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The Sun Monday, May 12, 1997 Page 9A
OPINION
COMMENTARY
The president must take the lead in addressing the race question
ASHINGTON The
GERMOND
to whether they were reasonable
military prison after being
and blacks know that the upper
In a better world, the race
W
Army's attempt to
or not. The same result is likely in
convicted of raping six women.
echelon of all the armed services is
question wouldn't be as
confront its problems
the cases involving the military -
But his lawyer and some
still predominantly white.
omnipresent as it seems to be
with sexual
a cloud of suspicion hanging over
politicians have depicted the case
The situation has been further
today in so many areas of
harassment is being
& WITCOVER
everything.
as based on racism - a charge not
complicated by the Army's
American life. But African
enormously
The Army's campaign to deal
likely to have been made if the
bringing charges against its most
Americans suffer from
complicated and
with sexual misconduct in the
races of the drill instructor and
senior enlisted man, Sgt. Major of
discrimination often enough that
perhaps compromised - by
ranks has offered an obvious
the young women under his
the Army Gene C. McKinney. He
it isn't surprising that they believe
accusations that it is being driven
opening to those, including such
command had been reversed. But
has been accused of adultery with
it is a driving force even more
by racism.
prominent African-American
it is also a charge that might not
one woman and propositioning
often:
This is not surprising. Charges
speeches or a special White House
politicians as Rep. Maxine Waters,
have been made if any white drill
three others. Citing the fact that
No one has a better bully pulpit
of racism have become a common
conference.
who choose to raise the racism
instructors also faced similar
he is black and the four women
than the president to take the lead
element of controversial
The charges of racism have not
issue. Most of the cases have
charges at the same time.
white, Sergeant McKinney issued
in confronting the race question.
situations that seem to juxtapose
been limited to the military. Many
involved black noncommissioned
No one who knows anything
a statement that race is "driving
It is a touchy business with all
whites in positions of authority
black politicians have been
officers and white recruits.
about the military imagines this is
this investigation and the way it is
sorts of obvious political hazards
against blacks as victims even
convinced that there has been a
when the evidence of racism is as
Convincing evidence
a problem peculiar to
being conducted."
to be skirted. But this is just the
racist pattern in investigations of
African-American NCOs. But it is
flimsy as, for example, it was in the
corruption charges against
The evidence in some of these
Public-relations standpoint
kind of issue on which a strong
difficult for other African
national leader can make a critical
O.J. Simpson murder trial.
mayors and other elected officials.
cases appears substantial. The
Americans to accept the idea that
A spokesman for the Army
difference to his constituents of all
President Clinton has signaled
In some cases, those suspicions
evidence against Staff Sgt. Delmar
the fact only blacks have been
investigators disputed that, but
races.
that he intends to confront the
appear to have some solid
G. Simpson at the Aberdeen
charged is the luck of the draw
perhaps the Army would have
broad problem of race relations in
foundation. In others, they do not.
Proving Ground appeared to both
rather than the product of racist
been better off, at least from the
America today, perhaps with the
But the effect is to cast doubt on
the jury and outsiders to be
policy - even though Secretary of
public-relations standpoint, if the
Jack W. Germond and Jules
appointment of a blue-ribbon
the validity of many of the
extremely convincing. Simpson
the Army Tógo West is himself an
accused and his accusers had
Witcover report from The Sun's
study commission or a series of
corruption cases without regard
was sentenced to 25 years in a
African American. Both whites
been of the same race.
Washington bureau.
Clifford Alexander
Declare War on Bigotry
Each day we hear more about President Clinton's
become downright ornery. with those who per-
eradicates the few abuses of racial preferences
singing "We Shall Overcome." It is about leader
desire to have a positive effect on race relations in
petuate bigotry in our society.
that are present in federal programs.
ship-leadership that takes on bigoted behavior
the United States. He has gingerly put his toe in the
Much difficult work needs to be done. This
He must go right in the face of bigots on
and punishes its perpetrators.
water and found it gentle and soothing.
country still perpetuates a negative image of
condominium boards in New York City as well
Stop praying for change and become an agent
He spoke at Shea Stadium about an American
black people. We are the poverty "problem," or
as those who restrict the black poor to our
of change, Mr. President. Put your best aides,
hero, Jackie Robinson, on the 50th anniversary
at least television says so. Twenty-nine percent
urban ghettos. When public accommodations do
black and white, to work and develop action
of his breaking baseball's color barrier. He
of America's poor are black, but when television
not serve black people, we should see Bill
plans for change. Use your voice to condemn
apologized on May 16, 1997, to the few surviv-
shows us poverty, 65 percent of the faces are
Clinton take to the bully pulpit.
that which you cannot address with the power of
ing victims of the inhumane, government-spon-
black. African Americans still can't hail a cab,
sored Tuskegee syphilis experiment. On both
But most of all, he must do more than
existing federal law.
occasions he sounded caring and eloquent, as he
acquire and progress in a job, or rent an
acknowledge that there still is a problem and tell
Set the agenda, don't take another poll. Tell
has when he preaches in black churches.
apartment where they choose with the same
us that he feels our pain. He must look and act
Americans what you expect of them, and when it
But his words would. have much greater
ease as white Americans. Only one black man
like a president who really wants and expects to
is in your power to challenge bigoted actions, use
import if he spoke instead in white board rooms
and one black woman have occupied United
do something to change business-as-usual right
every resource at your disposal to do SO. You
to those who can really bring about change. The
States Senate seats in the 20th century.
away. Black people have been patient too long.
haven't much time left. Use it and use it well.
president should urge those corporate leaders,
Bill Clinton's mission, should he accept it, is
White people, particularly white leaders, need
bully them, convince them of what is in the best
different, and requires a courage he has yet to
to show their contempt and impatience with the
The writer is president of a management
interest of corporate America.
display. He needs to utilize government power
many pockets of bigoted behavior that still exist
consulting firm specializing in work force
Sadly, however, Bill Clinton still does not get
against those who discriminate in the work-
in 1997 America.
inclusiveness. From 1967 to 1969 he was
it. If he wants to be a champion of justice, he
place. He should stop pussyfooting about affir-
No more learned studies are required. It is
chairman of the Equal Employment
must show courage and impatience. He must
mative action and support it fully, while he
not about black and white people hand in hand
Opportunity Commission.
HOME --- - was - - - 22m GREAT." toubed
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A consideration of touchy matters-
racial pride, racial solidarity, and racial loyalty-rarely discussed
MY RACE PROBLEM-
AND OURS
by RANDALL KENNEDY
W
HAT is the proper role
of race in determining
how I, an American
black, should feel toward others?
One response is that although I
should not dislike people because
of their race, there is nothing wrong
with having a special-a racial-
affection for other black people. In-
deed, many would go further and
maintain that something would be
wrong with me if I did not sense
and express racial pride, racial kin-
ship, racial patriotism, racial loyal-
ty, racial solidarity-synonyms for
that amalgam of belief, intuition,
and commitment that manifests it-
self when blacks treat blacks with
more solicitude than they do those
who are not black.
Some conduct animated by these
sentiments has blended into the
background of daily routine, as
when blacks who are strangers
nonetheless speak to each other-
"Hello," "Hey," "Yo"-or hug or give each other a soul handshake or refer to each other as "brother" or "sis-
ter." Other manifestations are more dramatic. For example, the Million Man March, which brought at least
500,000 black men to Washington, D.C., in 1995, was a demonstration predicated on the notion that blackness
gives rise to racial obligation and that black people should have a special, closer, more affectionate relationship
with their fellow blacks than with others in America's diverse society.
I reject this response to the question. Neither racial pride nor racial kinship offers guidance that is intellectu-
ally, morally, or politically satisfactory.
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
Illustrations by Sandra Dionisi
55
RACIAL PRIDE
RACIAL KINSHIP
I
ESCHEW racial pride because of my conception of
I
REJECT the notion of racial kinship. I do so in order to
what should properly be the object of pride for an in-
avoid its burdens and to be free to claim what the dis-
dividual: something that he or she has accomplished. I
tinguished political theorist Michael Sandel labels "the
can feel pride in a good deed I have done or a good effort I
unencumbered self." The unencumbered self is free and in-
have made. I cannot feel pride in some state of affairs that
dependent, "unencumbered by aims and attachments it does
is independent of my contribution to it. The color of my
not choose for itself," Sandel writes. "Freed from the sanc-
skin, the width of my nose, the texture of my hair, and the
tions of custom and tradition and inherited status, unbound
various other signs that prompt people to label me black
by moral ties antecedent to choice, the self is installed as
constitute such a state of affairs. I did not achieve my racial
sovereign, cast as the author of the only obligations that con-
designation. It was something I inherited-like my nation-
strain." Sandel believes that the unencumbered self is an il-
ality and socio-economic starting place and sex-and
lusion and that the yearning for it is a manifestation of a
therefore something I should not feel proud of or be credit-
shallow liberalism that "cannot account for certain moral
ed with. In taking this position I follow Frederick Doug-
and political obligations that we commonly recognize, even
lass, the great nineteenth-century reformer, who declared
prize"-"obligations of solidarity, religious duties, and oth-
that "the only excuse for pride in individuals
is in the
er moral ties that may claim us for reasons unrelated to a
fact of their own achievements." If the sun has created
choice," which are "indispensable aspects of our moral and
curled hair and tanned skin, Douglass observed, "let the
political experience." Sandel's objection to those who, like
sun be proud of its achievement."
me, seek the unencumbered self is that they fail to appreciate
It is understandable why people have often made in-
loyalties and responsibilities that should be accorded moral
herited group status an honorific credential. Personal
force partly because they influence our identity, such that
achievement is difficult to attain, and the lack of it often
living by these attachments "is inseparable from understand-
leaves a vacuum that racial pride can easily fill. Thus
ing ourselves as the particular persons we are-as members
even if a person has little to show for himself, racial pride
of this family or city or nation or people, as bearers of that
gives him status.
history, as citizens of this republic."
But maybe I am misconstruing what people mean by ra-
I admire Sandel's work and have learned much from it.
cial pride; perhaps it means simply that one is unashamed
But a major weakness in it is a conflation of "is" and
of one's race. To that I have no objection. No one should
"ought." Sandel privileges what exists and has existed so
be ashamed of the labeling by which she or he is racially
much that his deference to tradition lapses into historical de-
categorized, because no one chooses her or his parents or
terminism. He faults the model of the unencumbered self be-
the signs by which society describes and sorts people. For
cause, he says, it cannot account for feelings of solidarity
this very same reason, however, no one should congratu-
and loyalty that most people have not chosen to impose
late herself on her race insofar as it is merely an accident
upon themselves but that they cherish nonetheless. This rep-
of birth.
resents a fault, however, only if we believe that the unchosen
I suspect, however, that when most black people embrace
attachments Sandel celebrates should be accorded moral
the term "racial pride," they mean more than that they are
weight. I am not prepared to do that simply on the basis that
unembarrassed by their race. They mean, echoing Marcus
such attachments exist, have long existed, and are passion-
Garvey, that "to be [black] is no disgrace, but an honor."
ately felt. Feelings of primordial attachment often represent
Thus when James Brown sings "Say It Loud-I'm Black
mere prejudice or superstition, a hangover of the childhood
and I'm Proud," he is heard by many blacks as expressing
socialization from which many people never recover.
not just the absence of shame but delight and assertiveness
One defense of racial kinship takes the shape of an analo-
in valuing a racial designation that has long been stigma-
gy between race and family. This position was strikingly ad-
tized in America.
vanced by the nineteenth-century black-nationalist intellec-
There is an important virtue in this assertion of the value
tual Alexander Crummell, who asserted that "a race is a
of black life. It combats something still eminently in need
family," that "race feeling, like the family feeling, is of di-
of challenge: the assumption that because of their race
vine origin," and that the extinction of race feeling is thus-
black people are stupid, ugly, and low, and that because of
fortunately, in his view-just as impossible as the extinction
their race white people are smart, beautiful, and righteous.
of family feeling.
But within some of the forms that this assertiveness has
Analogizing race to family is a potent rhetorical move
taken are important vices-including the belief that be-
used to challenge those who, like me, are animated by a lib-
What if there we
cause of racial kinship blacks ought to value blacks more
eral, individualistic, and universalistic ethos that is skeptical
you have to do
highly than others.
of, if not hostile to, the particularisms-national, ethnic. re-
health plan in
56
MAY 1997
ligious, and racial-that seem to have grown so strong re-
cently, even in arenas, such as major cosmopolitan universi-
ties, where one might have expected their demise. The cen-
tral point of the challenge is to suggest that the norms I
embrace will, or at least should, wobble and collapse in
the face of claims on familial loyalty. Blood, as they say, is
thicker than water.
One way to deal with the race-family analogy is to ques-
tion its aptness on the grounds that a race is so much more
populous than what is commonly thought of as a family that
race cannot give rise to the same, or even similar, feelings of
loyalty. When we think of a family, we think of a small,
close-knit association of people who grow to know one an-
other intimately over time. A race, in contrast, is a conglom-
eration of strangers. Black men at the Million Man March
assuredly called one another brothers. But if certain ques-
tions were posed ("Would you be willing to lend a hundred
dollars to this brother, or donate a kidney to that one?"), it
would have quickly become clear that many, if not most, of
those "brothers" perceived one another as strangers-not so
distant as whites, perhaps, but strangers nonetheless.
However, I do not want to rest my argument here. Rather,
I want to accept the race-family analogy in order to strength-
en my attack on assumptions that privilege status-driven
loyalties (the loyalties of blood) over chosen loyalties (the
loyalties of will). In my view, many people, including legis-
lators and judges, make far too much of blood ties in dero-
gation of ties created by loving effort.
A vivid illustration is provided by the following kind of
child-custody decision. It involves a child who has been sep-
arated from her parents and placed with adults who assume
the role of foster parents. These adults nurture her, come to
love her, and ultimately seek legally to become her new par-
ents. If the "blood" parents of the child do not interfere, the
foster parents will have a good chance of doing this. If, how-
ever, the blood parents say they want "their" child back, au-
thorities in many jurisdictions will privilege the blood con-
nection and return the child-even if the initial separation is
mainly attributable to the fault of the blood parents, even if
the child has been with the foster parents for a long time and
is prospering under their care, even if the child views the
foster parents as her parents and wants to stay with them,
and even if there is good reason to believe that the foster
parents will provide a more secure home setting than the
child's blood parents: Judges make such rulings in large part
because they reflect the idolatry of "blood," which is an ide-
ological cousin to the racial beliefs I oppose.
Am I saying that, morally, blood ties are an insufficient,
indeed bad, basis for preferring one's genetic relatives to
others? Yes. I will rightly give the only life jacket on the
Racial pride and racial kinship offer no guidance th ntelle
58
MAY
ATLANTIC
sinking ship to my mother as opposed to your mother, be-
cause I love my mother (or at least I love her more than
yours). I love my mother, however, not because of a genetic
tie but because over time she has done countless things that
make me want to love her. She took care of me when I could
not take care of myself. She encouraged me. She provided
for my future by taking me to the doctor when appropriate,
disciplining me, giving me advice, paying for my education.
I love her, too, because of qualities I have seen her exhibit in
interactions with others-my father, my brother, my sister,
neighbors, colleagues, adversaries. The biological connec-
tion helped to create the framework in which I have been
able to see and experience her lovable qualities. But it is
deeds, not blood-doing, not being-that is the morally ap-
propriate basis for my preference for my mother over all
other mothers in the world.
SOLIDARITY WITH
VIOLA LIUZZO
S
OME contend, though, that "doing" is what lies at the
foundation of black racial kinship-that the reason
one should feel morally compelled by virtue of one's
blackness to have and show racial solidarity toward other
blacks is that preceding generations of black people did
things animated by racial loyalty which now benefit all black
people. These advocates would contend that the benefits be-
stowed-for instance, Brown V. Board of Education, the Civ-
il Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and af-
firmative-action programs-impose upon blacks correlative
racial obligations. That is what many are getting at when they
say that all blacks, but particularly affluent ones, have a racial
obligation to "give back" to the black community.
I agree that one should be grateful to those who have
waged struggles for racial justice, sometimes at tremendous
sacrifice. But why should my gratitude be racially bounded?
Elijah Lovejoy, a white man murdered in Alton, Illinois, in
1837 for advocating the abolition of slavery, participated
just as fervently in that great crusade as any person of my
hue. The same could be said of scores of other white aboli-
tionists. Coming closer to our time, not only courageous
black people, such as Medgar Evers, Vernon Dahmer, and
James Chaney, fought white supremacy in the shadow of
death during the struggle for civil rights in the Deep South.
White people like James Reeb and Viola Liuzzo were there
too, as were Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner:
Against this history I see no reason why paying homage to
the struggle for racial justice and endeavoring to continue
that struggle must entail any sort of racially stratified loyal-
ty. Indeed, this history suggests the opposite.
ntellectually, morally, or politically satisfactory.
ATLANTIC MONTHLY
59
"ONE'S PEOPLE"
ty is a chance to get to know some of the people who
will lead black America (and white America, too) into the
T
HUS far I have mainly argued that a black person
twenty-first century. But more than that, we feel a deep
should not feel morally bound to experience and
emotional connection to:them, through our blackness: we
show racial kinship with other blacks. But what do I
look at their youthful, enthusiastic faces and see ourselves.
say to a person who is considering whether to choose to em-
There is something affirming about the occasion-for
them, we hope; but certainly for us. It is a reminder of the
brace racial kinship?
bright and supportive side of solidarity.
One person who has made this choice is Stephen L.
Carter, a professor at Yale Law School and a well-known
I contend that in the mind, heart, and soul of a teacher
author. In a contribution to an anthology titled Lure and
there should be no stratification of students such that a
Loathing: Essays on Race, Identity, and the Ambivalence of
teacher feels closer to certain pupils than to others on
Assimilation, Carter writes about his racial love-for black
grounds of racial kinship. No teacher should view certain
people, declaring at one point that "to love one's people is
students as his racial "brothers and sisters" while viewing
to crave a kind of familyhood with them." Carter observes
others as, well, mere students. Every student should be free
that this feeling of racial kinship influences his life con-
of the worry that because of race, he or she will have less op-
cretely, affecting the way in which he values people's opin-
portunity to benefit from what a teacher has to offer.
ions of him. "The good opinions of black people
matter
Friends with whom I have debated these matters object
to me more," he writes, than the good opinions of white
to my position, charging that I pay insufficient attention to
people. "That is my choice, and 1 cannot imagine ever mak-
the complexity of the identities and roles that individuals
ing another." In Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby,
assume in society, and that I thus ignore or minimize the
Carter gives another example of how racial kinship affects
ability of a black professor to be both a good teacher who
his life.
serves all his students well and a good racial patriot who
Each December, my wife and I host a holiday dessert for
feels a special, racial affection for fellow blacks. These friends
the black students at the Yale Law School our hope is
assert that I have no valid basis for complaint so long as
to provide for the students an opportunity to unwind, to
the professor in his official duties is evenhanded in his
escape, to renew themselves, to chat, to argue, to com-
treatment of students. By "official duties" they mean his
plain-in short, to relax. For my wife and myself, the par-
conduct in the classroom, his accessibility during office
THE EMBRACE
You weren't well or really ill yet either;
Why so difficult, remembering the actual look
just a little tired, your handsomeness
of you? Without a photograph, without strain?
tinged by grief or anticipation, which brought
to your face a thoughtful, deepening grace.
So when I saw your unguarded, reliable face,
your unmistakable gaze opening all the warmth
I didn't for a moment doubt you were dead.
and clarity of you-warm brown tea-we held
I knew that to be true still, even in the dream.
each other for the time the dream allowed.
You'd been out-at work maybe?-
having a good day, almost energetic.
Bless you. You came back so I could see you
once more, plainly, so I could rest against you
We seemed to be moving from some old house
without thinking this happiness lessened anything,
where we'd lived, boxes everywhere, things
without thinking you were alive again.
in disarray: that was the story of my dream,
but even asleep I was shocked out of narrative
-MARK-DOTY
by your face, the physical fact of your face:
inches from mine, smooth-shaven, loving, alert.
60
MAY 1997
hours, and his grading of students' academic performance.
white teachers. I never perceived a racial difference in the
C
If these duties are met, they see no problem if the black
way that the best of these teachers treated me in comparison
were
professor, paying homage to his feelings of racial kinship,
with my white classmates. Neither John McCune nor San-
black
goes beyond what is officially required in his dealings with
ford Levinson nor Eric Foner nor Owen Fiss ever gave me
woul
black students.
reason to believe that because of my color I took a back seat
focus
I see a variety of problems. For one thing, I find it in-
to any of my classmates when it came to having a claim on
stude
conceivable that there would be no seepage from the per-
their attention. My respect for their conduct is accompanied
more
sonal sphere into the professional sphere. The students in-
by disappointment in others who seemed for reasons of
torsh
vited to the professor's home are surely being afforded an
racial kinship to invest more in white than in black stu-
howe
dents-who acted, in other words, in a
tribut
way that remains unfortunately "nor-
mal" in this society.
Am I demanding that teachers make
no distinctions between pupils? No.
Distinctions should be made. I am
11
simply insisting that sentiments of
racial kinship should play no role in
the ol
making them.
torshi
Am I demanding that teachers be
at lea
blind to race? No. It seems to me bad
black
policy to blind oneself to any potential-
Th
ly useful knowledge. Teachers should
the un
be aware of racial differences and dif-
creasi
ferentiations in our society. They should
ties c
be keenly aware, for instance, that his-
kinsh
torically and currently the dominant
those
form of racial kinship in American
view
life, the racial kinship that has been
ately
best organized and most destructive, is
whose
racial kinship mobilized in behalf of
ple. T
whites. This racial kinship has been
tion i:
animated by the desire to make and
is wh
keep the United States "a white man's
term
country." It is the racial kinship that
Ross j
politicians like Patrick Buchanan and
the 1°
Jesse, Helms openly nurture and ex-
who
ploit. This is also the racial kinship
er, tui
that politicians take care to avoid chal-
ple,'
lenging explicitly. A teacher should be
had de
aware of these and other racial facts of
As
life in order to satisfactorily equip stu-
is that
opportunity denied to those who are not invited-an op-
dents with knowledge about their society.
al unt.
portunity likely to be reflected in, for instance, letters of
The fact that race matters, however, does not mean that
the ot
recommendation to Judge So-and-So and Law Firm Part-
the salience and consequences of racial distinctions are good
clude
ner Such-and-Such.
or that race must continue to matter in the future. Nor does
group
Another problem is that even in the absence of any tangi-
the brute sociological fact that race matters dictate what
reache
ble, dollars-and-cents difference, the teacher's racial distinc-
one's response to that fact should be.
means
tions are likely to make a difference psychologically to the
Assuming that a teacher is aware of the different ways in
licitud
students involved. I have had the great benefit of being
which the race problem bears down upon his students, how
or whi
taught by wonderful teachers of various races, including
should he react? That depends on the circumstances.
can sti
The difficulties disproportionately afflicting black
64
MAY 1997
ifference in the
Consider a case, for instance, in which white students
black students, black professors as well as other professors
in comparison
were receiving considerable attention from teachers while
should give them priority.
Cune nor San-
black students were being widely ignored. In this case it
Some will argue that I ignore or minimize the fact that
S ever gave me
would be morally correct for a professor, with his eyes
different groups are differently situated and that it is thus
ook a back seat
focused on race, to reach out with special vigor to the black
justifiable to impose upon blacks and whites different stan-
ring a claim on
students. In this circumstance the black students would be
dards for purposes of evaluating conduct, beliefs, and sen-
S accompanied
more in need than the white students, whose needs for men-
timents. They will maintain that it is one thing for a white
for reasons of
torship were already being abundantly met. This outreach,
teacher to prefer his white students on grounds of racial
I in black stu
however, would be based not on racial kinship but on dis-
kinship and a very different thing for a black teacher to
her words, in a
tributive justice:
prefer his black students on grounds of racial kinship. The
tunately "nor-
former, they will say, is an expression of ethnocentrism
OUR PROBLEMS
that perpetuates racist inequality, whereas the latter is a
teachers make
laudable expression of racial solidarity that is needed to
n pupils? No.
T
HE distinction is significant. For one thing, under the
counter white domination.
e made. I am
rationale of giving priority of attention to those most
Several responses are in order.
sentiments of
in need, no racial boundary insulates professors from
First, it is a sociological fact that blacks and whites are dif-
lay no role in
the obligation to attend to whatever maldistributions of men-
ferently situated in the American polity. But, again, a brute
torship they are in a position to correct. White professors are
fact does not dictate the proper human response to it. That is
it teachers bè
at least as morally obligated to address the problem as are
a matter of choice-constrained, to be sure, but a choice
:ms to me bad
black or other professors.
nonetheless. In choosing how to proceed in the face of all
any potential
This is a point with ramifications that reach far beyond
that they encounter, blacks should insist, as did Martin Luther
achers should
the university. For it is said with increasing urgency by in-
King Jr., that acting with moral propriety is itself a glorious
ences and dif-
creasing numbers of people that the various social difficul-
goal. In seeking to attain that goal, blacks should be attuned
y. They should
ties confronting black Americans are, for reasons of racial
not only to the all too human cruelties and weaknesses of oth-
ance, that his
kinship, the moral responsibility of blacks; particularly
ers but also to the all too human cruelties and weaknesses in
the dominant
those who have obtained some degree of affluence. This
themselves. A good place to start is with the recognition that
in American
view should be rejected. The difficulties that disproportion-
unless inhibited, every person and group will tend toward be-
that-has been
ately afflict black Americans are not "black problems"
liefs and practices that are self-aggrandizing. This is certain-
destructive, is
whose solutions are the special responsibility of black peo-
ly true of those who inherit a dominant status. But it is also
1 in behalf of
ple. They are our problems, and their solution or ameliora-
true of those who inherit a subordinate status. Surely one of
ship has been
tion is the responsibility of us all, irrespective of race. That
the most striking features of human dynamics is the alacrity
to make and
is why it is proper to object when white politicians use the
with which those who have been oppressed will oppress
a white man
term "you people" to refer to blacks. This happened when
whomever they can once the opportunity presents itself. Be-
I kinship that
Ross Perot addressed the NAACP annual convention during
cause this is so, it is not premature to worry about the possi-
Buchanan and
the 1992 presidential election campaign. Many of those
bility that blacks or other-historically subordinated groups
rture and ex-
who objected to Perot's reference to "you people," howev-
will abuse power to the detriment of others.
acial kinship,
er. turned right around and referred to blacks as "our peo-
Moreover, at long last blacks have sufficient power to
to avoid chal-
ple." thereby replicating the racial boundary-setting they
raise urgent concerns regarding the abuse of it. Now, in
her should be
denounced.
enough circumstances to make the matter worth discussing,
racial facts of
A second reason why the justification for outreach matters
blacks are positioned to exploit their potential racial power
tily equip stu-
is that unlike an appeal to racial kinship, an appeal to an ide-
effectively. Hence black attorneys wonder whether they
al untrammeled by race enables any person or group to be
should seek to elicit the racial loyalties of black jurors or
not mean that
the object of solicitude. No person or group is racially ex-
judges in behalf of clients. Black jurors and judges face the
tions are good
cluded from the possibility of assistance, and no person or-
question of whether they should respond to such appeals.
ure. Nor does
group is expected to help only "our own." If a professor
Black professors face the question of whether racial loyalty
dictate what
reaches out in response to student need, for instance, that
should shape the extent to which they make themselves
means that whereas black students may deserve special so-
available to their students. Black employers or personnel
Ferent ways in
licitude today, Latino students or Asian-American students
directors face the question. of whether racial loyalties
students, how
or white students may deserve it tomorrow. If Asian-Ameri-
should shape their hiring decisions. Were blacks wholly
ances.
can students have a greater need for faculty mentorship than
bereft of power, as some commentators erroneously assert,
g blace not "black problems.' They are our problems.
MAY 199,7
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
65
these and similar questions would not arise. Thus I evaluate
This challenge raises large issues that cannot be exhaus-
arguments in favor of exempting blacks from the same stan-
tively dealt with here. But I should like to conclude by
dards imposed upon whites and conclude that typically,
suggesting the beginning of a response, based on two
though perhaps not always, such arguments amount to little
observations.
more than an elaborate camouflage for self-promotion or
First, it is noteworthy that those who have most ostenta-
group promotion.
tiously asserted the imperatives of black racial solidarity-I
A-second reason Iresist arguments in favor of asymmetri-
think here particularly of Marcus Garvey, Elijah Muhammad,
cal standards of judgment has to do with my sense of the re-
and Louis Farrakhan-are also those who have engaged in
quirements of reciprocity. I find it difficult to accept that it is
the most. divisive, destructive, and merciless attacks on
wrong for whites to mobilize themselves on a racial basis
"brothers" and "sisters" who wished to follow a different
solely for purposes of white advancement but morally per-
path. My objection to the claims of racial pride and kinship
missible for blacks to mobilize themselves on a racial basis
stems in part from my fears of the effect on interracial rela-
solely for purposes of black advancement. I would propose a
tions. But it stems also in large part from my fears of the stul-
shoe-on-the-other-foot test for the propriety of racial senti-
tifying effect on intraracial relations. Racial pride and kin-
ment. If a sentiment or practice. would be judged offensive
ship seem often to stunt intellectual independence. If racial
when voiced or implemented by anyone, it should be viewed
loyalty is deemed essential and morally virtuous, then a black
as prima facie offensive generally. If we would look askance
person's adoption of positions that are deemed racially dis-
at a white professor who wrote that on grounds of racial
loyal will be seen by racial loyalists as a supremely threat-
kinship he values the opinions of whites more than those of
ening sin, one warranting the harsh punishments that have
blacks, then unless given persuasive reasons to the contrary,
historically been visited upon alleged traitors.
we should look askance at a black professor who writes that
Second, if one looks at the most admirable efforts by ac-
on grounds of racial kinship he values the opinions of blacks
tivists to overcome racial oppression in the United States,
more than those of whites.
one finds people who yearn for justice, not merely for the
In some circumstances it is more difficult for blacks to
advancement of a particular racial group. One finds people
give up the consolations of racial kinship than for whites to
who do not replicate the racial alienations of the larger so-
do so, insofar as whites typically have more resources to fall
ciety but instead welcome interracial intimacy of the most
224
back on. But that should not matter, or at least should not
profound sorts. One finds people who are not content to ac-
new
matter decisively, if my underlying argument-that the sen-
cept the categories of communal affiliation they have in-
and
creat
timents and conduct of racial kinship are morally dubious-
herited but instead insist upon bringing into being new and
CD-R
is correct. After all, it is surely more difficult for a poor
better forms of communal affiliation, ones in which love
9-1/2
person than for a rich one to give up the opportunity to steal
and loyalty are unbounded by race. I think here of Wendell
untended merchandise. But we nevertheless rightly expect
Phillips and certain sectors of the abolitionist movement. I
the poor person to give up that opportunity.
also think of James Farmer and the early years of the Con-
A third consideration is prudential. It is bad for the coun-
gress of Racial Equality, and John Lewis and the early
try if whites, blacks, or any other group engages in the poli-
years of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
tics of racial kinship, because racial mobilization prompts
My favorite champion of this ethos, however, is a person I
racial countermobilization, further entrenching a pattern of
quoted at the beginning of this article, a person whom the
sterile racial competition.
sociologist Orlando Patterson aptly describes as "undoubt-
edly the most articulate former slave who ever lived," a
BEYOND RACIAL
person with whose words I would like to end. Frederick
LOYALTY
Douglass literally bore on his back the stigmata of racial
oppression. Speaking in June of 1863, only five months af-
II
ANTICIPATE that some will counter that this is what
ter the Emancipation Proclamation and before the com;
is happening, has happened, and will always happen,
plete abolition of slavery, Douglass gave a talk titled "The
and that the best that blacks can expect is what they are
Present and Future of the Colored Race in America," in
INCLUDI
able to exact from the white power structure through hard
which he asked whether "the white and colored people of
EDITION
bargaining. In this view, racial unity, racial loyalty, racial
this country [can] be blended into a common nationality.
Entire
solidarity, racial kinship-whatever one wants to call it-is
and
enjoy
together
under the same flag, the inestimable
Web sit
absolutely essential for obtaining the best deal available.
blessings of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, as
Free SO
for Wir.
Therefore, in this view, my thesis is anathema, the most
neighborly citizens of a common country." He answered:
foolhardy idealism, a plan for ruination, a plea for unilateral
"I believe they can."
disarmament by blacks in the face of a well-armed foe with
I, too, believe we can, if we are willing to reconsider and
a long history of bad intentions.
reconstruct the basis of our feelings of pride and kinship.
66
MAY 1997
ESSAY
May Harper's
TOWARD
AN END OF
BLACKNESS
An argument for the
surrender of race consciousness
By Jim Sleeper
L
ast January, not long after the
national furor over the decision by an Oakland school board to recognize
"Ebonics," I happened upon a C-SPAN telecast of the awarding of seven
Congressional Medals of Honor to black World War Il veterans, each of
whose "gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life" had been ignored
for more than fifty years. President Clinton strode across the East Room of
the White House to present the medals to Vernon Joseph Baker, seventy-
seven, the only recipient still living, and to the others' families. "History
has been made whole today," the President told the assembly. The hon-
orees, he said, had "helped us find a way to become a more just; more free
nation
more worthy of them and more true to its ideals."
History has not been made whole for American blacks, of course, and
yet something almost archaic in the recipients' bearing and in the cere-
mony itself reminded me that none of us in the younger generations can
say with certainty what an American wholeness might be or, within any
such presumed wholeness, what blackness and whiteness might mean. If
we have trouble thinking about race, possibly it's because we no lönger
know how to think about America itself.
At least Second Lieutenant Baker seemed to have less trouble fifty-two
years ago than we do now. In April 1945, he single-handedly wiped out
two German machine-gun nests in Viareggio, Italy, drew fire on himself
to permit the evacuation of wounded comrades, and led his segregated
battalion's advance through enemy minefields. Asked by reporters after
Jim Sleeper, a former political columnist for the New York Daily News, is the author of
The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York. This
essay has been adapted from his new book, Liberal Racism, which will be published by
Viking this summer.
ESSAY 35
WE FEAR THAT IF RACE
the East Room ceremony whether he had ever given up hope of winning
the medal, he "sounded surprised
as if the question presumed arro-
DISAPPEARED FROM OUR SOCIAL
gance," said one report. "I never thought about getting it," Baker said.
EQUATIONS, WE WOULD HAVE
Asked why he had joined the army in the first place, Baker responded, "I
was a young black man without a job." Ah, yes, that. Prodded to comment
NOTHING OF VALUE TO SAY
on having risked his life for his country while in a segregated unit, he an-
swered, "I was an angry young man. We were all angry. But we had a job
OR GIVE TO ONE ANOTHER
to do, and we did it.
My personal thoughts were that I knew things
would get better, and I'm happy I'm here to see it."
Asked what the ceremony meant to her, Arlene Fox, widow of First
Lieutenant John Fox, who died in Italy in 1944, said, "I think it's more
than just what it means
to this family. I think it
sends a message
that
when a man does his
duty, his color isn't im-
portant."
Even in the prime of
their anger, Baker and-
Fox, as well as the black
leaders and writers of their
generation, such as A.
Philip Randolph, Bayard
Rustin, Richard Wright,
and Ralph Ellison, did not
urge the importance of
color as much as they
1857
863
found color imposed on
758
them in ways that af-
fronted something in
them that wasn't "of col-
or" at all. Proud though
they were of what blacks
had endured and would
overcome (as Baker
"knew" they would), they
4HONOR GUARD, HARLEM, 1991
believed, before most of
the rest of us, that after a long dalliance with a white manifest destiny the
American republic would recognize no black or white sanction from God.
In Baker's black 92nd Infantry Division, in Randolph's Brotherhood of
Sleeping Car Porters, and in countless churches, blacks found it within
themselves to treat a society torn by racism not as inherently, eternally
damned but as nevertheless worth joining and redeeming. Blacks who
thought and acted that way shared with whites an important belief: not, alas,
a consensus that racism was wrong but a deep certainty that, despite it, they
were all bound passionately to the promise of the nation.
But what was that promise? It seems a long time now since the Smoth-
ers Brothers crooned "The Lord is colorblind" to what CBS must have as-
sumed was a reasonably receptive national audience in the late 1960s. To-
day many of us would think such an audience naive or hypocritical, if not
racist; it is almost as if any assertion that color isn't important insults what
has come to be known as black pride. It is almost as if we fear that if race
lost all weight in our social equations or disappeared entirely through in-
terracial marriages and offspring, we would have nothing of value to say or
give to one another. The problem is not that racism has grown stronger; it
is that American civic life has become weaker-and not primarily because
of racism: If we find it difficult to say that a black person's color isn't im-
portant, that is because we no longer know how to say that being an
"American" is important-important enough to transcend racial identity
in a classroom, in a jury room, or at the polls.
Photographs by Eli Reed/Magnum Photo, from Black in America, published by W. W.
36 HARPER'S MAGAZINE 1997
Norton. The photos were on display this winter at the Leica Gallery in New York City.
"An individual's moral character is formed by narrative and culture,"
THE SUDDEN LURCH TOWARD
writes the sociologist Alan Wolfe. "Contracts between us are not enforced
by laws or economic incentives; people adhere to social contracts when
INTEGRATION DISRUPTED BLACK
they feel that behind the contract lies a credible story of who they are and
COPING STRATEGIES, SCRAMBLING
why their fates are linked to those of others." But what is America's story,
when Vernon Baker's and Arlene Fox's descendants can climb to the very
THE COORDINATES OF AN
summit of the American Mt. Parnassus only to find there Dick Morris,
Vanity Fair, Dennis Rodman, Time Warner Inc., and a retinue of dancing
UNEASY RACIAL COEXISTENCE
pollsters? The òld American story of white manifest destiny, thankfully
gone, was coherent enough to give blacks enough moral footing and trac-
tion to undo its moral affronts. By comparison, our new stories (the space
shuttle Challenger? Forrest Gump? curricular gardens of multicultural de-
light?) are incoherent-much like Bill Clinton, truly a man of our time.
In 1963, James Baldwin wondered aloud why any black American would
want "to be integrated into a burning house." Obviously, he was not
proposing resegregation. What, then? How were black
F
Americans to think about themsélves? Baldwin's emigra-
tion to France left the question open. And so have we all.
a short while twenty years ago, Alex Haley's Roots seemed to of-
fer an answer. Turning on an intrepid black American's report of an as-
tonishing encounter with his African past, it promised to weave a recov-
ered, emblematic black story into the American national narrative, whose
promise, whatever it was, would become more coherent for resolving the
contradictions in its black story line. The story of Ha-
ley's story is worth retracing, because Roots wound up
demonstrating both that blackness has no reliable
myth of its own and that the summit of the American
Parnassus is bare.
Published late in 1976, Roots became the next
year's top nonfiction bestseller (selling some 1.5 mil-
lion copies in one year) after a record 130 million
Americans saw the twelve-hour ABC miniseries it
inspired. At least 250 colleges began offering credit
courses based significantly on Roots. Travel agencies
packaged back-to-Africa "Roots" tours. Even before
TV had anointed Haley, I watched him tell a rapt
audience of Harvard undergraduates, many of them
black, of his meeting with the griot, or oral histori-
an, of a village in Gambia from which, Haley said,
his ancestor Kunta Kinte had been abducted to
America in 1767. When he noted, as he had in the
book, that the griot "had no way in the world to
LINDA BROWN (BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION), 1995
know that [his story's particulars] had just echoed what I had heard all
through my boyhood years on my grandma's front porch in Henning,
Tennessee," there were gasps, and then the packed Quincy House din-
ing hall was awash in tears.
With this unprecedented return by a black American to the scene of
the primal crime against his West African forebears-"an astonishing feat
of genealogical detective work," Doubleday's original dust jacket had
called it-the long, tortuous arc of black dispossession and yearning for a
historic reckoning seemed, at last, to come home. Roots wasn't just Ha-
ley's own story; it was "a symbolic history of a people," he told a British
reporter who raised doubts about its accuracy. "I, we, need a place called
Eden. My people need a Pilgrim's Rock."
Indeed they did. The sudden lurch toward integration in the 1960s had
disrupted old black coping strategies, scrambling the coordinates of an un-
easy racial coexistence and confounding pious hopes for a smooth transi-
tion to the integration envisioned by so many of Baker and Fox's genera-
tion. Some white-ethnic Roman Catholics and Jews, who had resisted
ESSAY
37
ALEX HALEY'S V-FRIENDLY
their own assimilation into Anglo-Saxon norms, now intensified the sub-
cultural revivals of "unmeltable ethnics." Responding to these assertions
DOCUDRAMA OF BLACK
and, at the same time, to the equally unsettling prospect of black dissolu-
DISPOSSESSION BECAME THE NEXT
tion into whiteness through integration, a retaliatory black parochialism
surfaced in public life for the first time in decades, assailing blacks whom
"MYTH FOR A DAY," AN UPBEAT
it deemed too accommodating and forcing even assimilationist whites to
acknowledge their own hyphenated Americanism.
STORY FOR THE MASS MARKET
Appearing amid the confusion, Roots at first startled, then relieved, pes-
simists on both sides of the color line. By the grace of Haley's pilgrimage,
it seemed, blacks could recover and share the true story of their disposses-
sion. His mythopoetic triumph tugged at people's hearts, strengthening
hopes for a decorous pluralism of peoples and a decent integration of per-
sons. Americans of all colors. were transfixed, even as charges emerged
that Haley had taken too many folkloric and fictional liberties with mate-
rial he'd claimed was historically true. (He settled out of court for
$650,000 with author Harold Courlander, passages of whose novel The
African Haley had pretty much copied.) Yet while Roots was denounced as
a scholarly "fraud" by the historian Oscar Handlin, it was defended as an
irresistible historical novel and pedagogical tool by other historians,
including David Brion Davis, who told the New York Times, "We all need
certain myths about the past, and one must remember how much in the
myths about the Pilgrims or the immigrants coming here has been re-
versed." Haley received a "special" Pulitzer Prize and a rare "Citation of
Merit" from a National Book Awards panel. ABC produced a second
miniseries, Roots: The Next Generations, based on his new book Search,
which chronicled his family's later tribulations and triumphs, including
Haley's own work on The Autobiography of Malcolm X. "Now, as before,"
wrote Frank Rich in Time, "Roots occupies a special place in the history of
our mass culture: it has the singular power to reunite all Americans, black
and white, with their separate and collective pasts."
Today Roots is seldom mentioned. The History Channel's twentieth-
anniversary broadcast in February was little remarked by viewers or print
commentators. The book is still in stores-Doubleday calls it "an impor-
tant title on the Dell backlist"-but it's not much read in college or high
school courses. Few books on American racial matters mention Haley
(who died in 1992). "Roots?" laughs the black religion scholar C. Eric Lin-
coln. "It's disappeared! Alex Haley was my friend, and I can tell you, he
was a journeyman freelance writer, not a political writer or historian. He
was given a status he didn't expect."
Roots's virtual disappearance can't be explained with the observation
that it accomplished its mission by transforming the consciousness of a
generation. Nor is it enough to say that Roots shortchanged women by
portraying them as passive helpmates; Haley's misconstruals have been re-
dressed by Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, and others.
What drained Roots of its power with blacks as well as whites was a disillu-
sionment in at least three dimensions. First, Haley idealized an Africa and
a blackness that had been so overwhelmed (indeed, defined) by European
invasion that they flourished only as negations of whiteness. Second, so
complete was this submergence that Haley himself idealized American
blacks' white abductors, if only implicitly, by telling blacks' own story in
Western terms. In doing so he met his third pitfall: he tried to skirt West-
ern mythology's tragic sense of life by telling an upbeat story for the mass
market. Roots became the next "myth for a day," turning immense histori-
cal pain into immense profit. That was what slavery had done, and it was
what Roots was meant to counter. But Haley's TV-friendly, docudramatic
tale of black dispossession subtly reinforced the moral neutrality of classi-
cal liberalism, where markets are stronger than myths and history is not so
much falsified as tamed
In Africa, Haley depicted a precolonial Eden that hadn't existed, creat-
ed his account of Kunta Kinte's youth there more out of current anthro-
38 HARPER'S MAGAZINE MAY 1997
pology than history, paired all of this with the tale of his own communion
AMERICAN AFROCENTRISTS
with village elders in postcolonial Gambia, and inflated black Americans'
expectations of sub-Saharan Africa, past and present. For American
SEEKING A ROMANTIC FOIL TO
blacks, there was no there there: "Whatever Africans share," writes the
A RACIST AMERICA FOUND
Ghanaian intellectual Kwame Anthony Appiah, "we do not have a com-
mon traditional culture, common languages, a common religious or con-
THE SAME "ETHNIC CLEANSING"
ceptual
vocabulary.
[W]e do not even belong to a common race
When Americans making visits inspired by Haley's epiphanies got past
UNDER WAY IN AFRICA
their African hosts, they found strangers as indifferent or hostile to them
as "fellow whites" in my grandparents' native Lithuania might be to me
were I to visit there now-strangers who may resemble me racially but
MILLION MAN MARCH, WASHINGTON, 1995
whose religion, myths, and current interests have little in common with
those of my Jewish "tribe," which they drove out or exterminated in the
1940s. American Afrocentrists (and liberal whites) seeking a romantic,
Pan-African foil to a racist America found the same "ethnic cleansing" fu-
riously under way in Nigeria, Rwanda, Zaire, and the Sudan. The very
designation "black" was no more useful a moral, political, or cultural iden-
tification than is "white" in Lithuania or the Balkans.
"Blackness" did have one use: as a foil to whiteness. It is hard to exag-
gerate-yet hard for some blacks to acknowledge-how overwhelming
was the European presence in Africa. Even the work of such celebrated
Pan-African writers as Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe presupposes
what Appiah calls "the recognition that a specifically African identity be-
gan as the product of a European gaze." They write and are read almost
exclusively in English and French. Some apparently indigenous African
traditions were concocted in response to, and sometimes with the tactical
support of, white colonizers, and in order to construct so-called national-
ESSAY 39
BLACKS BROUGHT AS SLAVES TO
liberation movements. Africans had to devise "national" identities with
European military, economic, philosophical, and linguistic tools.
AMERICA WERE SO UPROOTED
For Americans, especially, the tie to Africa proved, in the words of the
FROM AFRICA THAT THEY WERE
black economist and social critic Glenn Loury, "an empty hope, all rem-
nants and echoes." American black luminaries who pursued those echoes
OBLIGED TO ACCEPT THE VALUES
only to fall for African dictators' charms might do well to heed the black
writer Albert Murray's comment last year on C-SPAN that the Jefferson-
OF THEIR NEWFOUND LAND
ian idea that all are equal didn't come from Africa, where others were also
enslaved. The blacks on the Underground Railroad "weren't trying to get
back to the tribal life in Africa they have no birthrights anywhere in
the world except in America." Black Americans' only coherent memories
and myths begin in the holds of the slave ships to which other Africans
had consigned them-a point that haunted Maya Angelou
on a visit to Ghana, as she wondered whether some of her
B
hosts' ancestors had arranged to sell her own.
y assigning two white men to kidnap Kunta Kinte, Haley wasn't
just distorting African history (in which the majority of slaves were cap-
tured and sold to whites by blacks); he was juggling European archetypes,
borrowing Western literary themes meant to appeal to whites as well as
blacks. He formulated sub-Saharan Africa's diffuse cultural attitudes into
a Western myth of "exile" or "pilgrimage" for a black American aúdience
that had internalized such notions from the Old Testament and for other
Americans who needed to understand, in both Christian and Enlighten-
ment terms, what their own forebears had perpetrated or suborned. But
the African slaves had no signs that an African god was punishing them
for their sins with an exile like that of the Jews, or blessing their "errand
into the wilderness" like that of the Puritans. Roots wasn't a product of its
protagonists' own mother culture; it was the work of a thoroughly West-
ern, Christian, American writer who took as much from Hebrews and Pu-
ritans as from Africans. The novel is a Western account of a monstrous
Western crime-a crime only according to Western religious and political
standards that triumphed later to abolish slavery, as no African authority
had done and as the Sudan hasn't done yet.
The irony, of course, is that the Western Enlightenment principles that
supported African colonial liberation failed to prevent colonialism in the
first place. And the ghastly, bloody misadventures in Europe since 1914
remind us that Western "values" often only ratchet up the human struggle
with evil into unprecedented levels of barbarity. Even the notion that
skin color is destiny derives from the ignorant scientific and cultural prej-
udices that draped nineteenth-century European imperialist states in all
their clanking, blundering glory.
If there is any glory for the West in all this, it lies not in Western power
but in Western thought, which projects triumphs out of tragedies and
which, for all its misuses, nourishes the capacity for rational self-contra-
diction that alone has put such words as "democracy," "liberation," and
"húman rights" into the minds and hearts of peoples on all five conti-
nents. The West's true Eden is not Haley's bucolic African village but the
garden in which a serpent- corrupted two human beings with the apple of
knowledge. Haley's distortions-like those of countless Western writers
before him-misrepresénted the West as much as they did Africa. When
people of any color imagine their origins as racially pure and their heroes
as morally infallible, they shrink from the tragic Western truth rooted in
the story of The Fall:
They also misunderstand that if the West has any hope of improving on
its work, that hope is in America. Roots showed, yet could not quite pro-
claim, that blacks brought as slaves into the American national experiment
were so thoroughly uprooted from African sources that they were obliged to
accept-for lack of anything else-the transcending liberal and Christian
promises of their newfound land. Blacks internalized those promises and re-
42 HARPER'S MAGAZINE 1997
hearsed their implementation long before Vernon Baker joined the 92nd
THE RELENTLESS LOGIC OF
Infantry Division in Italy. Precisely because they had not chosen to join this
society, could not dominate it, and could not leave it, they had the highest
THE MARKET OVERWHELMS
possible stakes in redeeming its oft-stated, oft-violated ideal.
NOT ONLY THE WORST RACIST
-that sense; surely; blacks became, for better or worse, the most
"American" of us all. In a nation born of fraught departures, clean breaks,
PRETENSIONS BUT ALSO THE BEST
and fresh starts on new frontiers, they had to construct their moral uni-
verse, again in the words of Glenn Loury, "almost out of nothing, almost
AMERICAN CIVIC TRADITIONS
heroically, in the cauldron of slavery. Or, as my friend Nathan Huggins
puts it, 'We're not an alien population, we're the alienated population.
We're after getting our birthright. We're the son who hasn't been ac-
knowledged.' See, that binds you. You can't turn back from it. Part of
what I want is an acknowledgment of my place, my legitimacy, my be-
longing." The special depth of this need is what makes blacks "America's
metaphor," as Richard Wright called them-moral witnesses to a self-
creating America, as well as the country's harshest, sometimes most ni-
hilist, assailants.
No wonder whites at first felt relieved by the Roots story: it had an end-
ing happy enough to make whites as well as blacks feel better about them-
selves. Although Haley didn't make much of the point in the book, white
Americans had responded to black fortitude and resistance not only with
cross burnings and guns but with the Abolitionist crusade, the great peda-
gogical, project that sent W.E.B. Du Bois and hundreds of New England
schoolteachers South during and after Reconstruction to "uplift" freed
slaves. Despite all of their cruelties, condescensions, and overweening
moral self-regard, white Americans participated in a civil-rights move-
ment that combined black Baptist communalism with a race-transcen-
dent, New England Calvinist theology of personal responsibility and justi-
fication by a faith beyond color.
So, if there was any real nobility in Haley's effort to weave blacks more.
vividly into the American tapestry-to make Kunta Kinte a mythic
American like Paul Revere-it consisted of the tragic but potentially re-
demptive fact that the author had to use the abductors' language and
metaphysical looms. If Roots hasn't helped a new generation of American
blacks to fit itself into the national tapestry, we must find something else
that can, for separating the black thread would harm all of us even more
than hiding it deep in the weave, as we've done in the past. Even Louis
Farrakhan knows this, no matter how strenuously he insists on the sepa-
ratist claims of the Nation of Islam. Not for nothing did he hold his
march on the, Washington Mall, amid all those white monuments, rather
than in the part of. the Mississippi Delta that the enthusiasts of his prede-
cessor, Elijah Muhammad, once designated as the provi-
Y
sional seat of the Republic of New Africa. Had Farrakhan
gone there, many fewer black men would have followed:
Roots failed to forestall the ascendancy of Farrakhan not only
because Haley dissembled about Africa and juggled tragic Western myths
to tell a black story but also because those myths are losing their traction
against the forces of a global market that employs the techniques of mass
marketing to guarantee the liquidity of collective amnesia. The relentless
logic of the market overwhelms not only the worst racist pretensions,
white as well as black, but also the best American civic cultural traditions.
Commitments to reason, individual rights, and freedom of contract aren't
"Eurocentric" ruses meant to co-opt and subordinate nonwhites; they em-
body historic human gains, and it would be folly to abandon them for fan-
tasies of racial destiny.
When Vernon Baker said, "I knew things would get better," surely he
did not think they would get "blacker" in the sense that blacks would be-
come so protective of blackness that whites' enthusiasm at the prospect of
Colin Powell's running for president would engender marked black am-
ESSAY
43
THE QUEST BY BLACK AMERICANS
bivalence about it. Nor, surely, did Baker's "better" characterize extenuat-
ed rationalizations of Ebonics, gangsta-rap celebrations of black self-im-
TO BELONG IN OUR NATIONAL
molation, or widespread black support for O. J. Simpson's acquittal and
LIFE IS THE MOST POWERFUL EPIC
the "black" jurisprudence and epistemology invoked to excuse it.
Similarly, when Arlene Fox said, "When a man does his duty, his col-
OF UNREQUITED LOVE IN THE
or isn't important," she was not applauding some recent efforts to rede-
fine "duty" in ways that make one's skin color one's destiny all over
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
again. Three years ago, while defending race-norming in college admis-
sions and a dizzying array of campus "diversity" programs that transform
everyone with a dark skin into a walking placard for disadvantage, Rut-
gers University president Francis Lawrence slid, infamously, into lingo
about blacks' "genetic hereditary background." It was an all too emblem-
atically liberal Freudian slip, born' of believing that the best way to over-
come racism's legacies is to create separate, remedial tracks for blacks
while denying that one is doing anything of the sort by enshrining and
embellishing disparities as cultur-
al "differences."
On the other hand: Colin Pow-
ell could yet become president, and-
Oprah Winfrey could own a movie
studio; black candidates keep win-
ning in white-majority districts,
and more blacks and nonblacks are
marrying, which explains why
many of the novels in black book-
stores are about multiracial rela-
tionships. Many blacks, in fact,
have anticipated and met a chal-
lenge now facing everyone else in
the country; we are all being "ab-
ducted" from our ancient ethnic
moorings by powerful currents we
no longer control or fully compre-
hend. Thanks significantly to
blacks, who started from "nothing-
ness" here, other Americans have a
better start on what now has be-
DAY CARE CENTER, TEXAS, 1990
come a more general problem. Eu-
ropeans sometimes say that white Americans walk and talk "black." The ob-
servation fits neatly with the feeling among some Africans that black
Americans are not "black" at all. America needs blacks not because it needs
blackness but because it needs what they learned on their long way out of
blackness-what others of us have yet to learn on the journeys we need to
take out of whiteness.
For all its wrong turns and dead ends, the quest by black Americans for
acknowledgment and belonging in our national life is the most powerful
epic of unrequited love in the history of the world. "Afrocentrism," Ger-
ald Early has written, "is a historiography of decline, like the mythic epic
of the [lost, antebellum] South. The tragedy is that black people fail to see
their 'Americanization' as one of the greatest human triumphs of the past
500 years." Even if every broken heart could be mended and every theft of
opportunity be redressed, there would remain a black community of mem-
ory, loss, and endurance. Yet the country's special debt to blacks cannot
be paid by anything less than an inclusion that brings the implosion of
the identity of blackness-and, with it, of whiteness. The most that
blacks can expect of the rest of us (and the most that Vernon Baker and
Arlene Fox have expected) is that we will embrace and judge blacks-and
let ourselves in turn be embraced and judged by them-as individual fel-
low participants in our common national experiment. As brothers, some
used to say.
44 HARPER'S MAGAZINE 1997
June 97
MEMOIR
matic, no
a battery i
ship, as it.
longer "lil
cuse.
Vaughi
WHILE WATTS
hind me,
boys, and
looped are
BURNED
tight ove
teeth. Th
cured acr
Remembering a riot and a boy's fear
and I had
ing X'd ou
By Don Wallace
A gust
moaning
dles, and
strip of b
toward m
ing to gr.
wind cha¹
The chor-
a wailing
The black
horns we
multitud
drone. T
each othe
We'
their thin
e'd barely pitched our
I'd hated those brothers
sandstone
tents at summer camp-an
ever since a Joshua Tree
the rope :
annual gathering of Boy
campout during which
Wiggli-
Scout troops on the slopes
they'd broken into some
the tape,
of the San Bernardino
desert rat's home, stolen his
in time !
Mountains; high above the
cache of naturalist maga-
staring
steaming City of Angels-
zines, and then, when the
topped ro
when we began to behave
theft was discovered, tried to
procession
like the boys in Lord of the
pin the crime on me, who
ed the h
Flies. We teased the shy and
had merely come into the
the hei;
fearful, ran amok at night,
possession of a single issue of
Chevrole
and mocked our Eagle Scout
"art studies." But I also en-
paneled, I
leaders, those feathered and
vied them: their father, it
surfboard
beaded braves who danced
was known, had a weapons
all empt
hey-na-na in buckskin G.
collection that included ri-
each whe
strings around ceremonial
fles, shotguns, and a Mauser
The ca
campfires.
machine pistol, and the boys
thers mar
We were so bad we were
got to shoot everything. As
Kraut" Fc
beginning to scare our-
the son of an Annapolis
master sta
selves. I know I was fright-
graduate gone inexplicably
up his sh
ened when I found myself
soft on guns, 1. had spent
We watc
captive, tied up, lashed to a
fruitless years nudging my
spread fa
resinous pine by two broth-
dad's conscience with Na-
war, assa:
ers, Vaughn and John, who'd im-
brothers were teenaged chips off the
tional Rifle Association membership
son's disn
proved their forest-green Scout uni-
old block, forever spouting white su-
forms, Boys' Life articles on "Your
Fosters
forms with swastikas of black
premacist slogans and saying things
Son's First Gun," and lists of friends
and wave
electrician's tape. Sons of a chapter
like "Hitler was right." In 1965
whose fathers weren't too busy to
growled.
head of the John Birch Society, the
southern California, such views,
take them shooting. But Dad was the
were goin
while considered indelicate, were
pious sort of father who could ignore
ons. Sud
Don Wallace is the author of Hot Water, a
not enough to warrant expulsion or
the fact, that he'd gotten to blast
where m:
novel. He lives in New York City.
even censure from the Scouts.
away on the range with a .45 auto-
hadn't CO
62 HARPER'S MAGAZINE 1997
Illustration by Jim Lee
matic, not to mention commanding
uncomfortably close to one he and
over the hills to the Los Angeles
a battery of 12-inch guns on a battle-
my mother often discussed, with us
Basin, arguing and pushing for
ship, as if simply saying that he no
children in the audience: how, when
space, forgetting in our candy-bar-
longer "liked". guns was sufficient ex-
the Communists took over, children
induced daze that we were fleeing
cuse.
would be separated and sent to live
camp for a reason, and a mysterious
Vaughn and John shuffled up be-
apart, girls to work in beet fields,
one at that.
hind me, one on each side, like altar
boys in pig-iron foundries.
Then we topped the ridge. The
boys, and a black strip of tape was
The forest went utterly still, as if
dad kept driving, kept his eyes on the
looped around my head and cinched
we'd all drawn in our breath, creat-
road. By the time we had looked at
right over my lower lip, baring my
ing a momentary vacuum.
the horizon ahead and then back at
teeth. Then a second piece was se-
"The reason for this-this situa-
him, there was nothing he could say
cured across the bridge of my nose,
tion-is because of something, some
that would lessen the impact of this,
and I had a cold premonition of be-
trouble, back home. Not at your
not after telling us not to worry for
ing X'd out, strand by strand.
home," Fosterson corrected himself,
the past two hours. The sight-dense
A gust of wind bent the pines,
with a quick peek at the row of fa-
black pillars of smoke rising from the
moaning through the massed nee-
thers. One of them gave a slight nod.
center of the horizon-silenced all of
dles, and I looked unblinking at a
Fosterson chopped down with his
us for a moment. But we were boys:
strip of black approaching directly
right hand. "Not at home, but in a
we had to talk. Someone noted the
toward my eyes like a horizon rush-
place-someplace in the South.
drivers of the other cars on the free-
ing to greet me. The moan of the
Georgia, Mississippi. They started it
way, how grim they were and how
wind changed key, became a chord.
down there. They've called in the
they ignored the speed limit, racing
The chord swelled majestically into
National Guard: To stop the Ne-
past and rocking us in their wakes.
a wailing of what sounded like horns.
groes, who are burning this place
"Boys," the dad said. "Listen up."
The black horizon wavered. Now the
down. Burning Watts."
He took a deep breath as if knowing
horns were distinct, a discordant
"-Georgia," interjected a father,
he had to give the speech of a life-
multitude merging into a great
loudly.
time. We were not a friendly audi-
drone. The brothers murmured to
"Affirmative. Watts, Georgia,"
ence, we knew what it was like to be
each other. I heard them picking up
said Fösterson. He folded his clammy
lied to: it was only two years ago that
their things. Their steps crunched on
white hands over his khaki shirt and
they'd said Kennedy was unhurt,
brothers
sandstone, and-an afterthought-
stared up into the midday sky. He
then only wounded.
ua Tree
the rope at my back slackened.
cleared his throat. "Let us join hands
"It's like they went crazy." He
which
Wiggling myself free, stripping off
for the Scout-Prayer." As usual, Fos-
sighed. "We'll be home soon." And
to some
the tape, I staggered back to camp
terson didn't open his eyes to see if
then he switched on the radio.
tolen his
in time to join an anxious throng
we were actually holding hands. We
-exploding violence flaring bullets
[ maga
staring down the narrow black-
weren't. But the row of fathers
loading you're old enough to kill but not
hen the
topped road. Still blaring, a stately
couldn't help but see, if they cared
for voting-
tried to
procession of station wagons breast-
to. This made me nervous, until I re-
And he switched it off.
ie, who
ed the hill, radiators steaming in
alized that they weren't holding
"I can't believe anybody listens to
nto the
the height of summer's heat.
hands either.
that garbage."
issue of
Chevrolets, Fords, Buicks-wood-
"And now, may the Great Father
"But it's 'Eve of Destruction," one
ilso en-
paneled, bright chrome grilles big as
of All Scouts be with us till we meet
of. us protested. Someone added la-
ther, it
surfboards-all station wagons, and
again. Wo-he-lo." Fosterson opened
conically, "It's really cool."
eapons
all empty, except for the dad at
his eyes warily.
That shut the dad up, probably
ded ri-
each wheel.
The boys began to surge forward,
even scared him. Approaching from
Mauser
The cars pulled over, and the fa-
carrying me with them.
the east, we skirted the mysterious
he boys
thers marched straight to Klaus "the
"Wait!" Fosterson cried out.
smoky center of Los Angeles as con-
ng. As
Kraut" Fosterson's tent. Our Scout-
"Wait till I call your names!"
voys of police cars and fire trucks
apolist
master staggered out, still buttoning
Soon I found myself in a crowded
ripped down the fast lane every five
licably
up his shirt from a midday snooze.
station wagon driven by somebody's
minutes or so, overtaking us in a wail
spent,
We watched, lip-reading. Rumors
father. As we made our way down
of sirens. As we neared the outskirts
ng my
spread fast, like a dry Santa Ana:
the San Bernardino Mountain's into
of Long Beach, a black and white pa-
h Na-
war, assassination, invasion, Foster-
the, yellow foothills, our tires
trol car pulled alongside our little
ership
son's dismissal.
squealed on every hairpin curve,
wagon train. The unsmiling officer
"Your
Fosterson mounted a picnic table
and the dad deflected our-questions
eyeballed us, then accelerated to the
riends
and waved for quiet. "Listen up," he
and refused to allow us to play the
next car to do the same. "Checking
usy to
growled. The camp was closing. We
radio. We couldn't figure out why
for outside agitators," our
as the
were going home in the station wag-
he was so tense if the trouble was in
driver told us.
gnore
ons. Suddenly I wanted to know
Georgia, light-years away. We
blast
where my father was, and why he
climbed the slow grade up to the
A
t home we found my father
auto-
hadn't come. The situation seemed
sleepy town of Corona and the pass
standing before the television in the
I'm Lee
MEMOIR 63
P.I.
den. My mother and two sisters were
With her ship-worker son, she'd just.
eyes,
on the sofa, mesmerized by herky-
moved to a small house in South-
see "
jerky images: firemen dragging hoses,
Central Los Angeles, but with the
As
sprays of water, flaming buildings,
Wallace kids shuttling in and out of
too c
sweaty faces. "Somebody's house is
sleep-away camps all summer, she'd
wool
burning," my little sister said. Time
had to pick up work in the nearby
past,
passed, and my family and the news-
projects. And now there were flames
siren
casters took turns filling me in about
visible from outside her window, and
miles
the man arrested for drunken driv-
she was afraid.
No
ing, his mother screaming at the po-
Of course we felt responsible.
way 1
MANC
lice to stop beating her son, the
"Can't the police
?" asked my
Five
crowd gathering, the mother arrest-
mother.
pack
ed, the first bottle thrown. Tear gas
"Their hands are full." Dad turned
two
was lobbed into the crowd in return.
to Alex. "We'll take the Buick."
that
Highly recommended for
Molotov cocktails answered the tear
I stood up and edged in close to
cross
readers desiring access to some
gas, and shots were fired by the po-
my brother, intending to ride his
that
of the best voices in world
lice. Last night the violence had
slipstream out the door if necessary.
shoc
literature-Small Press
moved to the sniper phase, and rov-
But my father said nothing against
hopp
ing bands had set fires from Watts to
my presence: In fact, my older sister,
Sl
Compton, a distance of a hundred.
Anne, was also given permission to
a
cΓa
wice a year, discover some of
blocks, much of it along Atlantic
come along, in keeping with her sta-
timic
the best new writers from Asia,
Avenue.
tus as the family's best athlete. To
Dad
the Pacific, and America in
We had just moved to a larger
my intense anguish, at her just com-
floore
Manoa. This beautifully pro-
house on a corner lot. The nearest
pleted summer camp in the Sierras
side C
duced series of anthologies
big street, two blocks away: Atlantic
she had earned a marksman's medal
shou
includes new writers, authors
Avenue. The next town north:
with a 22, something I suspected I
comn
from vanishing languages, and
Compton. South of our house, in the
would never do.
before
the winners of national and
heart of Long Beach, also clustered
We set out in the blue Buick, sym-
were
international awards
around Atlantic Avenue, was our
bol of solidity, a cruiser of automo-
W
own ghetto, twenty blocks away.
biles. My father, ex-lieutenant of the
laugh
My brother, Alex, and I were
USS Columbus, wore his light blue
sixty-
Recently published
more thrilled than scared when Dad
Navy trousers, his windbreaker, and
the o
Seeing the Invisible Contem-
said he thought "they" would come
even, as I recall, his officer's cap
be W:
porary short fiction by Korean
tonight. In the manner of children
with the gold scrambled eggs above
phon-
women
everywhere, we craved participation
the bill. It was a cap for boating and
to ou
Homeland Contemporary Mãori
in the dangerous games of history.
for certain manly tasks such as visit-
"G
poetry and short fiction by
On that hot August afternoon in
ing the great flaming garbage dumps
W,
writers from New Zealand.
1965, we were definitely ready for
in the hills. Certainly, given his pen-
bearii
Century of Dreams New fiction
the apocalypse. For me, gunless and
chant for strategizing, I could well
"D
throbbing for the consummation of
imagine his deciding on a military
We o'
and poetry of the Philippines
fantasy and reality, the prospect of a
appearance on this day, a Navy
heard
pitched battle among the suburban
man's instinct for impressing the in-
muffl
Countries and regions featured
lawns of Long Beach seemed like a
digenous population.
drew
People's Republic of China,
gift from boy heaven.
We drove down Atlantic ten
least
Papua New Guinea, Korea,
The phone rang. My mother left
blocks to the San Diego Freeway,
flers n
Indonesia, Japan, Philippines
to answer it, then returned to beck-
rode that for a half-mile north to
if by
bècau
Mexico, Pacific Islands,
on for Dad, who went out.
the Harbor Freeway, L.A.'s femoral
Australia, Russian Far East,
Mom stared into our expectant
artery. Driving straight toward
the tl
faces. "Mrs. Jennings is trapped in
smoke pillars that seemed to be
peere.
Viet Nam, Pacific South
the projects," she said. "Fires are
holding up an opalescent ceiling
We
America, New Zealand
breaking out all around her."
scorched by fire, we found ourselves
carloa
Mrs. Jennings was our baby-sitter,
alone for giant stretches on the
ting
Also new from Manoa Books
a strong-willed, canny sergeant-ma-
white pavement, an event almost
dows
The Wind-Honed Islands Rise,
jor in a Blue Willow housedress. An
unprecedented in daylight hours.
ace.
poetry by writer and landscape
Elizabeth-just like my mother-
From our elevated roadway we
expre:
Mrs. Jennings had assisted greatly in
could see all around us calm tracts
cabili
artist Reuben Tam. $12.95
raising us children, freeing the other
of houses, brown strips of flood
wore
Mánoa is distributed by Mercury
Elizabeth to maneuver her way up
control, pumping oil wells; then
jacke
House and Consortium Book Sales
through the ranks of the Girl Scouts,
flashing lights and feverish activity
veye
& Distribution. Visit Manoa at
http://www2.hawai.edu/mjournal
PTA, Junior League, and the DAR.
at an intersection would catch our
while
Photograph by Franco Salmoiraghi
Charlene Spretnak's
she'd just
eyes, but we'd be going too fast to
left arm resting on the open window,
n South
The Resurgence of the Real
see what it was.
right hand on the wheel, his cap tilt-
with the
As the first pillar of smoke came
ed back on his head: a sailor out for a
is a remarkable intellectual
nd out of
too close for comfort, oily and wet-
Sunday drive.
tour de force, a mordant yet
ner, she'
wool-smelling, a police car rocketed
What did the black men think of
deeply humane critique of
ie nearby
past, traveling without lights or
us? I can only conjure up a surreal
where we went wrong in the
:re flames
siren. "Must be going a hundred
Norman Rockwell painting of the
modern world-and the way
dow, and
miles an hour," said my father.
freckled, pigtailed girl, the two wide-
forward to a wholesome
Now on this underpopulated road-
eyed boys, the deliberately insou-
post-industrial future."
ible.
way there loomed a traffic slowdown.
ciant father with a whistle on his
asked my
Five or six cars were traveling in a
lips, blithely sailing, somehow dis-
-Theodore Roszak, author, The
pack, keeping their distance from
arming these wrathful, desperate
Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein
ad turned
two cars, older, jacked-up Chevies,
rebels.
ick."
that wove back and forth in front,'
"I'm keeping my hands in sight.so
he
close to
crossing lanes with a lazy freedom
they won't think I have a gun, Dad
ride his
that was both mesmerizing and
said in a conversational tone. "I'm
Resurgence
cessary.
shocking. "Probably drunk or
not making eye contact. Giving
ig against
hopped-up," pronounced Dad.
them an excuse to cut and run
of
the
der sister,
Slowing down to little more than
without losing face. Making it nice
ission to
a crawl, we heaped scorn on the
and easy."
Real
n her sta-
timid drivers ahead of us. Finally,
The men shot us a last blazing
alete. To
Dad laid back from the pack, then
glare as their car sped up and pulled
just com-
floored the accelerator, taking an in-
ahead, then suddenly sharked across
e Sierras
side curve and riding right up on the
our bow and down an exit ramp in
n's medal
shoulder, past the herd of cowed
one smooth move, thrashing a tail of
spected I
commuters, roaring through the gap
dark exhaust behind it.
Charlene Spretnak
before the blockading team knew we
After that, picking up Mrs. Jen-
ick, sym-
were upon them.
nings was anticlimactic, especially
automo-
We sailed down the freeway,
when the projects where she'd been
ADDISON-WESLEY
nt of the
laughing. Returning to a respectable
baby-sitting turned out to be quite
ght blue
sixty-five, we began to count exits to
removed from the violence. Still, af-
iker, and
the one where Mrs. Jennings would
ter dropping her off at her house we
FATHER'S DAY
er's cap
be waiting beside her window, the
scooted home quickly and huddled
gs above
phone in her hand and the line open
behind our screen of dense shrub-
iting and
to our house back in Long Beach.
bery, shutters shut, curtains drawn,
as visit-
"GET DOWN!" thundered Dad.
and watched the televi-
:e dumps
We turned to see the two Chevies
sion screen.
his pen-
bearing down on us.
uld well
"Down on the floor," snapped Dad.
A
S before, a phone call pulled
military
We obeyed smartly. After a moment I
our father out of the room. Again,
a Navy
heard the blatting of a glass-packed
he returned, beckoning Alex into
,the in-
muffler approaching on my left. It
the hall. But this time when I moved
drew even. "Stay down," said Dad. At
to join them, he made a face and
tic ten
least a minute passed: now two muf-
told me to stay put. "Why?" I asked.
freeway,
flers muttered alongside us. Slowly, as
"Just do as I say," he replied, his skin
north to
if by common agreement-but really
flushed dark.
femoral
because we couldn't help ourselves-
Sensing a scene with potential, I
toward
the three of us children raised up and
stood my ground.
d to be
peered out the window.
Mom came to see what the fuss was
ceiling
We found ourselves staring at a
about. Dad pulled himself together.
urselves
carload of black men, their jaws jut-
"I'm going down to see a friend about
on the
ting toward us out of the open win-
a gun for tonight," he said.
almost
dows with an air of deliberate men-
"A gun!" cried my mother.
[ hours.
ace. Their eyes were slits, their
Her dislike of firearms was pro-
HOG'S HEAD
way we
expressions closed in a fierce impla-
nounced but forgivable; my father's
m tracts
cability; they were shirtless, and they
was to my mind perverse.
BEER CELLARS
if flood
wore porkpie hats. Even their
Now here he was going for a gun
THE MICROBREWERY BEER OF THE MONTH CLUB
Is; then
jacked-up, steeply raked car con-
without me. Standing in the tiled
SELECT MICROBREWS DELIVERED TO YOUR
activity
veyed a threat. My father, mean-
hallway under the curving wrought-
DOORSTEP MONTHLY. MEMBERSHIPS &
tch our
while, was leaning back in his seat,
iron banister, I placed myself be-
FATHER'S DAY GIFT SUBSCRIPTIONS AVAILABLE.
800-795-BEER
tween my father and the front door,
other hand, pulsated with the noise
west: as summer people to a tempo-
you
angry beyond words. I'd never un-
and energy of a stag night or a prize-
rary town, transported by the South-
to k
derstood how hypocritical, how cru-
fight. The television was on full
ern Pacific Railway, which sought to
";
elly manipulative my father could
blast. There was a large, gleaming
promote its large California real es-
pou
be: if ever a situation called for a re-
steel coffee urn. No women were
tate holdings. It made sense to es-
fron
sponsible, informed arming of the
present. Men milled around, peering
cape the Midwest to bathe in the sea
him
general populace, this was it. And
into one another's faces, clapping
and the dèlightfully unhumid air, es-
er-r
he was telling me that I couldn't be
one another on the back, braying
pecially when you could claim it as
for
trusted to join him and Alex at the
loudly: Cans of beer and pint bottles
moral improvement. A Methodist
ers,
front lines of our home defense. Ob-
of whiskey were passed from hand to
conception of Paradise, right down
coa
viously, if this were Concord on that
hand. The point of our being here
to the bloomer bathing dresses worn
spec
fateful April morning in 1775; my
seemed lost in the bath of enforced
by the ladies, Long Beach then was
tion
father would have left me home
camaraderie, the release of tension.
clean and flat and empty-a bare
ther
with the women. To churn butter or
In the midst of all this a man
canvas in an optimistic age. The
iden
something.
came out of a back room and wove
yearly encampments constructed
uten
"It's not fair," I said.
through the crowd holding a shot-
house-size tents along the high bluff
well
He hesitated to lay hands on me, I
gun in each fist, barrel-up. He
overlooking what was proudly called
he fl
could see. But still I feared his anger.
looked grim until someone in the
the finest beach in southern Califor-
the
"I don't see what you need a gun
crowd said something that made
nia. Modesty and respectability were
knev
for," said Mom.
everybody laugh, and his stern fea-
prized, turning what to us might
the
That did it. Any further delay
tures dissolved into a pleasure so un-
seem a potentially risible situation
cult.
would have meant weakening his
mistakable I felt it with him. I felt a
into a festival that practically flaunt-
the
course of action. "Okay," he said,
part of something.
ed its high-mindedness.
extr
lunging for the doorknob. I barely
Being young and crew-cut, I was
The scene at the gun dispenser's
neigl
got out of the way in
coming in for some attention now.
house, on the other hand, was chaot-
voice
time.
Men smiled or, even better, nodded
ic, lacking in discipline, aswirl with
"Y
W®
judiciously as if sizing me up for ac-
giddy currents. When the television
gani
only needed to drive four
tive duty. Out of the blue, someone
newscast switched to coverage of a
plan
blocks. To my surprise, we pulled up
slapped my back; another gave my
section of Watts that was burning,
D:
before a house I knew, a modern
head a'fast knuckle-rub.
those watching began to shout
have
split-level with a shingle roof, picture
But soon I realized that our father
abuse. Men gestured obscenely at the
no.
windows, a thick green lawn. Why,
was distinctly unhappy with the
screen; every other word seemed to
"\'
I'd trick-or-treated here! It seemed
scene, or rather with our witnessing
be "nigger," the sound of which
comi
astonishing that such a bland facade
it. Dad was no snob. He had a
would excite other men to say it-
geth
could harbor a secret armory. But
healthy appetite for the group expe-
like a spell, an enchantment-again
ing
then, ever since World War II, Long
rience, whether it was taking us out
and again. When an actual black
one
Beach had prided itself on being
on charter fishing boats for the boni-
person was shown, the men would
"R
"The Arsenal of Democracy."
ta run, attending our semipro foot-
shake their fists at the flat image on
It
The street was full of cars. Bixby
ball team's games, or taking the en-
the screen and roar like apes impo-
but
Knolls was the sort of place where
tire sign-toting family along to a
tently caged at a zoo.
shrug
you did not wash your car in the
Goldwater for President rally. It
Although he was recognized and
How
driveway but took it to the car wash.
could even be said that, in his civic
greeted, my father seemed stiff, and
"T
Yet here we were on this secluded,
life, he was democracy itself in ac-
his discomfort did not go unnoticed.
one
shady street, where picture windows
tion, devoting himself to the Scouts,
By now I had adjusted to the disor-
of wh
looked out at mature elm and locust
to local government, to the Rotari-
derliness and was watching a heavy-
sion
trees, and cars were double- and
ans, the Elks, the Kiwanis Club.
set man admit people to the room
joyed
triple-parked everywhere. Men were
Yet this democratic nature often
where the guns were. When my fa-
was
everywhere. Many were dressed for
alienated others. Quite without in-
ther's turn came, this man greeted
a cei
the suburban weekend, others were
tending it, he was "too clean" for
him loudly. "How are ya? Isn't this
elusiv
in yard clothes or coveralls, some in
many people's comfort. Pure Protes-
really something?" His small talk was
self
white T-shirts and jeans. Besides the
tant uplift came naturally to him. He
flushing Dad out into the open, forc-
Achi
professional class that belonged to'
was a product of Long Beach's pre-
ing him to declare himself. They
titter
Bixby Knolls, there were oil workers,
war heritage as a seaside Chautauqua
knew each other by sight from the
fores:
dockworkers, and aerospace engi-
town, a regular stop on the summer
neighborhood, I figured, through Lit-
urban
neers, men with meat on their
"tent circuit" of the 1890s, which of-
tle League or the Scouts, but they
Da
bones, men with bristling crew cuts.
fered the people a genteel and edify-
weren't natural allies. "Well, are we
paine
Men who washed their own cars in
ing program of music, lectures, and
finally going to show the niggers?"
when
their own driveways.
religious education. That is how the
he asked.
or tol
The scene on the lawn was busy
Wallaces came here, among the
"We live so close to Atlantic Av-
size-
but calm. The living room, on the
thousands of families from the Mid-
enue that
to be on the safe side,
odd P
66 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/JUNE 1997
a tempo-
you
know
My father. was trying
Dad was usually unconvincing when
Pioneering
he South-
to keep his voice down.
playing the role of a man's man.
Literature
sought to
"I know! They're gonna come
Raised to exacting standards by his
ia real es-
pouring in tonight! You're on the
parents, he had escaped being infect-
nse to es-
front lines!" The man looked around
with cynicism through some back
of Science
in the sea
him triumphantly. There were lock-
path in the culture that 1 sensed was
nid air, es-
er-room cheers. "So, what can I do
already closed to me, even at the age
:laim it as
for you?" Bragging about his suppli-
of thirteen. In a way, his innocence
GALILEO'S
Methodist
ers, he reeled off the names of a
would always be greater than mine.
COMMANDMENT
ight down
coalition of groups, some re-
By this time, I was actually feeling
esses worn
spectable-the NRA and the Na-
sorry for him. I wanted to tell him to
then was
tional Guard-others those my fa-
relax, to not be afraid of this danger-
y-a bare
ther and mother had always firmly
ous moment. At least it was real, a
age. The
identified as extremist, like the Min-
far cry from the ersatz ceremonials of
instructed
utemen and George Lincoln Rock-
Scouting and the cashmere-cardigan
high bluff
well's American Nazi Party. When
rigors of the golf course. But Dad's
dly called
he flatly claimed to be in touch with
sincerity was not simpleminded. It
n Califor-
the police, my father nodded, as if he
was of a piece with his belief in the
pility were
knew this already. The noise level in
righteousness of Long Beach, of Cali-
us might
rhe room made eavesdropping diffi-
fornia, of America. His own life was
GALILEO'S
situation
cult, but Dad must have questioned
proof that the system worked to the
illy flaunt-
the affiliation with those other, more
advantage of "the good guys," as he
COMMANDMENT
extremist groups then, because our
called them. A good student and a
lispenser's
neighborhóod Paul Revere raised his
good athlete, he went to Stanford-a
An Anthology of Great
vas chaot-
voice in righteous indignation:
jump in class over the state universi-
Science Writing
swirl with
"You think the niggers aren't or-
ties-at age sixteen; then the war of-
Edited by
television
ganized? You think this wasn't all
fered him an immediate promotion, a
Edmund Blair Bolles
erage of a
planned?"
spot at the Naval Academy that in
burning,
Dad said something that could
peacetime could never have been his.
The most inventive minds in
to shout
have meant yes, could have meant
From there he went back to Stanford
science and literature are
hely at the
no.
Law School, worked hard, married
represented in this impressive
seemed to
"Well, they have another thing
his high school sweetheart, and came
collection of the best writing
of which
coming. Right? We're all' in this to-
home to raise his family.
on science. Read Herodotus on
o say it-
gether. Right?" he demanded, leav-
The system worked for my father,
geology, Primo Levi on carbon,
nt-again
ing no doubt that Dad had to reply,
just as it had for at least four gener-
and Werner Heisenberg on
ual black
one way or another.
ations of our family, ever since the
cause and effect. You'll also
en would
"Right," my father said, briskly.
destitute Wallace clan had come
find writings by scientists
image on
It seemed as if he would say more,
over from Scotland, via Venezuela.
rarely represented in their own
pes impo-
but he didn't. Our neighbor
Five sons had ended up as bank
words: from Marie Curie to
shrugged. "Okay, what can I get you?
tellers. It had worked for my father's
Galileo himself.
nized and
How about a pump 12-gauge?"
father, Don Sr., who built a radio in
stiff, and
"That'll do some damage," said
a. barn at age six and by nineteen
unnoticed.
one of the living-room rowdies, half
was running President Woodrow
the disor-
of whom had turned from the televi-
Wilson's communications at the
g a heavy-
sion to watch our exchange. I en-
Paris Peace Conference. Selling his
the room
joyed their attention. For me, this
own radio sets, Don Sr. took the
en my fa-
was a rich and associative moment,
Depression in stride, becoming ever
SHADOW OF
n greeted
a ceremony in which my father's
more successful and recognized in-
Isn't this
elusive military ardor, would show it-
ternationally as an inventor and
A STAR
11 talk was
self in full gleaming array, like
amateur radio ambassador. He spent
The Neutrino Story of
pen, forc-
Achilles emerging from behind the
hour upon hour chatting with fel-
Supernova 1987A
elf. They
tittering women. Of course, I also
low hams around the world, enthu-
from the
foresaw being initiated into the sub-
siasts whose names had been re-
Alfred K. Mann
rough Lit-
urban militia.
placed by call signs like his own,
"The birth of neutrino astrono-
but they
Dad nodded, but his expression was
W6AM, and whose language was
my-an intriguing story told to
ell, are we
pained. I had seen this face before,
always Morse Code, so that nation-
us by one of its pioneers."
niggers?"
when someone unexpectedly cursed
ality and race and dialect were al-
-Georg G. Raffelt, Max-Planck-
or told an off-color joke. Despite his
ways secondary. To W6AM there
Institut für Physik, Munich.
lantic Av-
size-six-foot-three, two-hundred-
was no color; only the strength and
safe side,
odd pounds-and his hearty manner,
clarity of your signal.
At bookstores now
W.H. Freeman
All this made Don Sr. a sterling
"Nah, don't let the boy down. I've
television was turned off, and a vel-
example but a hard act to follow.
got a nice .410 shotgun, real light,
vety August dusk filled the cool
Yet, in his own way, my father was
practically no recoil to speak of. Over
chambers and hallways. As Dad took
trying-and this singular afternoon
and under. Perfect for when they
up his position, I had the eerie real-
in August would be, as it turned out,
come swarming over the back fence."
ization that he was settling into the
a crossroads.
Dad shook his head. Sarge's finger
same chair, in the same resigned
A knowing smile on his face, our
and thumb pressed deep into my
manner, that he adopted on Christ-
neighborhood arms supplier stepped
shoulder until it burned, a hot spot
mas Eve, when there were many un-
back into a plainly decorated bed-
the size of a half-dollar.
wrapped presents and empty stock-
room. Tilting my head, I could just
"No."
ings to fill before he could sleep.
see a double bed with a green bed-
Despairing, at last 1 spoke. "Dad!"
Now came the last pang: saying
spread that matched the dark green
"No." He shifted his gun to the
good night and going upstairs with
T
wallpaper. Laid out on it were ranks
other hand and shook with Sarge,
my sisters and our mother, upstairs
Ha
of long-barreled guns, dully glinting
who gave me a pitying, sympathetic
with the women, while downstairs
KEI
in the half-light; cardboard boxes at
look and ruffled my hair one more
Dad and Alex sat down to share the
the base of the bed were filled with
time. We passed through the cacoph-
graveyard watch. Dad's last words:
packages of cartridges.
onous living room and into the bright
"Nobody comes downstairs until I
No.
The man came back and handed
sunlight, I near tears, my
say so. There are not going to be any
Dad a shotgun and a box of car-
brother tactfully silent.
accidental shootings tonight. You
tridges. "Ever use one?" he asked.
"Dove hunting."
A
hear me, Donny?"
t home, outside the house, af-
Singled out, I gave the answer
"Then I don't have to tell you
ter we'd parked the Buick in the
that he demanded and went to my
what to do. Right, boys?" The boys
garage, my father paused to examine
room. It was lighter upstairs. Again
responded with suggestions of their
our property. Built by a corrupt for-
and again as I sat cross-legged on
own. "Now, how about this one?" he
mer harbor commissioner, it was an
my bedspread I heard the sirens ris-
asked, squinting at my brother. "I
authentic Spanish Mission hacienda,
ing, warbling in strange, electronic
think a 20-gauge. Less of a kick.
which meant that life was directed
harmony and shifting tone as they
Double-barreled. Easier to operate."
inward, to the patio and garden. The
went away. Usually a faint milky
Dad raised a dismissive hand. "I
smooth exterior walls and slanting
white, the night sky had a reddish
don't really-"
tile roofs, designed for a defensive
hue toward Los Angeles-or was I
The man looked him in the eye.
purpose in a world long gone,
only imagining it, tinting with my
"You think you can handle a whole
seemed newly comforting.
heart what deservéd to be visible? I
tribe of Zulus yourself, huh? You think
We started inside, locking doors
looked at my walls-hung with
they're carrying spears out there?"
and gates as we went. Mom greeted
weapons, including a Tunisian
Those watching gave vent to
us in the kitchen, nervous, unable to
scimitar, a cutlass, a Japanese offi-
some Tarzan yells. But my father
take her eyes off the guns. Now,
cer's sword, a boomerang, and an.
didn't smile. Then the man asked,
however, Dad seemed preternatural-
ironwood spear from New Guinea,
"You willing to bet your wife and
ly calm, as if the experience had put
tipped with a nasty barbed point-
children on that?" And he pressed
him through such a gauntlet of emo-
and saw that my dream life of war's
Add
the 20-gauge into Alex's out-
tions that he'd recovered a less apoc-
ennobling deeds had come crush-
(ext,
stretched hands.
alyptic perspective.
ingly, humiliatingly, down to this.
When Dad didn't tell Alex to give
The guns were laid down on the
Pressing my hands to my eyes, rock-
Add
it back, I edged forward, so anxious
carpet. Placing the living-room sofa
ing on my bed, I let go and sobbed
not to lose this opportunity that I
across the bottom of the picture win-
my heart out, so that when morn-
actually started to tremble.
dow, then stacking all available pil-
ing came I awoke without a sense
TOT
Staring up at the man, who resem-
lows and cushions upon it, Dad ex-
of time's passage.
bled ever so slightly my favorite
plained that we would show no
But as the night had passed, so
comic-book hero, Sergeant Rock, I
lights tonight, that no one would
had the danger. Roaring like angry
NAMI
was rewarded when one of his large
walk directly in front of any windows
wraiths through the streets, cars with
hands landed on my shoulder, where
or peer out into the street. "I'll be
heavy-throated mufflers had surged
ADD:
it began kneading the muscle against
sitting right here," he said, pointing
back and forth, again and again,
the bone, slowly, a little painfully
to an overstuffed chair he'd dragged
crisscrossing the neighborhood with
but with affection.
over to the wall between the front
sirens- wailing in their wake. At one
He peered into my face. "So, little
door and the picture window. "With
point, a great glow had gone up in
man, you want to protect your Ma-
both guns-unloaded."
the sky. Dad and Alex had loaded
ma from the niggers, too?"
And that was all the discussion-he
their weapons. Now, tired and spent.
Dad said, "We've got enough,
allowed. Henceforth, we understood,
they sat at the dining-room table sip-
we're fine. Thanks."
any chatter about the riots, hysteri-
ping coffee together and reading the
My hopes now rested with the
cal or otherwise, was out of bounds.
newspapers that had somehow man-
man, with Sarge.
When darkness finally fell, even the
aged to get delivered.
68 1997
From:
Michael Waldman on 05/20/97 11:52:47 AM
Record Type:
Record
To:
James T. Edmonds/WHO/EOP, Carolyn Curiel/WHO/EOP
CC:
Subject: FYI
Cultural diversity breaks down black-white divide -- An outmoded vocabulary of race
By Eric Liu
MSNBC CONTRIBUTOR
Language, of course, describes the world. It also, in
matters of race, creates the world. We might call someone
"black" because that roughly describes the hue of her skin.
We might also call her "black" even if she has light skin -
but just "one drop" of blood from an African ancestor. Such
is the power of language, not only to reflect the order of
things, but to impose it.
This interplay between the word and the world matters
now - matters more than ever - because America today
is in the midst of a demographic revolution. By 2050, the
Census Bureau projects, non-Hispanic whites will decline
from 74 percent of the population to a bare majority.
Hispanics, now more than 10 percent of the population, will
rise to 25 percent; Asian Americans, too, from less than 4
percent to more than 8 percent. Meanwhile, the rate of
interracial marriage is skyrocketing, the ranks of mixed-race
children are expanding, the flow of non-European
immigrants pulses on.
But put aside the statistics. You can sense the
revolution in the texture of your daily life: from the strange
languages you hear while channel surfing; from the eyes and
skin of those who sit beside you on the bus; from the placid,
blended visage of Tiger Woods; from the spices and sauces
that adorn your every meal.
What's happening, in short, is that the very meaning of
American identity is being rewritten. Yet in the face of such
upheaval, we cling to the vocabulary of another era - a
simpler, whiter era. We insist, by force of habit, that the sun
circles the earth, even as evidence mounts that it's the other
way around. The result is cognitive dissonance, a failure to
communicate, and silent racial estrangement. Can we talk
honestly about race? Yes - but we must first redefine our
terms.
From B&W to Technicolor. We can begin by
acknowledging the obvious: that "race relations" in America
consists of more than black-white interactions. To be sure,
blacks have a distinct moral and historical claim on the
national conscience: And tensions between blacks and
whites are the most dramatic symptoms of ills that pervade
our society. But we cannot go on pretending - as
publishers, politicians and pundits do - that the race
question reduces to the black condition. Asians and
Hispanics are moving from the margins to the mainstream,
and their presence will force us to take a more variegated
view of integration and racial politics.
Races are not boxes. It's one thing to point out the
many colors of America. It's another thing, though, to
perpetuate the myth of the census - that people can or
should jam themselves into one of five ethno-racial boxes,
and stay there. Tiger Woods, by insisting on his mixed
identity, has led us to confront the artificiality - and
arbitrariness - of racial categories. But the way so many of
us still regard him as "black" - and the fact that so many
parties, from Nike to the NAACP, have an interest in doing
so - suggests old habits will die hard. Just remember: race
is not a fixed, foreordained concept; it's a shifting,
man-made construct.
Assimilation doesn't mean whitening. There was a
time, of course, when "Americanization" meant
Anglo-morphing, when mimicking WASPs was the way to
acceptance. Two groups today still believe this is the case:
an old guard of white conservatives, and an avant-garde of
minority activists. But everyone else knows, or suspects,
that they're misguided. The mainstream has always been, in
Albert Murray's apt phrase, "mulatto"; the immigrant today
partakes from an ever-widening array of cultural influences.
Indeed, it is this very sensibility - this disregard for purity
- that marks him as an American. Does something get lost
when the minority assimilates? Yes - but something is
gained as well. And it won't do to call the end result
"white."
Color is not culture. When we talk about blacks in
the ghetto - or Asians at Harvard - we often make an
insidious assumption: that virtue can be color coded.
Something intrinsic to blacks makes them prone to urban
pathology, goes the innuendo, just as something intrinsic to
Asians makes them the new "whiz kids." Well, it's true that
behavior counts - it's true, say, that dropping out of
school hurts one's prospects, while working hard in school
helps. But it's not true that the behavior in either case is
inherently "black" or "Asian." It takes a partial blindness to
think color correlates with virtue (for it filters out
middle-class blacks and welfare-dependent Asians, both on
the rise). It takes total blindness to think color actually
determines virtue.
Colorblindness is a goal, not a reality. The more
diverse society becomes, the more we hear about the
colorblind ideal. Rightly so: The rule of law, and the
measure of merit, should ideally be administered without
regard to race. But let's not confuse the world as we'd like
it with the world as it is. This is the fallacy of the right - of
those who believe, sentimentally and often sincerely, that the
mere statement of a principle is enough to undo the
inequities of the real world. Race matters because, up till
now, race has mattered. We break that cycle not by wishing
it away, but by ensuring that especially for poor people of
color, race doesn't harden into caste.
Is a new vocabulary of race enough to ensure social
harmony? Of course not. Talk is ultimately just talk. Alone,
it cannot change power relations - or forestall an
emotional backlash to the country's changing complexion.
But whatever the limits of language, this much is true: We
will not improve the world of race until we know, properly,
how to name it.
MSNBC contributor Eric Liu is at work on a book
about Asian-Americans.
TE- TE -
From the
1
Schlesinger
booh-
I
I haven't
"A New Race"?
read looks it yet.
interesting
MD
A
t the beginning America was seen as a severing
of roots, a liberation from the stifling past, an
entry into a new life, an interweaving of separate eth-
nic strands into a new national design. "We have it in
our power," said Thomas Paine for the revolutionary
generation, "to begin the world all over again." The
unstated national motto was "Never look back." "The
Past is dead, and has no resurrection," wrote Herman
Melville. " The Past is the text-book of tyrants; the
Future the Bible of the Free."
23
THE DISUNITING OF AMERICA
"A New Race''?
assimilated to our customs, measures and laws: in a
word, soon become one people."
I
John Quincy Adams, another sternly practical
man, similarly insisted on the exclusiveness of the new
And the future was America-not so much a nation,
American identity. When a German baron contem-
Melville said, as a world. "You can not spill a drop of
American blood without spilling the blood of the
plating emigration interviewed Adams as secretary of
whole world. On this Western Hemisphere all tribes
state, Adams admonished his visitor that emigrants
and people are forming into one federated whole
"
had to make up their minds to one thing: "They must
For Ralph Waldo Emerson too, like Crèvecoeur, like
cast off the European skin, never to resume it. They
Melville, America was the distillation of the multifari-
must look forward to their posterity rather than back-
ward to their ancestors
"
ous planet. As the burning of the temple at Corinth
had melted and intermixed silver and gold to produce
But how could Crèvecoeur's "promiscuous
Corinthian brass, "a new compound more precious
breed" be transformed into a "new race"? How was
than any," so, Emerson wrote in his journal, in Amer-
Emerson's "smelting pot" to fuse such disparate ele-
ica, in this "asylum of all nations, the energy of Irish,
ments into Washington's "one people"? This question
Germans, Swedes, Poles, & Cossacks, & all the Euro-
preoccupied another young Frenchman who arrived
pean tribes-of the Africans, & of the Polynesians,
in America three quarters of a century after Crève-
will construct a new race
as vigorous as the new
coeur. "Imagine, my dear friend, if you can," Alexis
Europe which came out of the smelting pot of the
de Tocqueville wrote back to France, "a society
Dark Ages.
formed of all the nations of the world
people hav-
Melville was a novelist, Emerson an essayist;
ing different languages, beliefs, opinions: in a word, a
both were poets. But George Washington was a
society without roots, without memories, without
sternly practical man. Yet he believed no less ardently
prejudices, without routines, without common ideas,
in the doctrine of the "new race." "The bosom of
without a national character, yet a hundred times
America," Washington said, "is open
to the op-
happier than our own." What alchemy could make
pressed and persecuted of all Nations and Religions."
this miscellany into a single society?
But immigrants who nestled as clannish groups in the
The answer, Tocqueville concluded, lay in the
national bosom retained the "Language, habits and
commitment of Americans to democracy and self-gov-
principles (good or bad) which they bring with them."
ernment. Civic participation, Tocqueville argued in
Let them therefore settle as individuals, prepared for
Democracy in America, was the great educator and
"intermixture with our people." Then they would be
the great unifier.
24
25
THE DISUNITING OF AMERICA
"A New Race''?
How does it happen that in the United
tor, Gunnar Myrdal of Sweden, called the cluster of
States, where the inhabitants have only re-
ideas, institutions, and habits "the American Creed."
cently immigrated to the land which they
Americans "of all national origins, regions, creeds,
now occupy, and brought neither customs
and colors," Myrdal wrote in 1944, hold in common
nor traditions with them there; where they
"the most explicitly expressed system of general
met one another for the first time with no
ideals" of any country in the West: the ideals of the
previous acquaintance; where, in short, the
essential dignity and equality of all human beings, of
instinctive love of country can scarcely exist;
inalienable rights to freedom, justice, and opportu-
how does it happen that every one takes as
nity.
zealous an interest in the affairs of his town-
The schools teach the principles of the Creed,
ship, his country, and the whole state as if
Myrdal said; the churches preach them; the courts
they were his own? It is because everyone,
hand down judgments in their terms. Myrdal saw the
in his sphere, takes an active part in the gov-
Creed as the bond that links all Americans, including
ernment of society.
nonwhite minorities, and as the spur forever goading
Americans to live up to their principles. "America,"
Immigrants, Tocqueville said, become Americans
Myrdal said, "is continuously struggling for its soul."
through the exercise of the political rights and civic
responsibilities bestowed on them by the Declaration
of Independence and the Constitution.
II
Half a century later, when the next great foreign
commentator on American democracy, James Bryce,
The American Creed had its antecedents, and these
wrote The American Commonwealth, immigration
antecedents lay primarily in a British inheritance as
had vastly increased and diversified. Bryce's Euro-
recast by a century and a half of colonial experience.
pean friends expected that it would take a very long
How really new then was the "new race"? Crève-
time for America to assimilate these "heterogeneous
coeur's vision implied an equal blending of European
elements." What struck Bryce, on the contrary, was
stocks, and Emerson's smelting pot generously added
what had struck Tocqueville: "the amazing solvent
Cossacks, Africans, and Polynesians. In fact, the ma-
power which American institutions, habits, and ideas
jority of the population of the 13 colonies and the
exercise upon newcomers of all races
quickly dis-
weight of its culture came from Great Britain.
solving and assimilating the foreign bodies that are
Having cleared most of North America of their
poured into her mass."
French, Spanish, and Dutch rivals, the British were
A century after Tocqueville, another foreign visi-
free to set the mold. The language of the new nation,
26
27
THE DISUNITING OF AMERICA
"A New Race
its laws, its institutions, its political ideas, its litera-
their alien religions and folkways. Germans and Scan-
ture, its customs, its precepts, its prayers, primarily
dinavians were regarded as clannish in their fidelity to
derived from Britain. Crèvecoeur himself wrote his
the language and customs of the old country. The Ger-
book not in his native French but in his acquired En-
man fondness for beer gardens and jolly Sundays ex-
glish. The "curse of Babel," Melville said, had been
cited puritanical disapproval. The Irish were regarded
revoked in America, "and the language they shall
as shiftless and drunken; moreover, they were pa-
speak shall be the language of Britain."
pists, and their fealty to Rome, it was said, meant they
The smelting pot thus had, unmistakably and in-
could never become loyal Americans. They were sub-
escapably, an Anglocentric flavor. For better or
jected to severe discrimination in employment and
worse, the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant tradition
were despised by genteel society. W. E. B. Du Bois,
was for two centuries-and in crucial respects still
the black scholar, testified that when he grew up in
is-the dominant influence on American culture and
Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in the 1870s, "the
society. This tradition provided the standard to which
racial angle was more clearly defined against the Irish
other immigrant nationalities were expected to con-
than against me."
form, the matrix into which they would be assimi-
As the flow of immigrants increased, so did re-
lated.
sentment among the old-timers. By the 1850s immi-
But as the nineteenth century proceeded, non-
grants made up half the population of New York and
Anglo immigration gathered speed. European peas-
outnumbered native-born Americans in Chicago. Na-
ants who may never have dared go twenty miles from
tivist organizations sprang up, like the Supreme Order
their birthplaces now undertook the unimaginable ad-
of the Star-Spangled Banner and its political front, the
venture of a journey across perilous seas to a strange
American Party, calling for a lengthened naturaliza-
land in search of a new life. The land was indeed
tion process and curtailment of the political rights of
strange; and they could not but feel a need for reas-
the foreign-born. They were referred to as Know-
surance and security. So at first they tended to cling to
Nothings because members of the Supreme Order,
their compatriots and to the language, schools,
when asked about their secret oaths and rituals,
churches they brought with them. These ethnic en-
would reply, "I know nothing."
claves served as staging areas for regrouping and basic
In 1856 the Know-Nothings even ran a former
training before entry was made into the larger and
president, Millard Fillmore, as their presidential can-
riskier American life.
didate. "Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to
These immigrants came principally from western
be pretty rapid," observed Abraham Lincoln. "As a
and northern Europe. The Anglos often disliked the
nation, we began by declaring that 'all men are cre-
newcomers, disdained their uncouth presence, feared
ated equal.' We now practically read it 'all men are
28
29
THE DISUNITING OF AMERICA
"A New Race
created equal, except negroes.' When the Know-
million arrived in the half-century from Lee's surren-
Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created
der at Appomattox to America's entry into the First
equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catho-
World War-more than the total population of the
lics.''
country in 1850. The new immigrants-Italians,
But the Know-Nothing party fell as quickly as it
Poles, Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks, Russians, Jews-
rose. In the century and a half since, despite recurrent
settled mainly in the cities, where their bizarre cus-
xenophobic outbursts, no nativist political party has
toms, dress, languages, and religions excited new mis-
appeared to take its place. However prejudiced white
givings.
Anglo-Saxons were in practice, they were ashamed to
Yet the old faith in the power of Bryce's "amaz-
endorse nativism in principle. Equally important, an
ing solvent" to fulfill Washington's conception of
expanding economy in an underpopulated country re-
Americans as "one people" held fast. However much
quired a steady influx of new hands. Immigration al-
they suffered from social prejudice, the newcomers
leviated the labor shortage, and economic need over-
were not barred from civic participation, and civic
powered moral and aesthetic repugnance.
participation indoctrinated them in the fundamentals
The pre-Civil War immigrants steadily turned
of the American Creed. They altered the ethnic com-
into Americans. "The frontier," in the words of its
position of the country, but they preserved the old
great historian, Frederick Jackson Turner, "promoted
ambition to become Americans.
the formation of a composite nationality
In the
The fastidious Henry James, revisiting his native
crucible of the frontier the immigrants were Ameri-
land in 1904 after many years abroad, was at first dis-
canized, liberated, and fused into a mixed race, En-
mayed by the alien bustle of Ellis Island. But he soon
glish in neither nationality nor characteristics." In the
understood and appreciated "the ceaseless process of
crucible of the cities too assimilation proceeded apace.
the recruiting of our race, of the plenishing of our
Even "the Irish immigrant's son," Bryce reported in
huge national pot-au-feu, of the introduction of fresh
1888, "is an American citizen for all other purposes,
foreign matter into our heterogeneous system."
even if he retain, which he seldom does, the heredi-
Though he wondered at times what immigration
tary Anglophobia."
would do to Americans "ethnically, and thereby
physiognomically, linguistically, personally," though
he saw at times "the 'ethnic' apparition" sitting like a
III
skeleton at the feast, he was more impressed by the
"colossal" machinery that so efficiently converted the
After the Civil War came the so-called "new" immi-
children of immigrants into Americans-the political
gration from southern and eastern Europe. Over 27
and social habit, the common school, the newspaper,
30
31
"A New Race."?
THE DISUNITING OF AMERICA
all so reliably producing what James called "the 'eth-
VERA (softly nestling to him): Jew and Gen-
nic' synthesis." He spoke with something like awe
tile-
about "the cauldron of the 'American' character."
DAVID: Yes, East and West, and North and
New race, one people, smelting pot, pot-au-feu,
South, the palm and the pine, the pole and
cauldron-the original faith received its most cele-
the equator, the crescent and the cross.
brated metaphor a few years after James's visitation.
Here shall they all unite to build the Repub-
In 1908 a play by Israel Zangwill, an English writer of
lic of Man and the Kingdom of God. Ah,
Russian Jewish origin, opened in Washington. The
Vera, what is the glory of Rome and Jerusa-
Melting-Pot tells the story of a young Russian Jewish
lem where all nations and races come to
composer in New York. David Quixano's artistic ambi-
worship and look back, compared with the
tion is to write a symphony expressing the vast, har-
glory of America, where all races and na-
monious interweaving of races in America, and his
tions come to labour and look forward!
personal hope is to overcome racial barriers and
(Far back, like a lonely, guiding star, twin-
marry Vera, a beautiful Christian girl. "America,"
kles over the darkening water the torch of
David cries, "is God's crucible, the great Melting-Pot
the Statue of Liberty. From below comes up
where all the races of Europe are melting and re-
the softened sound of voices and instruments
forming!
Here you stand in your fifty groups, with
joining in 'My Country, 'tis of Thee.' The
your fifty languages
and your fifty blood hatreds.
curtain falls slowly.)
A fig for your feuds and vendettas! Germans and
Frenchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Rus-
When the curtain fell in Washington and the author
sians-into the Crucible with you all! God is making
walked onstage, President Theodore Roosevelt called
the American."
from his box: "That's a great play, Mr. Zangwill,
The climactic scene takes place on the roof gar-
that's a great play." "I'm not a Bernard Shaw man or
den of a lower-Manhattan settlement house. In the
Ibsen man, Mrs. Zangwill," T.R. later told the play-
background the Statue of Liberty gleams in the sun-
wright's wife. "No, this is the stuff." Zangwill subse-
set. The composer, alone with Vera, gestures toward
quently dedicated the printed play to Roosevelt. The
the city:
Melting-Pot played before rapt audiences across the
country. Jane Addams of Hull-House in Chicago ob-
There she lies, the great Melting-Pot-lis-
served that Zangwill had performed "a great service
ten! Can't you hear the roaring and the bub-
to America by reminding us of the high hopes of the
bling? Ah, what a stirring and a seething!
founders of the Republic."
Celt and Latin, Slav and Teuton, Greek and
Syrian,-black and yellow-
32
33
THE DISUNITING OF AMERICA
"A New Race
"who are to be cast into and dissolved in the crucible."
Even some of Anglo-Saxon descent deplored the oblit-
IV
eration of picturesque foreign strains for the sake of
insipid Anglocentric conformity.
Yet even as audiences cheered The Melting-Pot,
The impression grew that the melting pot was a
Zangwill's metaphor raised doubts. One had only to
device to impose Anglocentric images and values
stroll around the great cities, as Basil March did in
upon hapless immigrants-an impression reinforced
William Dean Howell's A Hazard of New Fortunes, to
by the rise of the "Americanization" movement in re-
see that the melting process was incomplete. Ethnic
sponse to the new polyglot immigration. Americaniza-
minorities were forming their own quartiers in which
tion programs, benign in intent, sought to expedite
they lived in their own way-not quite that of the
assimilation by offering immigrants special education
lands they had left but not that of Anglocentric Amer-
in language, citizenship, and American history. The
ica either: Little Italy, Chinatown, Yorkville, Harlem,
outbreak of war in 1914 gave Americanization a more
and so on.
coercive edge. Even presidents as friendly to immi-
Nor was the WASP culture showing great inclina-
grants as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson
tion to ease their access into Anglo-America. And
worried whether in crisis "hyphenated" Americans
when it did, when barriers fell, when new immigrants
might not be more loyal to the old country than to
gained acceptance through money or celebrity, there
their adopted land.
loomed the prospect of intermarriage. In having his
Three days after a German submarine sank the
drama turn on marriage between people of different
Lusitania, Wilson addressed an audience of recently
races and religions, Zangwill, who had himself mar-
naturalized citizens in Philadelphia. "You cannot
ried a Christian, emphasized where the melting pot
become thorough Americans," he told them, "if you
must inexorably lead: to the submergence of separate
think of yourselves in groups. America does not con-
ethnic identities in the new American race.
sist of groups. A man who thinks of himself as belong-
Was such a result desirable? Many immigrants
ing to a particular national group in America has not
doubtless thought so. In the early twentieth century,
yet become an American."
most of their children certainly did. But soon ethnic
"We can have no 'fifty-fifty' allegiance in this
spokesmen began to appear, moved by real concern
country," Theodore Roosevelt said two years later.
for distinctive ethnic values and also by real if uncon-
"Either a man is an American and nothing else, or he
scious vested interest in the preservation of ethnic
is not an American at all." He condemned Americans
constituencies. Jewish reviewers castigated Zangwill:
who saw the world from the standpoint of another
"All the worse for you and me, brother," wrote one,
nation. "We Americans are children of the crucible,"
34
35
"A New Race"?
THE DISUNITING OF AMERICA
T. R. said. "The crucible does not do its work unless it
original ideal of a single society. One critic warned
turns out those cast into it in one national mould."
that cultural pluralism would "result in the Balkaniza-
tion of these United States." But Kallen made his at-
tack on Anglo-centered assimilation at a time when
critics of the melting pot could reasonably assume the
V
solidity of the overarching framework. Because he
considered political unity a given, he put his emphasis
"One national mould"? Not everyone agreed. In 1915
on the protection of cultural diversity.
Horace Kallen, a Jewish-American philosopher, wrote
The gospel of cultural pluralism was at first
an essay for The Nation entitled "Democracy Versus
largely confined to academics, intellectuals, and art-
the Melting-Pot." The melting pot, Kallen argued,
ists. The postwar years saw much popular disenchant-
was valid neither as a fact nor as an ideal. What im-
ment with Europe, a Red Scare directed largely
pressed him was, on the contrary, the persistence of
against aliens, the rise of the anti-Catholic Ku Klux
ethnic groups and their distinctive traditions. Unlike
Klan, and a campaign, realized in the Immigration Act
freely chosen affiliations, Kallen said, the ethnic bond
of 1924, to freeze the ethnic composition of the Ameri-
was both involuntary and immutable. "Men may
can people. The new law established quotas on the
change their clothes, their politics, their wives, their
basis of the national origins of the population in 1890,
religions, their philosophies, to a greater or lesser ex-
thereby drastically reducing the flow from southern
tent: they cannot change their grandfathers. Jews or
and eastern Europe.
Poles or Anglo-Saxons, in order to cease being Jews
The xenophobic nationalism of the 1920s was fol-
or Poles or Anglo-Saxons, would have to cease to
lowed in the 1930s by crises that, on some levels divi-
be
sive, nevertheless strengthened the feeling that all
Ethnic diversity, Kallen observed, enriches
Americans were in the same boat and might as well
American civilization. He saw the nation not as one
pull together. The Great Depression and the Second
people, except in a political and administrative sense,
World War showed the desperate necessity of na-
but rather "as a federation or commonwealth of na-
tional cohesion within the frame of shared national
tional cultures a democracy of nationalities, coop-
ideals. "The principle on which this country was
erating voluntarily and autonomously through com-
founded and by which it has always been governed,"
mon
institutions
a multiplicity in a unity, an
Franklin D. Roosevelt said in 1943, "is that American-
orchestration of mankind." This conception he came
ism is a matter of the mind and heart; Americanism is
to call "cultural pluralism."
not, and never was, a matter of race and ancestry. A
Kallen was unclear on the question of how to en-
good American is one who is loyal to this country and
courage ethnic separatism without weakening the
to our creed of liberty and democracy."
36
37
THE DISUNITING OF AMERICA
"A New Race"?
questered their tribes. They had brought Africans to
America to work their plantations and Chinese to
VI
build their railroads. They had enunciated glittering
generalities of freedom and withheld them from peo-
Gunnar Myrdal in 1944 showed no hesitation in de-
ple of color. Their Constitution protected slavery, and
claring the American Creed the common possession of
their laws made distinctions on the basis of race.
all Americans, even as his great book An American
Though they eventually emancipated the slaves, they
Dilemma provided a magistral analysis of America's
conspired in the reduction of the freedmen to third-
most conspicuous failure to live up to the Creed: the
class citizenship. Their Chinese Exclusion acts cul-
treatment by white Americans of black America.
minated in the total prohibition of Asian immigration
Noble ideals had been pronounced as if for all
in the Immigration Act of 1924. It occurred to damned
Americans, yet in practice they applied only to white
few white Americans in these years that Americans of
people. Most interpretations of the national identity
color were also entitled to the rights and liberties
from Crèvecoeur on were for whites only. Even Hor-
promised by the Constitution.
ace Kallen, the champion of cultural pluralism, made
Yet what Bryce had called "the amazing solvent
no provision in his "democracy of nationalities" for
power" of American institutions and ideas retained its
black or red or brown or yellow Americans.
force, even among those most cruelly oppressed and
Tocqueville was an exception in factoring persons
excluded. Myrdal's polls of Afro-America showed the
of color into the American equation. With his usual
"determination" of blacks "to hold to the American
prescience, he identified racism as the irremediable
Creed." Ralph Bunche, one of Myrdal's collaborators,
flaw in American democracy. This "most grasping na-
observed that every man in the street-black, red,
tion on the globe" had doomed the red man to extinc-
and yellow as well as white-regarded America as the
tion; and the presence of a black population was "the
"land of the free" and the "cradle of liberty." The
most formidable of all the ills that threaten the future
American Creed, Myrdal surmised, meant even more
of the Union." The more optimistic Emerson and
to blacks than to whites, since it was the great means
Zangwill had thrown nonwhite nationalities into their
of pleading their unfulfilled rights. Blacks, new immi-
smelting or melting pots, but Tocqueville saw racist
grants, Jews, and other disadvantaged groups, Myrdal
exclusion as deeply ingrained in the national charac-
said, "could not possibly have invented a system of
ter.
political ideals which better corresponded to their in-
History supported this judgment. White settlers
terests."
had systematically pushed the American Indians
The Second World War gave the Creed new bite.
back, killed their braves, seized their lands, and se-
Hitler's racism forced Americans to look hard at their
38
39
THE DISUNITING OF AMERICA
"A New Race
own racial assumptions. How, in fighting against Hit-
The civil rights revolution provoked new expres-
ler's doctrine of the Master Race abroad, could Amer-
sions of ethnic identity by the now long-resident "new
icans maintain a doctrine of white supremacy at
migration" from southern and eastern Europe-Ital-
home? How, with China a faithful American ally,
ians, Greeks, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians. The
could Americans continue to forbid Chinese to
ethnic enthusiasm was reinforced by the "third-gen-
become American citizens? If the war did not end
eration" effect formulated in Hansen's Law, named
American racism, at least it drove much racial bigotry
after Marcus Lee Hansen, the great pioneer in immi-
underground. The rethinking of racial issues chal-
gration history: "What the son wishes to forget the
lenged the conscience of the majority and raised the
grandson wishes to remember."
consciousness of minorities.
Another factor powerfully nourished the passion
Emboldened by the Creed, blacks organized for
for roots: the waning American optimism about the
equal opportunities in employment, opposed segrega-
nation's prospects. For two centuries Americans had
tion in the armed forces, and fought in their own units
been confident that life would be better for their chil-
on many fronts. After the war, the civil rights revolu-
dren than it was for them. In their exuberant youth,
tion, so long deferred, accelerated black self-reliance.
Americans had disdained the past and, as John Quincy
So did the collapse of white colonialism around the
Adams urged, looked forward to their posterity rather
world and the appearance of independent black
than backward to their ancestors. Amid forebodings of
states.
national decline, Americans now began to look for-
Across America minorities proclaimed their pride
ward less and backward more. The rising cult of eth-
and demanded their rights. Women, the one "minor-
nicity was a symptom of decreasing confidence in the
ity" that in America constituted a numerical majority,
American future.
sought political and economic equality. Jews gained
new solidarity from the holocaust and then from the
establishment of a Jewish state in Israel. Changes in
VII
the immigration law dramatically increased the num-
ber arriving from Hispanic and Asian lands, and, fol-
Ethnic as a word has had a long history. It originally
lowing the general example, they asserted their own
meant "heathen" or "pagan" but soon came to mean
prerogatives. American Indians mobilized to reclaim
anything pertaining to a race or nation. In this sense
rights and lands long since appropriated by the white
everyone, even the Lowells and the Cabots, were eth-
man; their spokesmen even rejected the historic des-
nics. By the time Henry James used the word in The
ignation in which Indians had taken deserved pride
American Scene, however, "ethnic" had acquired an
and named themselves Native Americans.
association with foreignness. As applied since the
40
41
THE DISUNITING OF AMERICA
"A New Race''?
1960s, it definitely means non-Anglo minorities-a re-
In 1974, after testimony from ethnic spokesmen
version to the original sense of being beyond the pale.
denouncing the melting pot as a conspiracy to homog-
The noun ethnicity meanwhile made its modern
enize America, Congress passed the Ethnic Heritage
debut in 1940 in W. Lloyd Warner's Yankee City se-
Studies Program Act-a statute that, by applying the
ries. From its modest beginning in that sociological
ethnic ideology to all Americans, compromised the
study, "ethnicity" moved vigorously to center stage in
historic right of Americans to decide their ethnic iden-
popular discourse. The bicentennial of American in-
tities for themselves. The act ignored those millions of
dependence, the centennial of the Statue of Liberty,
Americans-surely a majority-who refused identifi-
the restoration of Ellis Island-all turned from trib-
cation with any particular ethnic group.
utes to the melting pot into extravaganzas of ethnic
The ethnic upsurge (it can hardly be called a revi-
distinctiveness.
val because it was unprecedented) began as a gesture
The pressure for the new cult of ethnicity came
of protest against the Anglocentric culture. It became
less from the minorities en masse than from their
a cult, and today it threatens to become a counter-
often self-appointed spokesmen. Most ethnics, white
revolution against the original theory of America as
and nonwhite, saw themselves primarily as Ameri-
"one people," a common culture, a single nation.
cans. "The cravings for 'historical identity,' Gunnar
Myrdal said at the height of the ethnic rage, "is not in
any sense a people's movement. Those cravings have
been raised by a few well-established intellectuals,
professors, writers-mostly, I gather, of a third gener-
ation." Few of them, Myrdal thought, made much ef-
fort to talk to their own ethnic groups. He feared,
Myrdal added with a certain contempt, that this
movement was only "upper-class intellectual romanti-
cism."
Still, ideologues, with sufficient publicity and
time, could create audiences. Spokesmen with a
vested interest in ethnic identification repudiated the
ideal of assimilation. The melting pot, it was said, in-
jured people by undermining their self-esteem. It de-
nied them heroes-"role models," in the jargon-
from their own ethnic ancestries. Praise now went to
"the unmeltable ethnics."
42
43