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Rather than welcoming blacks into the mainstream, some whites feel threatened by their arrival. They seem to believe that the good life -- the desirable neighborhood, the right school, the best country club -- is for whites only. Blacks in token numbers may be tolerated. But when their numbers exceed a so-called tipping point, many whites go on the defensive. A generation ago, the color bar was rigid and well defined: no blacks allowed. Now it has become a shifting barrier that can suddenly materialize, curtly reminding blacks that no matter how successful they may be, they remain in some ways second-class citizens. As black psychiatrist James P. Comer wrote in his family memoir, Maggie's American Dream, "Being black in America is often like playing your home games on the opponent's court."
Stanley Grayson is New York City's deputy mayor for finance and economic development. His wife Patricia is a vice president at National Medical Fellowships, an organization that promotes the education of minority students in medicine. Together they earn about $200,000 annually. But more than once while she was sorting clothes in the laundry room of the luxury apartment house in which they have lived for eight years, Patricia has been approached by white residents who have tried to hire her as a maid. Her husband has seen white residents close the elevator door in his face when he tried to board. Evidently they took the well-dressed 38-year-old Grayson, one of the highest- ranking officials in New York, for a mugger. "It makes me sizzle," he says, "because it means that no matter what I accomplish as an individual, I will always be judged by what people see first, my color."
Such affronts may seem insignificant to whites, but they are reshaping the racial agenda for the next decade and beyond. The problems of the urban black underclass -- unemployment, drugs, teenage pregnancy, hopeless schools -- are more urgent than ever. But for the black middle class, there are new preoccupations. Not just job-creation programs, but job promotions. Not just high school diplomas, but college tuition. Not just picket lines, but picket fences. An agenda, in short, for a full partnership in the American Dream.
Superficially, middle-class blacks already seem to be living that dream. Leon and Cora Brooks have spent more than a decade at IBM, where he is a dealer account manager and she is a senior personnel specialist. They have a comfortable home in the affluent and mostly black Los Angeles neighborhood of Baldwin Hills; they have a Mercedes in the garage and a daughter at California State University at Northridge. Leon Brooks jokes, "We're a typical white family that happens to be black."