Newspapers And Black Middle Class Hunker Down
By Erin Aubry Kaplan
Is broke the new poor? I certainly hope not.
But as the economy continues to spiral downward with the bottom of the well not quite in sight, I’m finally beginning to lose faith. Not in the likelihood of a rebound — that’ll happen at some point — but in my own status as a member of the black middle class.
I know that the black middle class has always been far more vulnerable than its white counterpart, for all kinds of reasons.
But I still assumed that my education level and work experience permanently guaranteed me work and a certain regard by peers and potential employers; being out of work only meant being between jobs or specialty gigs, not being at the mercy of economic forces that keep down that most unfortunate of classes, the black poor.
And there’s an almost spiritual component to my middle class-ness that goes way beyond money: It was my destiny, my responsibility. I was born in the early 60s, a member of the first black generation (i.e., the Obama generation) to cross the vast desert of segregation and Jim Crow into the promised land.
It was part of my job to never again suffer the indignities of poverty those practices had brought about for so many for so long. In other words, I had a duty to be successful and to stay that way.But ‘staying that way’ is proving to be a treacherous task. It doesn’t help that I work in a field that’s currently going through its own economic implosion, print journalism. Newspapers (including my hometown paper, the Los Angeles Times) are contracting faster than you can read them on a daily basis.
There are too many freelance writers and not enough publications offering decent pay. I know I’m not alone in scrambling for work, and I know that writers of color are very often at the back of the line (that happens for all of us, whatever our line of work, in hard times).
Yet none of that eases my fear of failing at being the new Negro I always assumed I was. None of it quells my anxiety about winding up black and poor and becoming one of those statistics that, the 1960s notwithstanding, has stretched unbroken across generations. Black people still have a desert, but I thought of myself as travelling a parallel road in a more temperate climate. I’m finding out there may be no such thing.
ERIN AUBRY KAPLAN, a contributing blogger with 3BAAS Media Group, is the first African American in history to be a weekly op-ed columnist for the Los Angeles Times. Her musings continue to appear in the Times, Essence magazine, and a host of other publications. Kaplan is currently working on her much anticipated book.