A friend of mind mentioned a term I'd never heard of before. The "black elite" she called it, and I decided to do a little web-surfing to find out what it means.
What I found absolutely disgusted me.
Apparently this man, Lawrence Otis Graham can speak volumes about what the black elite is, and with good reason -- he is one of them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Otis_Graham
http://www.topix.com/afam/2008/01/the-black-elite-whos-in-whos-out-who-cares
And he wrote a book as well, entitiled: Our Kind of People: Inside America's Black Upper Class. One woman's reaction to this can be seen on this site:
http://www.salon.com/books/feature/1999/02/04feature.html
Some excerpts that particularly bothered me are found below.
Luckily, I meet Audrey Thorne, member of the greater New York chapter of the Links, a black women's organization profiled in the book... 'I think the book is wonderful because it has so much history, it's enlightened me to so many things I didn't know about. Race, slavery, it's enlightening to me.' She's friendly and looks me in the eye so happily I don't have the heart to ask how it comes to pass that a woman in her 70s needs to be enlightened about race or slavery.
Redhead tells a story about not wanting to take his dad, a working-class immigrant who supported him in becoming a doctor, to the famous Harlem bar the Red Rooster because "You split verbs and dangle modifiers." When his father asked his son why when he wanted to borrow money the way he talked didn't bother him, Redhead replied, "Because I'd rather say 'I is rich' than 'I am poor.'"
...WHAT?!?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment