Sublime

In Atlanta, 40 percent of Black households have incomes of less than $50,000, whereas only 20 percent of White households do. Look at corporate boards and corporate leadership and you will see that they remain overwhelmingly White in the city: 80 percent of White Atlantans have a college degree; 27 percent of those who are Black do. And it is a

Atlanta is over 50 percent Black, it is luminous with Black celebrity and iconography, but the unbearable Whiteness of its being—and by that I mean a very old social order grown up from plantation economies into global corporations—still leaves most Black Atlantans vulnerable. No matter how it might look, Atlanta still comes out white as snow.

In virtually every competitive professional school in this country, one will find a critical mass of Morehouse and Spelman graduates; the same is true of investment banks, corporate law firms, and doctoral programs. Even if students are only in Atlanta for four years, the sheen of that place, the discipline, doesn’t rub off. And it does strike a