Discoveries
Having It All?
Black Women and Success
Veronica Chambers
Doubleday: 224 pp., $23.95
“I’m supposedly not like other black girls,” writes Veronica Chambers, former culture writer for Newsweek, executive editor of Savoy magazine, author of “Mama’s Girl,” a memoir of growing up in Brooklyn and Los Angeles, “because: I’ve studied Russian, am bookish, have been snowboarding, traveled to Shanghai, Morocco, fill-in-the-blank .... But it’s never been more untrue that my experiences as a successful black woman are unique. I am like other black women. Lots of them.”
Chambers set out to interview 50 black women with “enough disposable income to live a middle-class lifestyle,” to find out what having it all meant to them. What are the cliches and obstacles they come up against, what kinds of sacrifices are they making? The results are fascinating. Forty-nine of the 50 spoke of returning to the church or the importance of a spiritual life. Many spoke of the drain of supporting relatives who needed money. Many are deciding to forgo salaries to stay home with children. Museum curators, producers, editors, company vice presidents all spoke about the difficulty of finding a man. Although black women are more financially successful than black men, there are still fewer black women than black men in the Fortune 500; the corporate world plays by gender rules. Most mentioned that the Clarence Thomas-Anita Faye Hill affair was a defining moment in which they realized that they were women first, black second. Chambers reports less baby panic: Although 49% of women in the United States earning more than $100,000 are childless, Chambers has found in her interviews that black women seem more comfortable than white women with that choice. She writes about the importance of the “black swans” like Lena Horne and Eartha Kitt, who were successful and gorgeous role models, as well as Clair Huxtable, the lawyer-wife character from “The Cosby Show.”
For many of them, going “home” means being with other black people; the world has not yet found a place for these women. “The young person who takes the stereotypes at face value,” Chambers warns, “can end up with a fine education, a good job and an unhealthy mixture of self-loathing and cultural schizophrenia.” Nonetheless, Chambers’ is an uplifting book, chock-full of role models. Real ones. Like Chambers herself.
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Young, Gifted, and Black: Promoting High Achievement Among African-American Students, Theresa Perry, Claude Steele and Asa Hilliard III, Beacon Press: 176 pp., $25
While the authors of the three essays in this thought-provoking volume disagree on many things, all agree that we must have a “better understanding of what it is we are asking African-American youth to do when we ask them to commit themselves, over time, to academic achievement in the context of the American school.” “Young, Gifted, and Black” is full of successful young black students who have gone on to exciting, fulfilling careers, but its authors are out to ask the more important question behind their stories: How can we make this the norm?
Although Asa Hilliard III expresses disdain for the phrases “achievement gap” and “intelligence gap,” he acknowledges that there is a gap between what black students are achieving and what they can achieve. Theresa Perry writes about how to construct “identities of achievement” and the importance of external review systems like the “multicultural assessment plan,” which grades schools on their support for students from all backgrounds. Claude Steele warns against the perils of “stereotype threat,” one sad result being that “pain is lessened by ceasing to identify with the part of life in which the pain occurs”; in other words, why bother? Steele cautions students as his father cautioned him: “[L]ighten up on the politics, get the best education you can, and move on.... To do this you have to learn from people who part of yourself tells you are difficult to trust.” Much of the book is in academese, but the solutions offered by each essay are creative, inspirational and good old common sense.