many would agree. However, it is another component of Graham’s glimpse that lingers.

Summer homes and cotillions, degrees and pedigrees aside, all this flashy show-and-tell begs that we ask: What is it that we are celebrating? When the narrative is peppered with quotes like “Maybe it sounds a bit pretentious, but I simply can’t waste time getting to know women who aren’t Links. . .” or “All these loud, dark-skinned kids coming over here for the day. They nearly destroyed Virginia Beach,” many readers may find it difficult to fathom why this would be anything anyone of any color would want to set on a pedestal.

This is especially true when a great many of these schools, clubs and businesses--these “family dynasties,” if you will--grew out of legislated segregation. And segregation is itself a branch of the tree of hierarchy.

“The big problems don’t get solved when people are being exclusionary,” says Cassandra Young, who attended the reading because she was moved by Graham’s first book, because she felt it “questioned and challenged boundaries.”

Though he says he was troubled by some of the revelations, Graham maintains that he “did not attempt to draw conclusions with this book. . . . It was more important to pick up the nuances.”

But some say it is those very “nuances” that scratch at old wounds yet to heal, that point up the need for a discussion that can clear a path toward resolution--about what the future for African Americans might bring to bear. There are those who feel that the units measuring success, progress, self-worth and community are more varied and inclusive than where one’s great-grandfather went to medical school, than with whom one made one’s debut.

“It has been, for a long time, a very troubling premise, to have criteria that are unclear and that many people are unable to meet,” said Jamesina E. Henderson, executive director of the California African-American Museum in Los Angeles, who also attended the Eso Won reading.

Henderson, a member of the Links and Jack and Jill, has watched the organizations’ attempts to change with the demographic realities of working mothers, single mothers and a changing urban environment.

“In our focus on the American dream, we can lose our ability to think,” she says. “If you’re not careful, you can be swallowed up in the dream, and then you end up the walking wounded. Exclusivity is repugnant to me. The thing that worries me is participating in anything that does not elevate the whole.

“I was spoon-fed: by the people, of the people but always for the people. How dare I contribute to the notion that there is any good that can come out of exclusivity? In a pluralistic society, the wealth has to be shared.”

It is here where Graham and his critics agree.

“There are clearly people in this group who are snobs,” he admits. “It’s no different from elite groups--whether you’re talking about the Jewish upper class or the WASP upper class or the Irish upper class. All of them distinguish between the old guard and the nouveau riche.”

But why continue to perpetuate and underscore difference? What drives this preoccupation?

“It’s human nature,” Graham replies. “Blacks are not different than any other groups. It’s not necessarily that they are excluding other people, just saying that ‘we have standards.’ ”

Lynell George can be reached by e-mail at lynell.george@latimes.com