In George Orwell’s Animal Farm, farm animals overthrew the evil Mr. Jones and created a utopia where “all animals are equal.” However, the pigs, who led the uprising, gradually began acting more like the hated Jones. By the book’s end, the pigs had morphed into porcine Mr. Joneses and the farm into a place where “some animals are more equal than others.”
Orwell’s classic tale was an allegory about the 1917 Russian Revolution, but it was also aimed squarely at the very human tendency to create a pecking order based on perceived differences in status. Over the years, African-Americans, tired of fighting for social acceptance, have created their own groups in which they can feel comfortable. However, critics claim that some of these African-American groups have become as exclusive—some would say as discriminatory—as the white organizations that once spurned blacks.
One institution often singled out for excluding the “wrong” kind of black person is Jack and Jill, a social club for upper-crust African-American children. Jack and Jill was created in 1938 so that young African-Americans could “network with each other and meet each other,” as alumnus Lawrence Otis Graham, author of Our Kind of People, put it. Founder Marion Turner Stubbs Thomas said she wanted a “means of furthering an inherent natural desire … to bestow upon our children all the opportunities possible for a normal and graceful approach to a beautiful adulthood.”
When it comes to joining Jack and Jill, it is not who you know, but who knows you. Potential members must be sponsored by a current member. And not all who are called upon are chosen. In fact, not so many years ago, the biracial children of a well-known Minneapolis barrister were nearly rejected because their mother broke an unspoken taboo by having a white spouse. Even to this day, the local Minneapolis chapter doesn’t include any biracial families with a white mother as a member. When I asked a Jack and Jill member if my decidedly non-African-American wife would be welcome, she told me that she would support it, but she conceded that some of her sisters might be a tad lukewarm about bringing a white woman into the fold. And despite its billing as a family organization, this is a group run by women. (The role of men, who are relegated to an “auxiliary,” is made clear by their “under construction” page on Jack and Jill’s web site.)
However, Murvyn Baker Kelsey, the organization’s National Recording Secretary, claims that Jack and Jill is much more “receptive to today’s culture.” Yet even she concedes that old habits die hard. “We are not a racist organization,” she told me recently. “We just want to make sure that our children have contact with other quality black children. Class, more than race, is the dividing line.” Kelsey said that she had seen white moms at a Jack and Jill function once on the West Coast, though she could not tell me which chapter they belonged to.
She also asked plaintively, “You aren’t going to write something bad about us, are you? You sound like a professional, educated man. Don’t you want your sons around people that are going to uplift and support them?”
Indeed, I do. I have to admit that there are certain kinds of people with whom I do not want my sons to associate. My wife and I have candidly discussed whether we have the gumption to continue our Northside “urban adventure” once my youngest son starts school in three or four years. Like others, I do notice where people went to school. And I usually find some discreet way of asking my oldest sons about the parents of their new friends, what they do to put bread on the table.
Martin Luther King Jr. dreamt of an America where his four young children would be judged not by “the color of their skin but the content of their character.” However, his dream tacitly acknowledged that it was entirely appropriate to judge children, as long as it was for character using criteria that they could control (or perhaps more accurately, that their families could control).
Maybe Jack and Jill is just honest about what the upwardly mobile of all races have always secretly believed: People may be created equal, but when it comes to shaping your children’s character and hence, their future, some are more equal than others.
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