Seated beside him on a black velvet couch, Faith Burns, 34, is the soft-spoken half of the family. With Malik’s help, she manages the apartment building, supporting a family of five on just $280 a week, before taxes. In Faith, resignation runs deep. “We’re doing the best we can for the kids,” she says. “But I don’t think they’ll have many opportunities. If they get a job, it will be a dead-end job.”
The couple blames the enduring legacy of racism for their problems. Yet their story, like many, is more complicated than that. A high-school graduate, trained as a dermatology technician in the Navy, Malik could not land a job after his discharge. He blames a white senior officer for giving him a bad reference. Though he took spot factory jobs, he says, “I felt like a slave. I had assisted on surgeries back in the Navy. I had an education. I thought, I’m more than just an able body.” When he got interviews for medical jobs, he says his appearance scared white employers. Even as his family struggled, he did not cut his hair. “We’re told to conform in order to make the white man comfortable,” he says. “I consider [my appearance] an African cultural thing.”
The couple decided they would have to make their own way. Malik enrolled in L.A. Southwest College to study political science, and joined the New Black Panther Vanguard Movement. He brokered a truce between rival gangs in his building. The couple converted a storage area into a tutorial classroom, and launched a music and dance program for kids. Now, on a spring afternoon, children play in the concrete courtyard.
For all their work, the family remains below the poverty line, a counterpoint to the national statistics of black progress. “I wouldn’t say things are positive right now,” says Malik, “if the only way we can survive is to work two or three minimum-wage jobs–assuming you can get them.” The legacy of inequality, he says, is not resolved by a momentary upturn in the economy. Rather, it is in the weave of the American tapestry. “It’s a myth to think things are better for black families right now,” he says. “In many ways, they are worse than ever.”
