Erinn Westbrook and the Changing Reality of Black life in America

 Erinn Westbrook is a successful, young, black actress, and her life shows us some of the ways that the position of black people in our society is changing. We need to change our ideas to keep up with the changes in our world, and we should be particularly careful to keep our stereotypes of black entertainers up to date.

The Old Reality

When I was a boy, successful black entertainers were always people who had risen from poverty through their immense talent and perseverance. Hattie McDaniel and Stepin Fetchit were condemned to play the roles of servants or comic negroes throughout their careers in Hollywood. August Wilson’s play “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” shows us just how high the barriers to success were in that period. In the next generation, Lena Horne, Billie Holiday, Sidney Poitier, Louis Armstrong and others were able by the sheer force of their talent and will to weaken the barriers of racial prejudice and discrimination, and they opened the way for the black actors and musicians of our time.

The New Complexity

Today, while the barriers of racism still exist, some black people grow up in very privileged families. I recently saw an example in the Hallmark movie “Advice to Love By.” The female lead in the movie is Erinn Westbrook, and her life is illustrative of the fact that today, black people may come from a much broader range of backgrounds than in the past.

Erinn Westbrook was born in a wealthy family on Long Island and later moved to Missouri, where she lived in a community called “Town and Country”(!). She attended John Burroughs School, a private, college preparatory school and, like all of her siblings, graduated from Harvard University. Her father was the president and CEO of KRW Advisors, a consulting firm based in Tacoma, Washington. From 1997 to 2006, he was president and CEO of Millennium Digital Media, LLC, a cable and telecommunications company he co-founded.

Where Do We Go from Here?

Erinn Westbrook is not typical of black people in the United States today, but when I was born more than 80 years ago, she could not have existed at all. Her story cannot be taken to mean that institutional racism is a thing of the past, but the social context of racism today is different from what it was in the past, and we must understand the new context if we are to make further progress. We have to figure out how to make sense of a world in which on the one hand, the police can shoot black people with impunity, and on the other hand, some black people are born into the highest levels of our society. How can it be that a country that has produced Erinn Westbrook has also produced the mass incarceration of black people? Where do we go from here, and how do we get there?

Equality and Equity

 Equality Before the Law

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights ….” These inspirational words, written by Thomas Jefferson, are among the basic principles of our society and our laws, but what did they mean when they were written, and why do we now worry not only about equality but also about equity?

When Jefferson wrote these words, he was referring to equality before the law. He lived in a time when all people were not equal before the English law. Members of the English aristocracy had rights and privileges that ordinary people did not have. They were hereditary members of Parliament, and they controlled the country and its laws. They used their privileges to protect their ownership of most of the wealth of the country.  They claimed that this situation was right and just because it was divinely ordained. People said, “The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate, God made them high and lowly and ordered their estate.”

Jefferson declared that this kind of inequality was wrong. It was contrary to the laws of “Nature and Nature’s God.” In America, he said, everyone would be equal before the law.  Unfortunately, this lofty principle was not applied consistently. In Jefferson’s time, black people were not equal, and neither were women or Native Americans. Those inequalities had consequences that have reverberated throughout our history, which has been marked by continual struggles to obtain legal equality.

Equality of Opportunity

The struggle for legal equality has been and continues to be important to us because it is a condition of equality of opportunity, which is an important American value.  We believe that all people should have equal opportunities to prosper in life. Moreover, for us, equality of opportunity justifies the inequality of wealth that is an obvious feature of our society. It is acceptable to us that some people should be rich and others poor if we all have the same opportunity be rich, and we know that equality of opportunity requires at least legal equality.

Equity

Unfortunately, legal equality by itself cannot really guarantee equality of opportunity because people are born into unequal circumstances. Some people are born to wealth, and others are not. Some people face barriers created by both historical and contemporary racial discrimination while others do not.

For example, it has been well-documented that on average, black families in the United States have only about one eighth of the wealth of white families. This means that on average, black children face a harder struggle than white children to obtain professional or technical training. To overcome this handicap, black people end up carrying a heavier burden of student debt than white people do on average, and that burden becomes a drag on their economic prospects throughout their lives. Thus, the race for economic prosperity is not really fair, or as we now say, it is not equitable. That is why we worry today about equity as well as equality.

Equity and Real Equality of Opportunity

If we want our country to be one in which all people really have equality of opportunity, we must address the sources of inequity in our society. As far as we can, we must remove the practical, non-legal barriers that deny equality of opportunity to millions of people. We will never eliminate all of the inequalities of wealth or race but we can make them less important than they are today.

For example, we could make post-secondary education free for all students so that people who have not been born into wealth would not have to take on heavy debts to earn technical or professional certifications.  We could provide affordable child-care so that families who are poor would not need to impoverish themselves still further to provide for their children. We could develop a decent, national health care system so that no one needs to avoid taking her children to the doctor when they are sick.

These kinds of services – education, child care, health care – would not be charity. They would help people to help themselves. They would increase the equity of our society, and they would move us a little closer to real equality of opportunity.