Skin Deep

By Le Anne Schreiber

CERTAIN PEOPLE: AMERICA'S BLACK ELITE

by STEPHEN BIRMINGHAM

301 pages. Little, Brown. $8.95.

In his latest social history, Stephen Birmingham does for the black rich what he did for the Irish rich in Real Lace, the Jewish rich in Our Crowd, and the Wasp rich in The Right People. With a raconteur's ear for a good anecdote and an interior decorator's eye for a well-placed objet d'art, he classifies the values of the wealthy blacks, their habits, schools, clubs, skin tones, accents, charities and floor plans.

We learn, for instance, that the Chicago apartment of Ebony Publisher John H. Johnson has walls of leather, floors of petrified wood and a Jacuzzi whirlpool in every bathroom. Such ostentation, we are told, is frowned upon by the black old guard, who prefer the quiet good taste of Sag Harbor summer houses and Episcopal church services. That the black rich unbridgeably divide themselves into old and new money seems to come as a surprise to Birmingham, whose naivete in such matters --whether real or feigned--quickly becomes cloying. After ten years of traveling among a growing list of ethnic elites, he has little excuse for such a lack of insight into the phenomena he purports to study.

Agile Hands. Indeed, Certain People is so flawed that it is hard to decide where to find fault first--in Birmingham's cavalier disregard for documentation or in the complacent banality of his observations. For example, he traces the current class distinctions among blacks to the old divisions between house slaves and field slaves, then peremptorily concludes that the reason why blacks rarely succeed in business is that "they don't quite like each other." In a later chapter, he notes that blacks do make skilled surgeons, perhaps, he adds, "because they have especially deft and agile hands."

Birmingham's coup de grace, however, is a chapter called "Taste." He takes up what he calls "the complicated question of black taste, or perhaps, lack of it," and finds that all is "not quite right." Why, puzzles Birmingham, should the aristocratic wife of Washington's black mayor "satisfy herself with plastic plants in her house and settle for brightly colored glass ceiling fixtures"? Why does a Harlem socialite place a huge Steuben glass bowl in the center of her coffee table and fill it with gold-painted walnuts? Why, he asks, do so many blacks drink Kool-Aid and smoke Kool cigarettes? Birmingham's answers are even more idiosyncratic than his questions. He theorizes that "the associations of the words Kool and cool, as in 'keeping one's cool' and 'playing it cool,' have much to do with this." But progress, at least Birmingham's notion of it, is at hand; he has noticed that more upwardly mobile blacks are now "es-chewing Cadillacs in favor of compacts and station wagons."

Birmingham could be forgiven his lapses of judgment in his previous works, because he compensated his reader with a good read. In Certain People, however, he remains insensitive to the tragic involutions of identity that make the black elite very different from -- and much more vulnerable than -- its white counterpart. Birmingham's premise in Certain People, as in his previous works, is that an upper class emerges from people who have the deepest and most solid feeling of their own worth. What he fails to take into account is that the black upper class, many of whom value them selves by how closely they approximate white standards, often must cope with a self-hatred that is as profound as the white elite's selfesteem.

White Ancestor. With little apparent appreciation of its implication, Birmingham casually mentions that some wealthy, light-skinned blacks prefer to adopt children rather than risk giving birth to a dark-skinned heir. Damned by the very values they exalt, the black elite may search for evidence of white ancestors only to feel the shame of illegitimacy when they find them. When members of a class hesitate to reproduce themselves because they literally regard their skin color as a deformity, there seems little point in pretending that what separates them from the white upper class is a fondness for Kool-Aid or painted walnuts in Steuben glass bowls.

By substituting gossip for insight, Birmingham has produced a book that lacks not only a thesis but also a heart.

Le Anne Schreiber

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