By any standard, Jarobin Gilbert is a success. A Harvard-educated linguist with degrees in international law and finance, he commands a handsome salary as a globe-trotting NBC vice president who negotiated the broadcast rights to the 1988 Olympic Games. But every so often, Gilbert is rudely reminded that for people like him, there are still some things success cannot provide -- simple things, like a taxicab. Late leaving for the airport to catch an important business flight, Gilbert stood on a busy avenue futilely hailing cab after speeding cab. Finally he phoned his secretary for assistance. She got one on her first attempt. Gilbert's secretary is white. He is black. "It's pretty hard to feel like you're mainstream," he says with a sigh, "when you're wearing $2,000 worth of clothes and you can't catch a cab at night."
It has been a revolution without much fanfare, but a revolution nonetheless. While the nation's attention focused on the plight of the urban underclass, millions of black Americans marched quietly into the mainstream, creating a vibrant middle class with incomes, educations and life-styles rivaling those of its white counterpart. For them, the passions and suffering of the civil rights struggle have culminated, as they were meant to, in the mundane pleasures and pangs of middle-class life. Theirs is the infrequently told success story of American race relations.
Statistics tell some of that story. The past decade has seen a 52% increase in the number of black managers, professionals, technicians and government officials. The gap between black and white median income is wider now than it was in the late 1970s -- largely because blacks did not recover from the last recession as completely as whites did. Still, roughly one-third of all black households have solidly middle-class incomes of $35,000 or more, compared with about 70% of all white households. Blacks manage the department stores that once rejected their patronage. They make decisions at corporations where once they worked only on assembly lines. They preside as mayors of cities and represent congressional districts where they were formerly denied the right to vote. They live in exclusive suburbs that once excluded them and send their children to leading schools and universities that once blackballed them.
But for all its undeniable progress, the black middle class still seems more to be poised on the banks of the mainstream than to be swimming in its current. Its members are haunted by a feeling of alienation from the white majority with which they have so much in common, a sense that somehow they still do not quite fit in. They speak again and again of "living in two worlds." In one they are judged by their credentials and capabilities. In the other, race still comes first.
Around the turn of the century, W.E.B. DuBois described the "twoness" felt by blacks, forced by segregation to see themselves both from the inside and from without, as they might appear to a hostile white world. Today the white world is less hostile. But achievement and a limited degree of acceptance have failed to remove all traces of ambiguity from the lives of the black middle class.