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?