The clearest insights into the black condition might be found in the lost art of “table talk.”

Few white Americans have sat at a Black Table. They do not know the secret handshake. They miss out on the rituals that can be traced back to Africa. The summoning of ancestral spirits remains shrouded in mystery.

Of course, I am not serious.  I kid, I kid, as Triumph the Insult Comic Relief Dog might say.

And yet any student at a predominantly white college recognizes the Black Table as social reality. I became conscious of the Black Table in Junior High School. A new black student from the Richmond, Virginia public schools had moved out to my suburban, three percent black school. The lack of black consciousness astonished this transplant. A new school, Salem Church Junior High, had never known a day of de jure segregation, a fact that situated it firmly in the hope of the New South.  The new arrival from the 82% black schools in Richmond preached the doctrine of separation from our white classmates. While many of my fellow African-Americans succumbed to the bullying, I had political ambitions. I did not see the logic in only eating lunch with three percent of the population. And so I did not. I freely roamed among my classmates and ate with other budding politicos who were all white.

Lord knows what the Malcolm X carpetbagger made of me.

What lessons can we learn from the Black Table, particularly where the participants come together out of affinity, out of familial relations?  In his Autocrat essays, which launched the Atlantic Monthly in 1857, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. caught the attention of educated readers with his “table talk” about provincial, familiar topics.  Similarly, the Black Table offers a forum for all Americans, both black, white, and others, to see provincial subjects of African-American life sans the political agenda of a Jesse Jackson or the intellectual lens of a Thomas Sowell. The clearest insights into the black condition might be found in the “lost art” of “table talk.”

This past Saturday, I had dinner with family at a Black Table. All the participants were African-Americans. They included my mother-in-law, a remarried and retired assistant principal from the Brooklyn, NY public school system, her husband, a mechanic at AutoZone and sometime musician, my wife, an English literature major from Yale and stay-at-home mother of our three young children, and "Nelson," an eight-year-old cousin of my children and son of my sister-in-law. Nelson was visiting from Rockville, Maryland. The dinner took place in La Mesa, California, a predominantly white middle-class suburb of San Diego.

As I arrived at my mother-in-law’s house, I thought about the contrast between San Diego and our family relations back East. Nelson’s parents live in an affluent, heavily black neighborhood in Montgomery County, Maryland.  My mother-in-law lives in an unpretentious area adjacent to the freeway. As far as I can tell, there are no other black homeowners in the area. Parked in the driveway are vehicles purchased with great care and aforethought — my mother-in-law’s aquamarine BMW 320i and her husband’s big deal pickup truck. He formerly owned a BMW but decided that growing grandkids warranted a bigger sized vehicle. My wife arrived with the kids in our green, aging Volvo station wagon. I brought up the rear in my unwashed, white four-door Suzuki.

From the street, my mother-in-law’s house on the outside looks like every other home on the block. The front lawn is San Diego small. The back yard is overrun with a swimming pool and Jacuzzi. 

But as you step inside her comfortable home, the ambiance is aggressively African-American. Black art can be found on every wall. To the right is a portrait of an Egyptian pharaoh (we claim the pharaohs as one of us, you know). To the left as you approach the kitchen is a black and white photograph of a 1960s black family in their Sunday best clothes marching for civil rights. The caption reads, “No Retreat on Civil Rights.” On the dining room walls hang large portraits by the black artist Louis Delsarte. Facing the table where we will be dining is another drawing of urban art, this one titled, "Nat Pinkey A Retrospective July 13-August 14, 1980.  Credit is given to the Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Center for Art and Culture.” Other paintings surrounding the dinner table include famous drawings by Ernie Barres, another black artist of note. All of the books on the book shelf are about the black experience and black culture, the titles being definitely left of center if not far left. I imagine my mother-in-law has the latest works of Michael Eric Dyson, a leftist writer, and Derrick Bell, a critical race theorist.

As I enter her house, dinner is still being prepared by my wife’s mom. Her husband, a dark-skinned man with salt and pepper hair and a gray mustache, lies prone on the couch watching Amazing Videos on television. He wears no socks and no shoes.  Despite the summer heat and humidity, he is wearing a black t-shirt with the Snap-On logo on the back.  The four children are watching Amazing Videos as well, eager to share the highlights with their grandma’s husband.

He offers me a beer. I say, “no thanks.”

At one point, there is a scene where two NASCAR drivers crash into one another. My mother-in-law’s husband says to the boys, “They let blacks drive in NASCAR. Now, you can be a NASCAR driver.” Inside, I am annoyed. I don’t want my children to have a crimped view of what they can and cannot do based on race. It’s not about social class, it’s about not acknowledging limitations. I do not speak up because I want to be polite. It is Nelson’s last night in San Diego. But I wonder how many other throw away lines has this guy said that might poison the young minds of my boys. Isn’t it more affirming to say nothing? Why interject race?

When we are all called to the Table for dinner, we say a prayer. My wife and I never say prayers before we eat at home. But we are at her mom’s house. And for her, saying a prayer before eating shows good manners, good breeding. I think it shows a religious faith I do not share. But I oblige to be polite. We all do.

My mother-in-law offers me a beer. I say, “no thanks.”

My boys misbehave at dinner. My oldest child refuses to eat the potato salad. The middle child makes impolite noises. My mother-in-law says, “they did not act like this for the past two weeks while we were visiting the Grand Canyon.” Translation — you are not disciplining these children. The cutting remark is a not so subtle dig but I hold my tongue. I err on the side of politeness, as does my wife. Respect for elders had been ingrained in us from an early age. Where did we go wrong with our children? The wave of guilt soon passes.

My wife tells her mother about a recent essay of mine. The essay came out in The Pennsylvania Lawyer.  I am proud of the essay, my first sale as a writer. My wife urges me to go out to the car and bring in a copy for her mom. I do so. As I hand the essay over to her, I am relieved that the essay is a piece praising the first black female attorney in Pennsylvania, Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander, and not a hard conservative piece about race. I half-expect my mother-in-law to have known Mrs. Alexander, my mother-in-law being one of the most connected black women that I know.  If she had known Mrs. Alexander, she doesn’t let on.

Why did my mother-in-law marry an auto mechanic? She has two master’s degrees in education and is a retired principal of a San Diego private school (her second retirement). She comes from a literate family. She remains active in her college sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha. I know that her parents viewed her husband with skepticism at first. His fanciful stories of battling sharks to the death raised an eyebrow or two in the family. Maybe, there are not a lot of eligible black men in their 50s. Maybe, he treated her well. I do not know.  But a disconnect in education between black wives and husbands is not uncommon in the black community.

My mother-in-law reads the Alexander essay as I fan myself to keep cool. The air is oppressive with humidity and heat.

While my mother-in-law finishes my article, my wife is reading the playbill for a play, Awaiting Judgment, by Art Cribbs. Rev. Cribbs pastors at the United Church of Christ, a black church that we are members of in a black San Diego neighborhood.  My mother-in-law and her husband had attended the play the previous night. The play drew parallels between the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Dietrich Bonhoneffer, a minister hung by the Nazis in 1945. A community theater group put together the performance. Rev. Cribbs is a strong proponent for social justice. My wife nods with approval.

I ask Nelson about school. He says that he likes sports. He played basketball, baseball, soccer, and t-ball this past year but his favorite game was basketball. I ask him about his favorite basketball shot, whether it was a lay-up, a free throw or the hook. I am on dangerous ground. I know it. I have no interest in basketball, except watching championship games where everything is on the line. As I started to explain the hook shot and to ask if he had heard of Kareem Adul-Jabar, my mother-in-law, with a knowing smile, interrupted me. “You know, Nelson has memorized all of the players in the NBA,” she said. I was impressed. I decided to test his memory. I named a few cities that I knew had NBA teams. And Nelson named all of the members on each team. The kid is eight years old! I shouldn’t have been surprised — parents have encouraged him to play basketball from an early age. When I was his age, I had also impressed adults with my memory. I could recite all of the U.S. Presidents in order. But I also recalled how the middle-class black parents in my home county discouraged their children from investing too much effort and time in basketball. They viewed basketball as a stereotype for black youngsters, an activity that would afford few a way to make a living in life.

Maybe Nelson’s interest in basketball should be encouraged. Why should a fear of racial stereotyping prevent my nephew from following his bliss? And besides, he need look no further than his parents for successful role models in sports. His father is the track coach for a major University and a gold medal winner in the 1988 Olympic Games. His mother represented the U.S. as a runner in the 1992, 1996, and 2000 Olympic Games. Sometimes, black kids have good cause to see sports as a career path.

Nelson quickly informed me that his father’s relative played professional football for some Texas team (I could not name the NFL teams if my life depended upon it). I returned the verbal jousting by informing Nelson that my distant cousin’s son, Peter C.B. Bynoe, had purchased and sold the Denver Nuggets for a profit. (I did not say that Peter was the first black owner of a basketball team because why should Peter’s race matter in this context?) And, to sweeten my boasting, I slyly told Nelson that Peter was friends with Michael Jordan. “Do you know Michael Jordan?” Nelson said a polite “yes.” Nelson probably thought his Uncle Winkfield was lame but he kept his thoughts to himself.

Dinner ended with strawberry shortcake, a nod to middle-aged parents and bulging waistlines.

As you can see, there are no secret handshakes, no insider rituals at this Black Table.

But like The Autocrat essays, this essay shows the appeal of “table talk” for understanding the black experience. For example, should black parents and grandparents interject race into otherwise non-racial moments like a televised car crash? If so, do you expand or poison impressionable minds with constant reminders that you can now do certain things like drive a racecar as a black person? Should the choice to drive a race car just be a color blind given today? Should conservative ideas be suppressed at the Black Table or aired out for public discussion? Will prayer at every meal be lost as the old generation dies off? When are hoop dreams for a black middle-class kid constructive? Should parents be mindful of a stereotype threat or not?  Did I do the right thing to not mention that Bynoe was the “first black” to own a NBA team? Do we imply mental limitations when we draw attention to “first blacks?” And, something that might not be expected by an outsider or enthusiast of integrated housing, my mother-in-law is the only African-American homeowner in the vicinity. And yet black art, black culture, and black consciousness are integral to her home life and sense of self. Should we be reassured or troubled by the resiliency of black life in an otherwise all-white area? Finally, how does aneducation gap between black husbands and black wives impact the black family? I left dinner with more questions than answers but thus is the lost art of table talk. One should leave the Black Table well fed but hungry for answers.

As I left dinner, it occurred to me that the Black Table in my own life has less and less relevance. When I do have meals at a Black Table, it is normally with my wife and the kids at a non-black restaurant in a non-black part of town. We talk about lots of things — school, little league baseball, chuck e. cheese. Race never comes up.