The Politically Homeless House of Umoja
Tags: Ibram Kendi, Henry James Saloon, Roxborough, Strawberry Mansion, John McWhorter, Indianapolis, William Julius Wilson, Ralph Ellison, Mad Men, Tom Waits, Caroline Polachek, David Foster Wallace
Foreword. I recently wrote for Philadelphia Weekly about the House of Umoja, a legendary Philadelphia anti-violence organization, and how it defies the logic of Ibram X. Kendi’s antiracism. With the group’s proven track record of success, the point of the piece was to raise the question: amid an historic surge in homicides, are we more committed to Being Antiracists, or to finding solutions that stop the bleeding, regardless of how they correspond to the airy abstractions of our culture wars?
Here, I’m again writing about the House of Umoja (eventually, I swear, if you stick with me for long enough, through a bajillion words of anecdote, criticism, and pop culture references). But this time I’m flipping the script: instead of analyzing how the group clashes Kendi’s antiracism, this piece puts it in dialogue with conventional conservative ideas. What I hope to show is that one of the most successful anti-violence organizations in Philadelphia history is at odds with prominent modes of thought on both left and right today. Let’s see what we can learn by studying the space between the House of Umoja’s success and the commonplace prescriptions of contemporary politics.
Spoiler Alert: Not sure if there’s a statute of limitations on these things, but if you’ve never seen Mad Men, proceed with caution.
Prologue. On the Sunday after Christmas, I ate dinner at Henry James Saloon in Roxborough. I walked in around 7:30 – the Chiefs-Steelers game was on the TV, but the three people inside were too busy talking among each other to pay it any mind. There was a woman in her early fifties sitting at one end of the bar, a man in his late thirties at the other end, and the bartender, early forties, was standing in between. I picked a barstool near the center, ordered a burger, and asked the bartender for an Irish whiskey recommendation. He poured me a glass of Powers. By the time I took my first sip, the woman’s husband was returning from the bathroom. He walked by and patted me on the shoulder: “hey, how’re you doing, buddy? Have a good Christmas?”
He began filling me in. His name was Scott, his wife’s Aileen, and the bartender’s Brian. I didn’t catch the other man’s name and Scott didn’t know it – but everyone there aside from me knew Brian, had known him for as long as they could remember. They all grew up Irish Catholic in Roxborough, and they spent much of the evening reminiscing. They recalled friends who became cops that bragged about beating the pulp out of people, and high school athletes they came up with who ran from cops like that. They talked about kids from the old neighborhood and where they ended up — stories that involved gambling debts, drug addictions, single motherhood, mental health, fist fights, “tough” Irish Catholic parenting, getting jumped, witnessing robberies, coaching basketball, lifting weights, bartending, raising kids, hiring nephews, friends and brothers dying young. Lulls in remembrance were filled with fantasy football, favorite TV shows, shitting on the 76ers.
Once, the nameless man at the other end of the bar launched into a monologue:
My dad’s 75 and I’m still waiting on the day I can kick his ass no contest. Right now, I think he could still beat me. It’d at least be a tough fight. Maybe in another 10 years. He’ll be 85, and I’ll finally be able to pay him back for how he raised me.
Scott told about a friend who, after a night out with his girlfriend, was being followed by a group of “three black guys.” The friend was “5-foot-1 and 110 pounds soaking wet,” but he had a big mouth and he used it to confront his followers, who proceeded to pummel him without breaking a sweat. After Scott and Brian teased each other for not being much taller than 5-foot-1 themselves, the nameless man chimed in about how Brian is still strong as an ox, and how he has “the same Irish nose as every bully who ever roughed me up.” Brian remembered a kid in his high school class who had freckles the size of nickels.
They were politely judgmental about half the people they talked about. They’d express their judgments somewhat delicately — “so and so could be a selfish guy” or “what’s his name never was the best worker” — and then their Catholic guilt would get the best of them, and they’d say something like: “good guy though, I mean, everyone has their flaws, we’re all humans… that’s just how life goes, you’re not gonna like everyone, but you gotta find a way to get along with them.”
At some point, amid all this, Scott tapped me on the arm, pointed at my empty glass, and told me to “have another, get involved in the conversation, have a good time.” I had another Powers, but I mostly just listened to them talk. When I was about ready to go, I asked Brian for the check, but Scott was having none of it: “nah, come on. Hang out a while, next one’s on me.” Brian served me a pint of Yuengling, and I stuck around. When I drained the pint, Scott was ready to buy me another, but Aileen elbowed him and gave him an earful about how he doesn’t always need to pay for everything, etc., etc. So, he waited for her to go to the bathroom, and then he looked at me and said:
Fuck her. If I want to buy you a beer, and I can afford to buy you a beer, then I’ll buy you a goddamn beer. Hey, BRIAN! Get him another Yuengling, and don’t tell Aileen I’m paying for it.
Then, before Aileen got back, he had Brian splash another shot of Captain Morgan into his drink so that he could get a little extra drunk on the sly.
I’d never met any of these people in my life; they’d known each other all their lives. I was quiet and respectful, shared a laugh with Scott and Brian here and there, but mostly just kept to myself because I knew I was out of place. These were working class folks who had rough upbringings. Brian, a husband and father, spends fall, winter, and spring coaching high school sports and bartending; in the summers, he bartends in Philly during the week and down the shore on the weekends.
Scott told us about a nephew who couldn’t seem to stay employed, who even managed to screw up a job working as a “tomato crusher” — literally, the kid’s only responsibility was to take tomatoes and put them in a crusher, which he did indiscriminately, including the “black tomatoes” that he claims not to have known were rotten. This nephew had recently gotten himself a new gig, which Aileen was criticizing for being undignified, but Scott spoke up in his defense:
Hey, work is work. We work a lot, and it’s the only thing that keeps us from being bums. So, it’s good that he’s working, no matter what it is.
I couldn’t have grown up much differently than them, couldn’t be living much differently now at 24 than they did at my age. Of course, Scott didn’t know that. But he also didn’t ask — just bought me a beer and tried to help me have a good time. And when he did so, he was welcoming me into what seems, to an outsider, like the prototype of a healthy working-class community. Rough around the edges, to be sure, but decent at heart.
John McWhorter and Self-Reliant Old Black Indianapolis. Perhaps you’re wondering why the hell I just spat out 1,000 words at you about a blue-collar bar in Roxborough. Well… on Sunday afternoon I finished my Philadelphia Weekly article, but I was feeling like the House of Umoja warranted a more balanced treatment, so I had the idea of writing this piece. Then I ate dinner at Henry James Saloon, and on Monday morning I started reading some conservative articles in preparation for the piece. As I read, I came to realize that the folks at Henry James had something to say about the core question I wanted to confront. That question, framed locally, is: why is Roxborough more or less a healthy working-class community, whereas Strawberry Mansion is not?
Keep that question in mind, and bear with me as I take us on a detour through twentieth century Indianapolis.
***
For decades, John McWhorter has been a leading black intellectual, prized in conservative circles for being a vocal proponent of the view that culture explains the high rates of poverty and violence that have persisted in black inner-city neighborhoods since the late 1960s. Or, at least, that culture is a better explanation for this persistence than is joblessness or racism. In the pages of conservative urban policy magazine City Journal in 2002, McWhorter defended his position at length, using the history of Indianapolis in the twentieth century as a case study.
He opens by lamenting the “dysfunctional inner-city culture—a culture of violence, illegitimacy, substance abuse, and non-work—that took root in Indianapolis” beginning in the late 1960s. “How,” he asks the reader, “had a segment of Indianapolis’s black community gone so wrong?” He spends the rest of his 3,858 words using the city’s history to argue against the economic and social explanations offered by left-leaning scholars like William Julius Wilson, and to argue for his cultural explanation. “[The] self-destructive behavior of today’s black underclass” was not caused by “an economically unjust and institutionally racist society,” but by a “destructive cultural mix: equal measures of the blame game and the formulaic rage that goes along with it,” plus “the welfare dependency that a sense of black grievance fostered.”
McWhorter paints a portrait of the “self-reliant old black Indianapolis” that existed before the community succumbed to this destructive cultural mix:
Civil society flourished… [b]ranches of the National Association of Colored Women, the National Negro Business League, and various lodges thrived; churches were ubiquitous. Indiana Avenue played host to a crackling-hot music scene. Old black Indianapolis also enjoyed four lively African-American newspapers… Reflecting its hardworking, striving spirit, old black Indianapolis hungered for education.
A thriving community of active citizens who shared a strong work ethic that was rooted in a common morality shaped by the church. The “demoralized and dependent lifestyle” that’s predominant in Indianapolis’s black communities today “would have shocked the residents of old black Indianapolis.” Back then, “self-respecting people worked to support themselves, however low their wages. [They] sought charity only under truly pressing circumstances and generally sought immediate provisions in a pinch rather than open-ended support.” People who needed help could get it, but the general sense was that “it wasn’t right to become dependent on others’ charity.”
McWhorter has this idyllic-sounding society in mind when he opens his article by asking how things had gone so wrong for a segment of Indianapolis’s black community. And when he says that things went wrong, he means that “a new culture emerged of dependency and self-destructive hostility toward mainstream culture,” and that this new culture caused “the descent of a previously dignified people into a violent, feckless underclass.”
McWhorter’s article is good and his central argument is solid. But he pulls a little rhetorical trick at the very end of the piece to help make his account more palatable:
We have a choice, then, between two factors that might explain the descent of a previously dignified people into a violent, feckless underclass. Choice one: a new culture emerged of dependency and self-destructive hostility toward mainstream culture. Choice two: it got a little harder to get to work. A black history that endorses the second choice while dismissing the first substitutes playing the underdog for common sense.
Peering back at the complicated century-long rise and fall of an urban community, McWhorter wants his reader not only to accept his version of the story, but to believe that it’s one of only two conceivable options: his, or his uncharitable interpretation of the left-leaning version. Such dichotomies always reek of snake oil to me. And, besides, even if we did accept McWhorter’s account… is our curiosity really satisfied? He’s told us that “a new culture emerged.” But how?
By the late sixties, at the very moment that blacks were winning political victories ensuring their civil rights, this enterprising, hardworking community was rapidly coming undone… By 1973, central Indianapolis’s black neighborhoods were so threatening that special escorts now ushered black kids to and from school… Out of the shadows crawled black “leaders” whom the old black Indianapolis would have run out of town in a week… Fred Crawford, a Black Panther from Oakland, set up shop in Indianapolis, spouting regulation Panther rhetoric: “I don’t feel we can gain our freedom without a revolution. This could only happen if the white man raised his fist off the black man’s neck, but I don’t think he’ll ever do that.”
“[In] the new black Indianapolis,” leaders like Crawford “seemed to outweigh” the virtuous, hardworking leaders of old. “[B]lacks in Indianapolis in 1950…would be staggered to see what had befallen their community” by the 1960s, when:
[T]he black street began to embrace the entitlement-seeking, guilt-mongering, society-is-to-blame worldview now so drearily familiar among black leaders. This resentment-based ideology has dissuaded legions of blacks from seeking the American Dream out of the wrongheaded belief that the country is too racist and morally corrupt for them to embrace it.
Okay. So… in a span of about 20 years, black communities in Indianapolis went from seeking the American dream, and embracing leaders who succeeded in pursuing it, to denouncing it as a pipedream peddled by racist gaslighters. McWhorter asserts that this occurred because “legions of blacks” had been dissuaded by a “resentment-based ideology.” And for him, that’s as deep as the analysis needs to go.
But his assertion is a far cry from an explanation. It’s an answer that begs another question: why did the resentment-mongering “leaders” of the late sixties win out over the American Dream-embracing leaders of old black Indianapolis?
***
Or, put another way… why is Roxborough a healthy working-class community, whereas Strawberry Mansion is not?
What is this freedom you love so well?
***
"Old woman, what is this freedom you love so well?" I asked around a corner of my mind.
She looked surprised, then thoughtful, then baffled. "I done forgot, son. It's all mixed up. First I think it's one thing, then I think it's another. It gits my head to spinning. I guess now it ain't nothing but knowing how to say what I got up in my head. But it's a hard job, son. Too much is done happen to me in too short a time. Hit's like I have a fever. Ever' time I starts to walk my head gits to swirling and I falls down. Or if it ain't that, it's the boys; they gits to laughing and wants to kill up the white folks. They's bitter, that's what they is . . ."
"But what about freedom?"
"Leave me 'lone, boy; my head aches!"
— Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
***
Not long after I started my freshman year of college, I was having a conversation in my dorm with two guys from across the hall — one who’s now my best friend, and one who’s not. In what I can most charitably interpret as an insincere, misguided effort to bond with some fellow Dudes, the one who’s not told us about his aspirations:
I just want to be rich and have a hot wife. Isn’t that the goal?
It was a bonding moment for me and the one who’s now my best friend. No, we agreed, that is not “the” goal. Sure, those things might be nice, but no, we don’t “just” want those things. And regardless of what you want in life… Christ, Dude, do you hear yourself?
Thing is, the Dude went to an expensive private catholic high school. He was a good soccer player, a great student, a good-looking guy — in sum, a shoo-in for realizing his aspirations. He was, in other words, a member of the rising elite. I don’t know where he is now, but I would guess he’s got a cushy chemical engineering job, or will have one after he becomes Dude, PhD. And good for him.
But I can’t help looking back on this little anecdote — not the actual person from the story, just the story about the person — as emblematic of an American elite that, lacking in restraint, is all but deplete of moral legitimacy. Choosing material comfort and earthly pleasure over moral consistency and foundational principles, the plush life over the good life, doing so in the ever-more-all-encompassing limelight from the 1960s right on down to the present day… leading by bad example, setting the pace for the public at large.
It’s a point that McWhorter briefly touches on:
The deindustrialization theorist would blame the rapid expansion of welfare on those same old vanishing manufacturing jobs. But in feminist Katherine Rosier’s 1990 study of women on welfare in Indianapolis, no welfare client speaks of “the factories moving away.” Rosier’s interview subjects readily admit that the downward trajectory of their lives began in the seventies with periods of drug abuse and sleeping around—behavior that elite culture had largely de-stigmatized. Culture matters.
But then he abandons the theme. Let’s pick it back up.
***
Since McWhorter pinpoints the 1960s as Indianapolis’s cultural inflection point, I’ll draw on a depiction of the moral decay of America’s elite during that time period — that is, on Mad Men. Here’s a scene set in 1960 in which Bert Cooper, co-owner of the advertising firm Sterling Cooper, hands Don Draper, his top ad man, a check worth ~$23,000, adjusted for inflation:
Bert, a member of New York elite society, praises Don for being “completely self-interested,” introduces him to Ayn Rand, starts to welcome him into the ranks. Here’s a later scene, set in 1962, in which Bert explains to Don that “philanthropy is the gateway to power,” and that “there are few people who get to decide what will happen in our world,” before instructing him to “pull back the curtain” and take his seat among them:
Of course, the next seat Don takes is in behind the steering wheel of a Cadillac, because Matthew Weiner, the show’s creator, is great at what he does. But what did Bert mean when he asked if Don would agree that Bert knows a little bit about him?
The “little bit” is the fact that Don’s name isn’t actually Don. It’s Dick. Beneath the surface of the broad-shouldered ad man is Dick Whitman, a scared kid from Southern Pennsylvania who went off to fight in the Korean War in a desperate attempt to escape his childhood hell-scape. It wasn’t long before he realized he’d run from one hell-scape into another, and then he accidentally got his commanding officer blown to pieces. He saw in the wreckage of the explosion a gleam — his officer’s dog tags, which had the name “Don Draper” pressed into them. In that gleam, young Dick Whitman saw another chance at a new life, and he took it.
Bert Cooper knows that his breadwinning creative director is a fraud because junior account man Peter Campbell, conniving little snake that he is, stumbled onto the reality lurking behind Don’s exterior and tried to blackmail him with it. Except, when he ran and told Bert about it, here’s what happened:
I assure you, there’s more profit in forgetting this.
Bert knows that Don is too valuable to discard. In what at first seems like an act of mercy toward Don, Bert has an ulterior motive, seen in action in the Season Two scene about philanthropy as the gateway to power. Don is even more valuable to Sterling Cooper once Bert knows about his past — now, the business benefits both from Don’s creative genius, and from Bert’s possession of more or less absolute power over him. When Bert wants to coerce Don into doing this or that, he uses this dirt against Don, because in the end, Bert is what he says he is: completely self-interested.
***
Mad Men depicts a particularly cut-throat corner of the world of American capitalism — a corner rife with unfettered selfishness in which the characters compete for money, power, status, and sexual gratification. And they do so while helping to birth the broader culture of American consumerism, a culture of material temptation and false fulfillment, the likes of which was being parodied by Tom Waits in 1976, only a few years after it had become evident that the Indianapolis of old was no more:
it gets rid of your gambling debts it quits smoking
it's a friend and it's a companion
and it's the only product you will ever need
…it finds you a job it is a job…
and you know it's a friend and it's a companion
and it gets rid of your traveler's checks
it's new it's improved it's old-fashioned
well it takes care of business never needs winding
never needs winding never needs winding
gets rid of blackheads the heartbreak of psoriasis
christ you don't know the meaning of heartbreak buddy…
it disinfects it sanitizes for your protection
it gives you an erection it wins the election
It’s easy to blame the Bert Coopers and Don Drapers of the world for creating this culture, but I say only “helping to birth” above because, as I see it, they’re as much symptoms of the culture as creators of it. The unrestrained pursuit of self-interest on Madison Avenue has a complex give-and-take relationship with unrestrained consumerism in the public at large — neither gave rise single-handedly to the other and they can’t exist apart from one another. A man can’t invent love to sell nylons unless there are consumers who’ll buy what he’s selling. Rachel Menken, Don’s main Season One mistress, is not one of those consumers:
The Don Drapers aren’t duping the sappy nylon-buyers into entering a shallow new world of materialism — they’re both suffering from, and exacerbating, a culture in spiritual crisis. The question is why they won out over the Rachels of the 1960s — just like the question for McWhorter is why the resentment-mongering revolutionaries won out over the leaders of old black Indianapolis.
***
Don has a brush up with death when Roger Sterling has a heart attack. He’s shaken by it and he knocks on Rachel’s door:
Focus in on how exactly Don seduces Rachel, or, at least, convinces her to submit to his advances:
D: “Jesus, Rachel. This is it. This is all there is. And I feel like it’s slipping through my fingers like a handful of sand. This is it. This is all there is.”
R: “See, that’s just an excuse for bad behavior.”
D: “You don’t really believe that.”
She seems to give in. They’re kissing. Don pulls back:
D: “No. Not unless you tell me you want this.”
R: “…yes please.”
And the music is somber as Don carries on, because no one — not Don, not Rachel, not the viewer — no one believes Rachel really wants this. Part of her does, but more of her — the part that sees right through Don, the part that really does believe Don’s nihilism is just an excuse for bad behavior, the part that doesn’t believe that this is all there is — more of her doesn’t want this at all. And Rachel’s better nature wins out in the end, in Episode 12, when Don comes to her office, asking her to run away with him so he can escape his demons:
D: “What is the difference? We’ll go somewhere else, we’ll start over, like Adam and Eve.”
R: “What are you, 15 years old? … My father… can’t we be together here?”
D: “There’s nothing here.”
R: “What about your children?”
What, exactly, are the “demons” that Don wanted to run away from? What was Dick Whitman running from when he switched dog tags with the still-warm body of his commanding officer? Where did he end up when he became Don Draper?
R: “What kind of man are you? Go away, drop everything, leave your life?”
D: “People do it every day.”
R: “This was a dalliance. A cheap affair.”
D: “Rachel, don’t.”
R: “You don’t want to run away with me. You just want to run away. You’re a coward… Please go now. Get out.”
As Rachel says, Don was try to run from, quite simply, his life.
But what was his life?
***
I went to a Caroline Polachek concert recently. In her song “Parachute,” she describes a nightmare in which she, like Don Draper in Season One of Mad Men, has a brush up with death:
Except her brush up affected her quite differently than Don’s did him. As part of a monologue introducing this song during the concert, Caroline told us how, after making peace with her imminent death in the dream, a sudden shift in the wind pulled her parachute back over solid ground, where she landed in a “banal wasteland of suburbia.” There, standing “on a tiny patch of grass between a strip mall and a soccer field,” she thought to herself:
I’m so happy to be here in this world. I’m so happy to be alive.
The space between Caroline Polachek’s gratitude and Don Draper’s debauchery harbors a lesson about the life that Don was running from. The banal wasteland of suburbia that Caroline describes – the strip malls, highways, and soccer fields – that image has roots in the mid-twentieth century world that Don inhabits. His life with his wife, Betty, is a stereotypical suburban variation on the American dream. Dad works in the city and comes home to the suburbs where his beautiful housewife is waiting for him with dinner on the table. She spends all day raising the kids and keeping the home. Birthday parties, a playset, a golden retriever, all framed by a white picket fence. Of course, for Don, this suburban life is built upon a lie – Don isn’t even his real name. But when he goes to Rachel and tries to get her to run away with him, he’s only partly running from the consequences of this deception. More so, Don is running from something simpler: the banality of the world into which he escaped from the smoldering ruins of a military base in Korea.
His old life was tough, to say the least. He was an illegitimate child and his birth caused the death of his mother, who was a prostitute. Before she died, she named him Dick, because she had told his father that if he got her pregnant, she would cut his dick off. He was still a young boy when he saw the man who raised him die of a horse kick to the face. As a teenager he was sexually preyed upon by a prostitute who worked for his new stand-in father. He got beat like hell, did hard work on a farm from a young age, came up during the great depression. It’s easy enough to understand why he wanted to run away from all this. And yet, those pesky questions posed by Rachel — “what about your kids?” — are still applicable to his escape from this life; Don didn’t just leave behind his own misery, he also abandoned his little brother.
Except Don couldn’t escape his past entirely. Eventually his little brother tracks him down, try to establish a connection, become part of his life again. Don can’t run the risk, so he tries to pay him to disappear — and disappear he does, but not in the way Don was hoping. He later learns that his little brother committed suicide not long after Don coldly turned him away with a wad of cash.
With a traumatic upbringing, the added trauma of his only living family member’s suicide, and his sense that he’s completely alone in all this because he can’t even tell his wife for fear of losing her, too… it’s no wonder Don is tempted to fill the void in his heart with alcohol, sex, money, prestige. The question is: why does he fail to overcome that temptation? Why, when Rachel looks him in the eye and asks him what kind of man he is, when she points out to him that he’d be inflicting the same trauma upon his own children that he suffered himself as a fatherless child… why, after she exposes his weakness for what it is and then denies him, does Don move on and succumb to the same old vices that led him to her door in the first place?
For one thing, as his father-in-law was fond of saying, Don “has no people.” Sure, he has Betty and the kids, but now, with his brother dead, there’s no one on the planet who really understands who he is (except Anna Draper, widow of his fallen commanding officer and now his dear friend, but she’s in California, and for obvious reasons she can’t be part of his life). With every tie to his former life severed, Don feels isolated, adrift. There’s no one who can really hold him accountable, help keep him grounded. He lacks a true emotional support system – no real friends, no real family. Only relationships built upon lies.
But there’s another reason. Don he expresses it when he knocks on Rachel’s door after Roger’s heart attack:
Jesus, Rachel. This is it. This is all there is.
Don is a nihilist. He, like Bert Cooper, has no real moral code — but Bert is a businessman, and Don is a romantic. Bert does whatever’s best for his business; Don does whatever’s best, moment to moment, for the void in his heart, damn the consequences.
When you have no deeply held moral code, and no family or friends to hold you accountable, it’s all too easy to succumb to vice. More to the point, it’s far too difficult to exercise restraint, a great deal of which is needed to cultivate and sustain a sense of gratitude for life in the mundane world of suburban America. The fact of the matter is that Caroline Polachek’s monologue, above all else, displays fortitude. She didn’t have to respond to the “banal wasteland of suburbia” as she did. She had the freedom to choose, and she chose gratitude.
Don thought he was running for freedom, but his conception of freedom was flawed. He should’ve read Ellison:
“Old woman, what is this freedom you love so well?”
“I done forgot, son. It's all mixed up. First I think it's one thing, then I think it's another. It gits my head to spinning… But it’s a hard job, son…”
If he had a time machine, he also could’ve read David Foster Wallace:
[T]he so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving…. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.”
To conceive of freedom as somewhere to escape to, some far off dreamland in which you’ll be free of the problems you’re faced with where you are, is to forget that no matter where you find yourself, the freedom available to you is ambiguous, often monotonous, and always difficult to make good use of. You can hop in a car thinking:
mister, anywhere you point this thing
It got to beat the hell out of the sting
Of going to bed with every dream that dies here every mornin'
But you just might find yourself being pulled from a wreck, every wishbone that you saved lying swindled from you
Just this side
Of Burma Shave
To look around at a “banal wasteland of suburbia” and make the choice to love it instead of running from it, to find a way to feel “happy to be here in this world,” to seek fulfillment in this life even when it requires you to sacrifice in “myriad petty, unsexy ways” – this requires strength, far more strength than it takes to leave it behind for Burma-Shave, where you vainly hope to “start over like Adam and Eve.”
And that strength, I think, comes from community, and from moral conviction — a conviction held not at the level of the intellect, but deeper than that, at the spirit-level.
Don Draper jeopardizes his suburban life — his membership in mainstream American culture — for a cheap affair, because a moment of intense sexual gratification is truly all there is for him. It’s what he lives for. On the other hand, somewhere deep in Caroline Polachek’s soul, she must harbor an inexplicable and inalienable conviction that there is something more, something to live for beyond the thrill of whatever vice happens to be enticing her. That same conviction gave Rachel the strength to speak truth to Don when he came knocking at her door, and to deny him. And I can’t help but feel that this conviction, and its absence, have something to do with the central questions I’m posing in this piece:
How did resentment-mongering revolutionaries crawl out of the shadows and conquer the leaders of old black Indianapolis?
Why is Roxborough a healthy working-class community, whereas Strawberry Mansion is not?
Black rage and hopelessness. I am not black. I don’t have many black people in my network of family and friends. So, I don’t know, nor do I even have much second-hand insight into, what it feels like to be black and American. I haven’t felt for myself the “rage and hopelessness” that John McWhorter says started to multiply in black inner-city communities in the 1960s.
All I have to rely on is art and imagination and empathy, and they lead me to the question: if bourgeois life in modern American looks banal to Caroline Polachek… how must it look to a young black male in an inner-city neighborhood, one whose ancestors were slaves, whose parents faced brutal discrimination during the Jim Crow era, whose father is in prison, whose mother is poor, whose one friend was killed in a gang-related conflict and whose other friend was assaulted by a police officer, whose uncle is addicted to crack cocaine, and whose neighborhood leaders preach Fred Crawford’s message, which assures him that right down to the present day, the suffering all around him is the fault of mainstream American culture? Against this backdrop of injustice and fragmentation and heartbreak, is entering that culture appealing? Is a young man’s highest aspiration to assimilate into the culture that seems to him, at least in part, responsible for his plight and that of his loved ones, and their ancestors? Or is rebellion against that culture perhaps a bit more enticing?
McWhorter is adamant that such rebellion is a vice, regardless of how it manifests itself, as violence or sloth or substance abuse. I’ve tried to show why Don Draper succumbs to vice and why Rachel Menken, and Caroline Polachek, have the strength to resist it. Is the lesson applicable here?
Don gave in to the temptations of money, prestige, sex, alcohol — but at the heart of his weakness, I see a rebellion against a humdrum suburban existence, a life he once saw as a paradise into which to escape from his traumatic childhood. That life was alluring but turned out to be mundane; the freedom of American capitalism is enticing, but freedom turns out to be a hard job. There’s no escaping your 9-5, or the grueling work of raising children, or the petty and unsexy sacrifices you must make to be a good person in a consumer culture — in any culture, really, but it’s a reality that feels especially jarring in a culture predicated on romantic notions like the “pursuit of happiness.” It’s cliché that the 1960s birthed America’s counterculture movement, but from Mad Men I take away the lesson that a subtler counterculture was forming simultaneously within America’s elite class — a quiet decay of moral integrity and a loss of restraint that led men like Don Draper to rebel against the mundane.
The culture that McWhorter describes, an inner-city culture of dependency and self-destructive hostility… is it perhaps a mistake to conceive of this culture as one clashing with mainstream American culture, rather than as a subculture that exists within the mainstream? If mainstream American culture, as Mad Men depicts it and David Foster Wallace describes it…
…[h]as harnessed [the forces of money and power… fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self] in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation...
…then, it seems to me that we live in a culture that lacks restraint, a culture too weak to fortify its members against the temptations of vice. So if, for McWhorter, inner city culture is a culture of vice, rooted in a resentment-ideology that “seduced” black communities… shouldn’t he be asking why those communities lacked the strength to resist it? And shouldn’t we be trying to understand the fall of Indianapolis as a subplot in the story of America’s fall, black-inner city communities being, not an exception to the general rule of material prosperity, but rather an acute embodiment of an all-pervasive spiritual crisis?
Remember the kid on my floor freshman year who said his goal was to be rich and have a hot wife? That was a kid who grew up in a wealthy suburb, raised by well-educated parents, blessed with natural intelligence that the adults in his life cultivated from the moment he was born. For him, the path of least resistance to a life of material luxury was an engineering degree. For a young black male in the inner-city, that path of least resistance might be to rise up the ladder of a drug trafficking ring. If the white kid from the wealthy suburb has to bribe a few admissions officers to get into a good school and secure a high salary after graduation, so be it. If the young black male in the inner city has to rough a few people up to get his money and stay in good favor with his higher ups, so be it. Variations on the same theme.
McWhorter asks why young black males so often behave this way, and his answer is: bad culture. The better question is: what would keep them from behaving this way? And my answer is, strong community ties that hold them accountable, or strong moral convictions with which to hold themselves accountable, or better yet, both. Strong communities and strong moral convictions aren’t just missing from black inner-city neighborhoods, they’re missing from America. It’s just that the absence manifests itself differently in different environments. Similarly, viable answers to the absence may be different in different environments.
Open as many doors for someone as you want, if the new life waiting for them on the other side isn’t appealing to them, they’re not going to walk through, no matter how virtuous the decision might be. Trying to put myself in the shoes of a young black male in an inner-city neighborhood, I can understand why the often-mundane life on offer in mainstream American culture might not be appealing — might, in fact, seem rather alienating. That life might seem alienating for a poor Irish Catholic kid in Roxborough, too — but, for a host of reasons articulated in the second paragraph of this section, I suspect that this alienation, and a temptation to rebel along with it, are often felt more acutely by young black males in Strawberry Mansion.
If so, then the answer to our central question is, at least in part, that, in Roxborough, community and morals have remained more intact because the temptation to abandon them is felt a little less intensely. In Strawberry Mansion, the temptation to abandon the lifestyle of old Indianapolis may be more powerful, McWhorter’s toxic culture of dependency and self-destructive hostility a more seductive snake when crawling out of the shadows of that particular Eden.
And if this answer has any truth to it, then, next, we ask: what is to be done?
The House of Umoja. Shortly after 2 A.M. on New Year’s Eve, at the corner of A street and Indiana — an intersection that frames the southwest corner of Hope Park in Kensington — the 560th person of 2021 was murdered in Philadelphia. Last year, the city came within one murder of its all-time record; this year, the record has been shattered. By 60. The public is afraid. Leaders are on edge. Hope is in short supply.
Critics have hammered Mayor Jim Kenney for being ineffectual; they’ve skewered District Attorney Larry Krasner for having a deranged agenda and a heart hardened to its human toll. Skepticism toward the administration’s funding of grassroots anti-violence groups is mounting — so are pleas for more effective policing and more aggressive prosecution. Philadelphia is growing nostalgic for the Democratic Party of a decade ago; former mayor Michael Nutter’s name has been in headline after headline.
And fair enough. A lot of blood is being spilled — most of it in poor, predominantly black neighborhoods. The city could use a short-term fix to slow the flow. That fix could conceivably come — indeed, might need to come — from the police department and the district attorney’s office. The murder count was much lower when Michael Nutter was in office, and he’s been pointing to his successes as a model for current city leadership to emulate.
But in 1960, the year when McWhorter’s cultural inflection point had just begun, and when Philadelphia had 500,000 more residents than it does today, there were only 150 murders. 144 the year after, then 124, then 125. In 1970, the City’s population dropped below two million for the first time since 1950, and its murder count jumped above 300 for the first time ever. In the 1960s, the average annual murder count was just over 188. Since 1970, the average has been nearly double that, at just over 365.
More effective policing and prosecuting might get us back down to, or even a bit below, the post-1970 average. But that average is still far higher than the city’s pre-1970 level, which was lower by half when the population was higher by a third. So, in the long term, Philadelphia could use something more than law enforcement. The city has a crisis of violence, and law enforcement can hope, at best, to keep the symptoms in check. What about the symptoms’ source?
***
Queen Mother Falaka Fattah has individually saved more lives of young men in this city than possibly any other person over the last 40 plus years.
So said then-Mayor Michael Nutter in 2011. She didn’t do it alone, but she founded, and for decades spearheaded, the most storied anti-violence initiative in Philadelphia history. As the city grew increasingly violent in the late sixties and early seventies, Falaka Fattah, a freelance journalist and public relations specialist, began to publish Umoja Magazine, which was dedicated to “examining the image of African Americans.” Then, readers started send in letters asking for explanations to the prevalence of violence among the city’s black youth. Fattah had her husband, who’d occasionally talked about his own “adventures” in the streets as a youth, do some investigating.
Her husband started to figure out that “the northward migration of African Americans from the South was creating neighborhood-based, familial-like factions influenced by a person’s southern origin.” In a 2020 article, Billy Penn related that:
“They were trying to get away from the terrorists, the KKK,” Fattah said. Once up north, they’d run into others from their home town — “that’s the origin of the word ‘homie,'” she said — and clique up.
These were useful insights. But one truth that he dug up was a jolt to their system: their 16-year-old son, Robin, was a gang member. This realization changed Fattah’s life:
I began to think about what I could do but didn’t know enough about it. I wanted to bring my son’s gang to live with us so I can get hands on [experience]. I asked my husband and of course he told me no and said I was out of my mind. But I kept bugging him and soon he just said, “I don’t care what you do. Just don’t talk about it.”
And that started the changeover from communications to dealing with young people.
So Fattah did exactly what her husband initially balked at. She opened their home to her son’s gang, and they quickly started to learn more about the scope of the gang problem in the city. Her son’s gang was actively warring with two other gangs, the three of them having a total of around 500 members.
Her husband came around. Based on what they’d learned, they hypothesized that “economic and emotional pressure led young boys to join gangs in search of a sense of family, and they created the House of Umoja as a blueprint to test this.” Since its creation, the House of Umoja “has successfully transformed more than 3,000 frightened, frustrated, and alienated young minority males into self-assured, competent, concerned, and productive citizens.” It’s done so through “reparenting and providing role models,” thereby offering “a sense of belonging, identity, and self-worth that was previously sought through gang membership.”
So far, the House of Umoja seems to be following McWhorter’s advice to a T. Take a culture of fear, frustration, and alienation, and replace it with the comfort of family, productivity, and civic involvement. But the story isn’t quite that simple.
***
When American conservatives talk about good culture, they tend to mean something like the “Judeo-Christian tradition,” or, for those less inclined toward religion, at least the “enlightenment values” that grew out of the “Judeo-Christian tradition.” McWhorter is a staunch atheist, so for him, good culture is adherence to the rule of law, an affinity for scientific rationalism, and the Protestant work ethic without the Protestantism. Whatever the specifics, “good culture” means something derived from the rich inheritance of “Western Civilization.” And when good culture is lacking, tough law enforcement should pick up the slack.
This is where things get complicated with the House of Umoja. Councilmember Curtis Jones has noted that the group “was based on an Afrocentric concept of self-worth.” It was designed to emulate Djenne, a city in Mali dating back to 250 B.C., in an effort to “capture the cultural ethos of West Africa right here in West Philadelphia.” And it “mimicked an African familial structure” — Fattah wore traditional African garb, group members spoke Swahili (Umoja is Swahili for unity), the adults taught youths the seven Kwanzaa principles.
Furthermore, Fattah told Philadelphia Neighborhoods that the group has had a complicated relationship with law enforcement:
It’s interesting. We’ve had times when they looked at us like we were the culprits. And there were times when they needed community input. We’ve played both roles.
She also recalls drawing the ire of city officials when she sent a group of youths to a polling station to register to vote:
We wanted the kids to understand how politics played a role in their lives. We organized the gangs to vote. We were going gang by gang. Dave took them down to register to vote, and the registrar guy totally got shook up.
I received a telephone call and all I hear is, “Your people are down there! Your people!”…
It was funny because they had a section where you’re supposed to put down your occupation and they were putting down “gang member.”
And it is a funny anecdote, but it’s also one that exposes an important limitation of conventional conservative calls for “good culture.” It’s one thing to have a cultural ideal in mind and believe that a community would be better off if it adhered to your ideal. It’s another thing to be on the ground in that community actually doing the substantive work of changing the culture. Black inner-city youths may or may not want what McWhorter is selling. But, at least briefly, in one little section of Philadelphia, many black youths did want what the House of Umoja was selling. And once the House of Umoja started to work its magic, suddenly city officials were faced with the prospect of former gang members trying to re-integrate into society.
One could argue that the re-integration would’ve been easier if the House of Umoja was transforming youths in the mold of western civilization, but they weren’t. And perhaps the group was so successful for precisely that reason. The group notes that they were dealing with “frightened, frustrated, and alienated young minority males.” McWhorter himself notes that such males were living in a culture of “hostility to mainstream American culture.” So maybe the House of Umoja was taking the most viable course of action available to it: meeting the youths where they were, accepting their alienation as a given, and offering a superior, but palatable, alternative.
The youths were thirsting for a sense of family and quenching that thirst by joining gangs; instead of seeking to deter gang membership, the House of Umoja sought to redirect the desire, channel it toward more productive ends. The youths were pissed off at mainstream American culture and venting that anger by rejecting its offerings; instead of wagging its finger at them, the House of Umoja again channeled this alienation toward more productive ends.
I’ve no interest in adjudicating the relative merits of mainstream American culture versus the Afrocentric model provided by the House of Umoja. The fact of the matter is that the House of Umoja’s methods were astonishingly successful:
David Fattah authored the peace pact, signed in 1974 by 400 gang members representing more than 30 groups. Eighty-five different gangs eventually signed on, Fattah once said. The impact was monumental.
“Gang-related deaths, which had been estimated to average 39 a year in the city, steadily declined,” a Times report on the pact noted. “In 1977, the number was one.”
Just as Don Draper could not leave his past behind and “start over like Adam and Eve,” neither can inner-city neighborhoods simply wish away the fragmentation from which they suffer, or the fear, frustration, and alienation felt so acutely by their youths. The House of Umoja proves it’s possible to accept those intractable realities for what they are and forge a better path forward. While Eden is always out of reach, the Fattahs did operate a peace garden, where they would bring rival boys to “bury their beefs.” And for a time, in the 1970s, when McWhorter’s resentment-mongering revolutionaries were crawling, snake-like, out of the shadows in old black Indianapolis, the House of Umoja helped young Philadelphians to resist the temptation.
***
The fragmentation of black inner-city neighborhoods seems only to have worsened since the heyday of the House of Umoja. Anti-violence activist Anton Moore expressed skepticism to Billy Penn about the possibility of the group seeing success today similar to that it saw during the 1970s:
The parents of today are much different from the parents of back then. Back then, the village raised the kids. Now, you can’t say something to their child without them getting nasty with you.
Former gang member Hakim Tendaji lamented the erosion of respect for community elders. Social media has exacerbated feelings of fear and alienation, and has altered the old dynamics of gang rivalries. So, if the House of Umoja, which is still in operation today, — or a would-be successor to Philadelphia’s throne of grassroots anti-violence activism — is going to help put an end to the city’s homicide crisis, then the methods of old will need to be adapted to the conditions of the 21st century. But one thing remains as true now as it was back then. As Mr. Tommy Joshua Caison, the Founder and Executive Director of Philly Peace Park, remarked in December 2021:
In order for the violence to stop, for the violence to cease, it’s not going to come from more money being spread around, it’s not going to come from more police being deployed. It’s not going to come from more punishment. It’s going to come from God, the master, working on our hearts…
Money can help, police and prosecutors can do damage control, but long-lasting, transformative change requires the healing of communities and the cultivation of moral conviction — changes that can be accomplished only at the spirit-level.
Epilogue. While I was sipping Irish whiskey at Henry James Saloon, Scott and Brian started talking about an old friend who was raised by a single mother. Somehow the subject of the father was broached. Scott immediately and viscerally protested:
This conversation is over. I was always told not to talk about the father; if I did, I’d be beat. There’s nothing good to say about him, anyway. And if he’s not here to defend himself, then I’m not going to say anything bad about him. You don’t do that. You just don’t.
Of course, plenty of people talk bad about others behind their backs all the time. They do it because it feels good to gossip. And, as far as I know, none of the bad mouthers have been struck down by thunderbolts of divine justice. When he was a kid, he refrained from bad-mouthing for fear of being beaten. But he’s grown now. And he’s not particularly pious — recall that his wife left her seat and within seconds he said “fuck her” and bought me a drink against her wishes.
He’s not scared. He might be vaguely Catholic, but he doesn’t seem devout. He can bad-mouth all he wants, and he knows it.
So why doesn’t he?