The last half-century has witnessed a massive relocation of African Americans away from farms, plantations, towns and cities in the South towards a more national and urbanized existence associated with factories, assembly-lines, service jobs, professional work and unemployment all within the context of burgeoning globalization. This structural shift has shaped the cultural experiences of African American people.

Mass migration, together with the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, and affirmative action policies, has wrought a unique degree of social differentiation among black Americans. One consequence has been the expansion of an African American middle class, with an estimated one-sixth of black families earning over $50,000 annually by the early 1990s. The influence of this new class is evident through the prominent placement of individuals like President Clinton’s former advisor Vernon Jordan, former Joint-Chief-of-Staff Colin Powell and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. It is also clear from the emergence of groups like the congressional Black Caucus and university academics whose political and intellectual influences are unprecedented. With this black middle class have come passionate arguments among black intellectuals about the manner in which to respond to the increasing social bifurcation of African American life. Struggles against slavery and second-class citizenship have historically united black people. Over the last generation, however, civic incorporation together with middle-classness has riven this traditional solidarity.

Meanwhile, poorer African Americans have been buffeted by global capitalism and by economic deprivation in inner cities. According to the 1991 federal census, over 30 percent of black families live below the poverty line. It has been estimated that more than 10 million African Americans are confined to fourteen cities with segregated black populations of at least 200,000, which denotes residential apartheid. For instance, there are fourteen job applicants for every available job in the fast-food industry in central Harlem because of the increasing globalization of the US economy. Perhaps the most striking feature of this postwar globalization is the degree to which the conditions of poor blacks resemble those of the poor world rather than those of the richest nation in history.

Economist Amartya Sen points out that African Americans are richer than Chinese citizens and South Indian peasants, but have lower life expectancies than these people.

The infant mortality rate in Washington, DC is 15 per 1000 babies born (1996) compared with 11 in Barbados, 10 in Jamaica and 7 in Cuba (1997). Rather than famine, poverty in the US causes poor diets, with higher rates of obesity and heart attacks.

Perverse representations in the dominant culture can be found in fast-food advertisements and on cigarette billboards directly targeting poorer minorities, while healthier black bodies adorn magazine covers, radiate from television screens, and saturate the sporting arena.

Professional sports has served as one escape hatch from poverty and the ghetto, especially since Woody Strode and Jackie Robinson began the integration of modern sports in the late 1940s. It is unclear how many African Americans earned their living through sports during the era of the Negro Leagues from the 1920s to 1940s, but it is likely that there are far more blacks earning a living from professional sports today. In 1997, blacks accounted for 80 percent of 361 NBA players, 67 percent of 1,815 NFL players and 17 percent of 1,100 major league baseball players. Over the last two years, golfer Tiger Woods and tennis sisters Serena and Venus Williams have courted enormous prestige and earning power; while heavyweight boxer Mike Tyson earned $60 million in six years and basketball guard Michael Jordan earned $16 million alone in commercial endorsements in 1992. Indeed, “Air” Jordan assumed an unprecedented global commodification through slick sports shoes advertising. In the process, company stockholders made a fortune, while the global spotlight revealed the company’s naked exploitation of factory workers in poor Asian nations.

Less remarked upon is the degree to which these poorly paid jobs are part of a process of globalization with devastating consequences for urban black life. The former exploitative commodity chain of slaves, sugar, cotton and popular consumption has been replaced by overseas cheap labor and shoddily manufactured goods advertised by African American sports stars, with youngsters fighting and killing other youngsters for sports shoes. Indeed, contemporary sport functions as terrible schooling for black youth.

According to a 1995 New York Times survey of the top twenty college football teams, three-quarters of these teams had graduation rates for scholarship players below 60 percent. A 1997 survey revealed that 66 percent of black youth aged thirteen through eighteen believed they would make a living through professional sports. It is true that sports can pave the way out of poverty for some; a late 1980s study revealed that fivesixths of blacks in Major League baseball born since 1940 had working-class backgrounds. Most black youth, however, never make it into professional sports, and those few who do are often ill-prepared for life after their careers in professional sports.

Most disturbing of all, the dominant culture continues to feed parasitically off black sporting prowess, oblivious to the social costs involved. The question modern sport raises for African American popular culture is: who pays the high price for “He Got Game”? Much like sports, popular music serves an ambivalent role in African American culture. A rich and varied tradition of spirituals, work songs, blues, gospel music and jazz suggests that music “be the food” of African American life. Changing jazz styles— bebop (1940s), hard bop and cool jazz (1950s), modern jazz (1960s), jazz funk, and fusion (1970s) and the new jazz swing (1990s)—make it hard to generalize about jazz, yet it is clear that jazz is part of a movement culture which reflects a disembedded modern people. While relatively unappreciated by most Americans—public television and radio stations continue to define classical music as only a European genre—jazz is the US’ classic music and is arguably the most serious musical contribution of the US to world culture.

In more recent decades, an assortment of other popular black musical genres have emerged, including: 1950s R&B, characterized by the group ballad and doo-wop style; 1960s soul, symbolizing a black aesthetic of pride, purpose and people-hood; and 1970s funk, disco and crossover. Currently, hip-hop, emerging from the fusion of rhythmic poetry and poverty-stricken city life has taken alternate directions with nationalist rappers like Public Enemy and Sister Souljah to blaxsploiters like Geto Boys and Snoop Doggy Dogg.

It is important to emphasize that many of these genres emerged from structural transformations in African American life. It is also significant to note the consistent globalization of African American popular music from jazz through hip-hop, with the latter currently being the fastest growing musical form in Europe. It should be added, however, that this European musical appreciation has exotic and imperialist undercurrents, while its exploitative features are particularly prominent. The wealth of black music contrasts with the relative poverty of blacks working in the music industry.

Furthermore, real existing urban poverty, despair and discontent inform musical genres like rap and hip-hop, which then become consumer products and in turn reduce a complex African American class structure to one negative racial stereotype of underclassness.

Meanwhile, the dominant culture feeds off these images, especially through record-buying, hipster jean-wearing, bored white suburban youth, while black youth on elite college campuses consume this music as a means to gain their “props” with the “real folk” outside academe’s privileged and safe walls.

It might be argued that African Americans have progressed from being a talented tenth in the 1890s to a talented third in the 1990s. Apart from fostering a false set of values for unsuccessful blacks, this argument ignores the precarious position of the black middle class who increasingly find themselves under attack for enjoying “discriminatory” entitlement. It also ignores the broader context of a dominant national and global culture which has historically been quite comfortable with the exploitation of people of African descent.