Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about my future. I’m only a sophomore, but I can already see myself as a Harvard alumnus. The prestige, the connections, the intellectual and personal growth—all of these will be fixed parts of my life. It’s no secret that having a Harvard degree has wonderful benefits.

But does this all even matter?

I’m still a black person in America. Sure, I can graduate from Harvard and have many opportunities opened up to me. However, whether or not my earnings will classify me as upper class, middle class, or lower class, I will still be a member of the dark class.

The recent apology for slavery given by the Virginia State Assembly is great evidence of the huge racial strides that have been made in this country. The unanimous measure, taken by the Assembly of a state that was once home to the capital of the Confederate South, is a symbolic gesture that highlights the attitude changes that have taken place over the past decades. While there still may be hostilities based on ideas of racial essentialism, this apology indicates that beliefs about the innate inferiority of black people have been on the decline. Yet, the disproportionate number of black people living in poverty and in crime-infested communities has caused black people to become the face of poverty in America. This face is often too ugly for others to bear, so what used to be pure racism against black people has morphed into a form of classism.

Though the days have passed when black people were legally considered three-fifths of a person, prejudice is far from absent in contemporary society. Though black people may not be enslaved or living under the suffocating pressure of Jim Crow, we are still gasping for air under the weight of the legacy of systematic injustice in this country. The gloomy economic state of many black communities across the country is one of the most indicative illustrations of this fact.

It is in response to the dismal economic conditions of the black community to which Americans have turned their spite. America—for all of its grand ideals such as social equality, class mobility, and equal opportunity—has labeled a whole race of people as second-class citizens.

This dark class is discriminated against because it represents the poor part of America. The poor isn’t a group that we are too fond of in our society. The poor steal. They kill. They do drugs. They drop out of school. They end up in prison.

Is this not what people think of black people?

No matter how successful a black person is, he is still liable to fall into this conception of blackness. This is true even for successful actors like Danny Glover, who once complained publicly about being ignored by cabs in New York because of his race. He was probably not passed up by cabs because they thought that he was undeserving of a cab ride or that he was incapable of the cab ride because of his black skin. Rather, they likely ignored him because they assumed that he would probably be poor, and were wary of all the negative attributes that poverty often implies.

Why did they assume this trait of poverty? Because he was black. They saw him as a member of the dark class, and they didn’t want one of those.

Just as the racist declaration of black inferiority had a profoundly negative impact on how black people viewed themselves and their own humanity, the classist discrimination against black people has had a damaging impact on the psyche of black Americans today. In conversations about what it means to be “authentically” black, people often reference one’s connection to the ghetto. In other situations, someone’s economic background may be checked—the poorer you are, the more legitimately black you are.

This is ridiculous. There is no single type of black person in America, and it is crippling for us to label the black experience as an impoverished experience. Although black people may disproportionately occupy prison space and reside in poor communities, it is simply immoral and inexcusable to associate an entire race with the negative stereotypes of a single class. There are many black professionals, community leaders, and role models that provide alternative images to this negative view of black people.

Even if there are a large number of poor black people, poor people deserve just as much respect as everybody else. Residents of poor communities are not all the same, and they do not all adhere to the negative stereotypes associated with them. None of us are so perfect that we have the authority to belittle other people just because of their economic status. Instead of labeling and looking down upon an entire community, we should be working to counteract many of the systematic injustices still present in our society that affect the wealth of black communities. Unless people cease to judge others by their skin color and supposed economic background, the great American dream of social equality between all classes and all people will never be reached.



Lumumba Seegars ’09 is a social studies concentrator in Dunster House. His column appears on alternate Fridays.