William Cross Jr., a psychologist, author, theorist and researcher, spoke to several hundred people at the University of Akron’s Black Male Symposium on Friday as part of its Black Male Summit event.
Cross, who resides in Denver, spoke on black identity and the challenges blacks face in everyday life. After his speech, he talked with students in smaller groups to further discuss the topic.
“Being born black doesn’t make you black, you have to work at your attitude. Blackness is an attitude. It requires work,” he told the larger crowd. “You have to absorb information. If you read, it doesn’t make you better, it makes you informed. You can’t be black if you don’t know your history.”
He said people who know their history are better at buffering than those who don’t know their history, so culture is just as important for protection as knowledge.
“You don’t become black in a day,” Cross said. “It takes nurturing.”
Cross, who earned his bachelor’s from the University of Denver, his master’s from Roosevelt University in Chicago and his doctorate in African-American studies at Princeton, said he dedicated his life to studying blackness. Cross said he’s met other black professors “who don’t give a damn,” but it doesn’t make him better than them, he said. It just means you can be highly educated, but totally irrelevant.
After his talk, Cross, 77, told a reporter that one of his biggest challenges in life was the color of his skin. He is fair complexioned. Darker-skinned blacks refuted his studies saying he couldn’t possibly fully understand the black experience because he was too light skinned, he said.
His book, Shade of Black, is considered a classic in the field of racial identity.
About 350 high school and college students and more than 100 educators and members of the community attended the symposium. Cross talked about being an individual and appreciating and developing your unique talents, whether it’s in sports, having a good sense of humor or keeping cool under pressure.
“There is no contradiction between individuality and blackness; they can come together. To say that you are an individual doesn’t mean that you believe in individualism; that’s a philosophical thing. Individuality is recognizing how each of us is unique. Individuality is critical,” he said.
Cross said blacks have to find a way to deal with internalized racism, which he described as a cancer if there’s no outlet. He said for him personally the fastest cure to reduce his radicalism was when he got married, had a child and got a mortgage. That’s when he had to depend on whites for a paycheck, explaining there are ways to cope.
He said so-called “code switching” is probably the most powerful tool a person can use for success.
“It’s an understanding,” he said. “When you realize you need a job and want to go to school and want to be successful you have to go from your community into the world of ‘how will I be seen by whites because I have performed at a high level,’ ” he said, because that is your goal … learning how to deal with the rules of the game and performing at a high level so that you end up being treated relatively fairly. It isn’t being phony, its code switching.
“You call it playing a game, but it’s not a game, it’s serious. It’s whether or not you pass in school. It’s whether or not you get the loan. It’s whether or not a doctor treats you with respect and helps you be cured. There is nothing anti black about being good at school.”
He said the question is, after you gain your individual skills what are you going to do with it. He said whites can also be allies.
Cross, whose father was a porter and his mother a maid, said he learned so much about people and his culture from all walks of life, including from his parents and the people they worked with and for, whether it was the shoe-shine man or his mother’s experience as a maid to white families.
He said the family was his mother’s therapy or sounding board when she came home from work.
Cross said there is a difference between assimilation and acculturation. Cultural assimilation is when a minority group gradually adapts to the customs and attitudes of the prevailing culture and the minority culture becomes almost indistinguishable from the majority culture. Acculturation is if enough of the cultural markers of language, tradition, and food from the minority culture are maintained for the members to be able to recognize themselves as a distinct culture adopting the culture of others.
In all his research, he told the crowd, he wished he could say that black people are more mentally healthy or identifying with a group makes you more powerful, but it does not.
“There is no difference in the mental health or in self-esteem in black people who are assimilated as compared to blacks who have some type of black identity, that is to say we have a choice,” he said. “We can develop a sense of group identity based on our own heritage or we can over identify ourselves as Americans … but people who work to develop a black identity learn to answer the call. Relevancy is a choice.”
He said when the black community is in trouble or under attack and needs someone to step forward, the person who is going to step forward is the person who has some degree of identification with the community, not the one who is assimilated.
Cross said that everyone needs to find meaning in their lives and leave their mark.
“Nurture yourself, love yourself and find beauty in what you like,” Cross said. “You only live once and that means you have one chance, one opportunity to make a difference.”
Marilyn Miller can be reached at 330-996-3098 or mmiller@thebeaconjournal.com.