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Pulitzer Prize-winning writer charts diversity within the black community

> Written by Micki Carter
> June 28, 2009

"Now that we have a black president, are we done with this diversity thing?"

This question, posed by Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Eugene
Robinson at the Saturday morning keynote address for General Synod 27,
forms the central thesis of his current book-in-progress. The
Washington Post writer and MSNBC commentator provided his own answer.

"Diversity is not a destination, it's a journey? If you stop pushing,
if you stop trying, you backslide," he said. "The problem is, the
target keeps moving... The black community is very different from what
most people think it is. My book is about the diversity within the
black community."

Robinson is better poised than most to discuss this issue. "I was born
in 1954, and my early years were spent during the last throes of Jim
Crow in the South...

"I was in high school in 1968 when an incident known as the Orangeburg
Massacre occurred?

"My house was right across the street from the campus. I have this
vivid memory of waking up and looking out the window. I saw patrol
cars and officers with rifles. That afternoon three black students
were killed, all shot in the back or in the soles of their feet.

"Fast forward to election night 2008, and I'm with my dysfunctional
MSNBC family?We'd seen the exit polls, and we got word that at 11 p.m.
the network was going to call the election for Obama. I was able to
call my parents who still live in that house in Orangeburg and tell
them they had lived to see the election of the first black president.

"It's all the more poignant in that my father died on Jan. 2 ? but he
didn't get cheated."

Robinson stressed that there is no monolithic African-American
community. It is as diverse within as the country is as a whole.

"There was a time, 1968, when there were certain generalizations,
Black America was poorer or less well educated than white America...
Today there is a majority of African-Americans who are virtually
indistinguishable from most Americans. This group is basically Canada!"

He also found a group that didn't exist in 1968. "People like Oprah
Winfrey. They're not just prominent but at the very, very top in terms
of the powers they are able to wield. The idea that the most powerful
woman in television is a black woman. That's new!"

The furor that arose over the comments of Supreme Court nominee Sonia
Sotomayor drew Robinson's attention. "Her critics made an assumption
without knowing it. They assumed that someone like (Chief Justice)
John Roberts is not affected by his past, that there's some kind of
neutral base line (white male) which is just how things are.

"But that white male screen is not transparent.

"While we're looking at Affirmative Action, let's look at the policies
that allowed George W. Bush to get into Yale with a C average as a
legacy admission. Why don't we call legacy admissions Affirmative
Action... Let's just recognize that the white male filter is not
neutral; it's just a screen through which they see the world," just
like Sotomayor's