The 1960's Literary War Between Blacks & Jews
James Baldwin vs The Jewish Community (You'd Never See This in Today's Corporate Media)
There was a crazy literary battle between James Baldwin and the Jewish Community, including Norman Podhoretz and others (you’ll see).
Norman Podhoretz is the Godfather of Neoconservatism. Without his ideas there would have been no 9/11. No ‘War on Terror.’ And the Middle East might just be experiencing peace. He grew up in a different time, that is true, but what follows is so very shocking, especially when you find out it was published in mainstream publications Commentary, The New Yorker, The Village Voice, and the New York Times.
I had to dig to find these, so I am publishing them in full. This is a lost way of debate. Long gone with the technological advancements of our day. For the better? You decide. Let’s discuss in the comments section.
But this will be forever “Crystallized in Stone.”
Look, I am copy/pasting these articles side-by-side so we can see the full exchange. There will be words that we don’t use anymore in current society. This shit’s raw and I refuse to censor a single word.
Continue at YOUR OWN RISK.
Thank you, Sincerely,
Management,
February 1963
My Negro Problem—And Ours
One of the Most Controversial and Powerful Essays Published in COMMENTARY
If we—and . . . I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others—do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world.
Two ideas puzzled me deeply as a child growing up in Brooklyn during the 1930’s in what today would be called an integrated neighborhood. One of them was that all Jews were rich; the other was that all Negroes were persecuted. These ideas had appeared in print; therefore they must be true. My own experience and the evidence of my senses told me they were not true, but that only confirmed what a day-dreaming boy in the provinces—for the lower-class neighborhoods of New York belong as surely to the provinces as any rural town in North Dakota—discovers very early: his experience is unreal and the evidence of his senses is not to be trusted. Yet even a boy with a head full of fantasies incongruously synthesized out of Hollywood movies and English novels cannot altogether deny the reality of his own experience—especially when there is so much deprivation in that experience. Nor can he altogether gainsay the evidence of his own senses—especially such evidence of the senses as comes from being repeatedly beaten up, robbed, and in general hated, terrorized, and humiliated.
And so for a long time I was puzzled to think that Jews were supposed to be rich when the only Jews I knew were poor, and that Negroes were supposed to be persecuted when it was the Negroes who were doing the only persecuting I knew about—and doing it, moreover, to me. During the early years of the war, when my older sister joined a left-wing youth organization, I remember my astonishment at hearing her passionately denounce my father for thinking that Jews were worse off than Negroes. To me, at the age of twelve, it seemed very clear that Negroes were better off than Jews—indeed, than all whites. A city boy’s world is contained within three or four square blocks, and in my world it was the whites, the Italians and Jews, who feared the Negroes, not the other way around. The Negroes were tougher than we were, more ruthless, and on the whole they were better athletes. What could it mean, then, to say that they were badly off and that we were more fortunate? Yet my sister’s opinions, like print, were sacred, and when she told me about exploitation and economic forces I believed her. I believed her, but I was still afraid of Negroes. And I still hated them with all my heart.
It had not always been so—that much I can recall from early childhood. When did it start, this fear and this hatred? There was a kindergarten in the local public school, and given the character of the neighborhood, at least half of the children in my class must have been Negroes. Yet I have no memory of being aware of color differences at that age, and I know from observing my own children that they attribute no significance to such differences even when they begin noticing them. I think there was a day—first grade? second grade?—when my best friend Carl hit me on the way home from school and announced that he wouldn’t play with me any more because I had killed Jesus. When I ran home to my mother crying for an explanation, she told me not to pay any attention to such foolishness, and then in Yiddish she cursed the goyim and the Schwartzes, the Schwartzes and the goyim. Carl, it turned out, was a Schwartze, and so was added a third to the categories into which people were mysteriously divided.
Sometimes I wonder whether this is a true memory at all. It is blazingly vivid, but perhaps it never happened: can anyone really remember back to the age of six? There is no uncertainty in my mind, however, about the years that followed. Carl and I hardly ever spoke, though we met in school every day up through the eighth or ninth grade. There would be embarrassed moments of catching his eye or of his catching mine—for whatever it was that had attracted us to one another as very small children remained alive in spite of the fantastic barrier of hostility that had grown up between us, suddenly and out of nowhere. Nevertheless, friendship would have been impossible, and even if it had been possible, it would have been unthinkable. About that, there was nothing anyone could do by the time we were eight years old.
Item: The orphanage across the street is torn down, a city housing project begins to rise in its place, and on the marvelous vacant lot next to the old orphanage they are building a playground. Much excitement and anticipation as Opening Day draws near. Mayor LaGuardia himself comes to dedicate this great gesture of public benevolence. He speaks of neighborliness and borrowing cups of sugar, and of the playground he says that children of all races, colors, and creeds will learn to live together in harmony. A week later, some of us are swatting flies on the playground’s inadequate little ball field. A gang of Negro kids, pretty much our own age, enter from the other side and order us out of the park. We refuse, proudly and indignantly, with superb masculine fervor. There is a fight, they win, and we retreat, half whimpering, half with bravado. My first nauseating experience of cowardice. And my first appalled realization that there are people in the world who do not seem to be afraid of anything, who act as though they have nothing to lose. Thereafter the playground becomes a battleground, sometimes quiet, sometimes the scene of athletic competition between Them and Us. But rocks are thrown as often as baseballs. Gradually we abandon the place and use the streets instead. The streets are safer, though we do not admit this to ourselves. We are not, after all, sissies—that most dreaded epithet of an American boyhood.
Item: I am standing alone in front of the building in which I live. It is late afternoon and getting dark. That day in school the teacher had asked a surly Negro boy named Quentin a question he was unable to answer. As usual I had waved my arm eagerly (“Be a good boy, get good marks, be smart, go to college, become a doctor”) and, the right answer bursting from my lips, I was held up lovingly by the teacher as an example to the class. I had seen Quentin’s face—a very dark, very cruel, very Oriental-looking face—harden, and there had been enough threat in his eyes to make me run all the way home for fear that he might catch me outside.
Now, standing idly in front of my own house, I see him approaching from the project accompanied by his little brother who is carrying a baseball bat and wearing a grin of malicious anticipation. As in a nightmare, I am trapped. The surroundings are secure and familiar, but terror is suddenly present and there is no one around to help. I am locked to the spot. I will not cry out or run away like a sissy, and I stand there, my heart wild, my throat clogged. He walks up, hurls the familiar epithet (“Hey, mo’f—r”), and to my surprise only pushes me. It is a violent push, but not a punch. A push is not as serious as a punch. Maybe I can still back out without entirely losing my dignity. Maybe I can still say, “Hey, c’mon Quentin, whaddya wanna do that for. I dint do nothin’ to you,” and walk away, not too rapidly. Instead, before I can stop myself, I push him back—a token gesture—and I say, “Cut that out, I don’t wanna fight, I ain’t got nothin’ to fight about.” As I turn to walk back into the building, the corner of my eye catches the motion of the bat his little brother has handed him. I try to duck, but the bat crashes colored lights into my head.
The next thing I know, my mother and sister are standing over me, both of them hysterical. My sister—she who was later to join the “progressive” youth organization—is shouting for the police and screaming imprecations at those dirty little black bastards. They take me upstairs, the doctor comes, the police come. I tell them that the boy who did it was a stranger, that he had been trying to get money from me. They do not believe me, but I am too scared to give them Quentin’s name. When I return to school a few days later, Quentin avoids my eyes. He knows that I have not squealed, and he is ashamed. I try to feel proud, but in my heart I know that it was fear of what his friends might do to me that had kept me silent, and not the code of the street.
Item: There is an athletic meet in which the whole of our junior high school is participating. I am in one of the seventh-grade rapid-advance classes, and “segregation” has now set in with a vengeance. In the last three or four years of the elementary school from which we have just graduated, each grade had been divided into three classes, according to “intelligence.” (In the earlier grades the divisions had either been arbitrary or else unrecognized by us as having anything to do with brains.) These divisions by IQ, or however it was arranged, had resulted in a preponderance of Jews in the “1” classes and a corresponding preponderance of Negroes in the “3’s,” with the Italians split unevenly along the spectrum. At least a few Negroes had always made the “l’s,” just as there had always been a few Jewish kids among the “3’s” and more among the “2’s” (where Italians dominated). But the junior high’s rapid-advance class of which I am now a member is overwhelmingly Jewish and entirely white—except for a shy lonely Negro girl with light skin and reddish hair.
The athletic meet takes place in a city-owned stadium far from the school. It is an important event to which a whole day is given over. The winners are to get those precious little medallions stamped with the New York City emblem that can be screwed into a belt and that prove the wearer to be a distinguished personage. I am a fast runner, and so I am assigned the position of anchor man on my class’s team in the relay race. There are three other seventh-grade teams in the race, two of them all Negro, as ours is all white. One of the all-Negro teams is very tall—their anchor man waiting silently next to me on the line looks years older than I am, and I do not recognize him. He is the first to get the baton and crosses the finishing line in a walk. Our team comes in second, but a few minutes later we are declared the winners, for it has been discovered that the anchor man on the first-place team is not a member of the class. We are awarded the medallions, and the following day our home-room teacher makes a speech about how proud she is of us for being superior athletes as well as superior students. We want to believe that we deserve the praise, but we know that we could not have won even if the other class had not cheated.
That afternoon, walking home, I am waylaid and surrounded by five Negroes, among whom is the anchor man of the disqualified team.
“Gimme my medal, mo’f—r,” he grunts. I do not have it with me and I tell him so.
“Anyway, it ain’t yours,” I say foolishly. He calls me a liar on both counts and pushes me up against the wall on which we sometimes play handball.
“Gimme my mo’f—n’ medal,” he says again.
I repeat that I have left it home.
“Le’s search the li’l mo’f—r,” one of them suggests, “he prolly got it hid in his mo’f—n’ pants.”
My panic is now unmanageable. (How many times had I been surrounded like this and asked in soft tones, “Len’ me a nickel, boy.” How many times had I been called a liar for pleading poverty and pushed around, or searched, or beaten up, unless there happened to be someone in the marauding gang like Carl who liked me across that enormous divide of hatred and who would therefore say, “Aaah, c’mon, le’s git someone else, this boy ain’t got no money on ‘im.”)
I scream at them through tears of rage and self-contempt, “Keep your f—n’ filthy lousy black hands off a me! I swear I’ll get the cops.”
This is all they need to hear, and the five of them set upon me. They bang me around, mostly in the stomach and on the arms and shoulders, and when several adults loitering near the candy store down the block notice what is going on and begin to shout, they run off and away.
To the Negroes, my white skin was enough to define me as the enemy, and in a war it is only the uniform that counts and not the person.
I do not tell my parents about the incident. My teammates, who have also been waylaid, each by a gang led by his opposite number from the disqualified team, have had their medallions taken from them, and they never squeal either.
For days, I walk home in terror, expecting to be caught again, but nothing happens. The medallion is put away into a drawer, never to be worn by anyone
Obviously experiences like these have always been a common feature of childhood life in working-class and immigrant neighborhoods, and Negroes do not necessarily figure in them. Wherever, and in whatever combination, they have lived together in the cities, kids of different groups have been at war, beating up and being beaten up: micks against kikes against wops against spics against pollocks. And even relatively homogeneous areas have not been spared the warring of the young: one block against another, one gang (called in my day, in a pathetic effort at gentility, an “S.A.C.,” or social-athletic club) against another. But the Negro-white conflict had—and no doubt still has—a special intensity and was conducted with a ferocity unmatched by intramural white battling.
Why, why should it have been so different as between the Negroes and us? How was it borne in upon us so early, white and black alike, that we were enemies beyond any possibility of reconciliation? Why did we hate one another so?
I suppose if I tried, I could answer those questions more or less adequately from the perspective of what I have since learned. I could draw upon James Baldwin—what better witness is there?—to describe the sense of entrapment that poisons the soul of the Negro with hatred for the white man whom he knows to be his jailer. On the other side, if I wanted to understand how the white man comes to hate the Negro, I could call upon the psychologists who have spoken of the guilt that white Americans feel toward Negroes and that turns into hatred for lack of acknowledging itself as guilt. These are plausible answers and certainly there is truth in them. Yet when I think back upon my own experience of the Negro and his of me, I find myself troubled and puzzled, much as I was as a child when I heard that all Jews were rich and all Negroes persecuted. How could the Negroes in my neighborhood have regarded the whites across the street and around the corner as jailers? On the whole, the whites were not so poor as the Negroes, but they were quite poor enough, and the years were years of Depression. As for white hatred of the Negro, how could guilt have had anything to do with it? What share had these Italian and Jewish immigrants in the enslavement of the Negro? What share had they—downtrodden people themselves breaking their own necks to eke out a living—in the exploitation of the Negro.
No, I cannot believe that we hated each other back there in Brooklyn because they thought of us as jailers and we felt guilty toward them. But does it matter, given the fact that we all went through an unrepresentative confrontation? I think it matters profoundly, for if we managed the job of hating each other so well without benefit of the aids to hatred that are supposedly at the root of this madness everywhere else, it must mean that the madness is not yet properly understood. I am far from pretending that I understand it, but I would insist that no view of the problem will begin to approach the truth unless it can account for a case like the one I have been trying to describe. Are the elements of any such view available to us?
At least two, I would say, are. One of them is a point we frequently come upon in the work of James Baldwin, and the other is a related point always stressed by psychologists who have studied the mechanisms of prejudice. Baldwin tells us that one of the reasons Negroes hate the white man is that the white man refuses to look at him: the Negro knows that in white eyes all Negroes are alike; they are faceless and therefore not altogether human. The psychologists, in their turn, tell us that the white man hates the Negro because he tends to project those wild impulses that he fears in himself onto an alien group which he then punishes with his contempt. What Baldwin does not tell us, however, is that the principle of facelessness is a two-way street and can operate in both directions with no difficulty at all. Thus, in my neighborhood in Brooklyn, I was as faceless to the Negroes as they were to me, and if they hated me because I never looked at them, I must also have hated them for never looking at me. To the Negroes, my white skin was enough to define me as the enemy, and in a war it is only the uniform that counts and not the person.
Not so long ago, it used to be asked of white liberals, “Would you like your sister to marry one?” When I was a boy and my sister was still unmarried, I would certainly have said no to that question.
So with the mechanism of projection that the psychologists talk about: it too works in both directions at once. There is no question that the psychologists are right about what the Negro represents symbolically to the white man.
For me as a child the life lived on the other side of the playground and down the block on Ralph Avenue seemed the very embodiment of the values of the street—free, independent, reckless, brave, masculine, erotic. I put the word “erotic” last, though it is usually stressed above all others, because in fact it came last, in consciousness as in importance.
What mainly counted for me about Negro kids of my own age was that they were “bad boys.” There were plenty of bad boys among the whites—this was, after all, a neighborhood with a long tradition of crime as a career open to aspiring talents—but the Negroes were really bad, bad in a way that beckoned to one, and made one feel inadequate.
We all went home every day for a lunch of spinach-and-potatoes; they roamed around during lunch hour, munching on candy bars. In winter we had to wear itchy woolen hats and mittens and cumbersome galoshes; they were bare-headed and loose as they pleased.
We rarely played hookey, or got into serious trouble in school, for all our street-corner bravado; they were defiant, forever staying out (to do what delicious things?), forever making disturbances in class and in the halls, forever being sent to the principal and returning uncowed. But most important of all, they were tough; beautifully, enviably tough, not giving a damn for anyone or anything. To hell with the teacher, the truant officer, the cop; to hell with the whole of the adult world that held us in its grip and that we never had the courage to rebel against except sporadically and in petty ways.
This is what I saw and envied and feared in the Negro: this is what finally made him faceless to me, though some of it, of course, was actually there. (The psychologists also tell us that the alien group which becomes the object of a projection will tend to respond by trying to live up to what is expected of them.) But what, on his side, did the Negro see in me that made me faceless to him?
Did he envy me my lunches of spinach-and-potatoes and my itchy woolen caps and my prudent behavior in the face of authority, as I envied him his noon-time candy bars and his bare head in winter and his magnificent rebelliousness?
Did those lunches and caps spell for him the prospect of power and riches in the future? Did they mean that there were possibilities open to me that were denied to him? Very likely they did. But if so, one also supposes that he feared the impulses within himself toward submission to authority no less powerfully than I feared the impulses in myself toward defiance.
If I represented the jailer to him, it was not because I was oppressing him or keeping him down: it was because I symbolized for him the dangerous and probably pointless temptation toward greater repression, just as he symbolized for me the equally perilous tug toward greater freedom. I personally was to be rewarded for this repression with a new and better life in the future, but how many of my friends paid an even higher price and were given only gall in return.
I know now, as I did not know when I was a child, that power is on my side, that the police are working for me and not for them.
We have it on the authority of James Baldwin that all Negroes hate whites. I am trying to suggest that on their side all whites—all American whites, that is—are sick in their feelings about Negroes. There are Negroes, no doubt, who would say that Baldwin is wrong, but I suspect them of being less honest than he is, just as I suspect whites of self-deception who tell me they have no special feeling toward Negroes. Special feelings about color are a contagion to which white Americans seem susceptible even when there is nothing in their background to account for the susceptibility. Thus, everywhere we look today in the North, we find the curious phenomenon of white middle-class liberals with no previous personal experience of Negroes—people to whom Negroes have always been faceless in virtue rather than faceless in vice—discovering that their abstract commitment to the cause of Negro rights will not stand the test of a direct confrontation. We find such people fleeing in droves to the suburbs as the Negro population in the inner city grows; and when they stay in the city we find them sending their children to private school rather than to the “integrated” public school in the neighborhood. We find them resisting the demand that gerrymandered school districts be re-zoned for the purpose of overcoming de facto segregation; we find them judiciously considering whether the Negroes (for their own good, of course) are not perhaps pushing too hard; we find them clucking their tongues over Negro militancy; we find them speculating on the question of whether there may not, after all, be something in the theory that the races are biologically different; we find them saying that it will take a very long time for Negroes to achieve full equality, no matter what anyone does; we find them deploring the rise of black nationalism and expressing the solemn hope that the leaders of the Negro community will discover ways of containing the impatience and incipient violence within the Negro ghettos.1
What happened to me, from Brooklyn, who grew up fearing and envying and hating Negroes? Now that Brooklyn is behind me, do I fear them and envy them and hate them still? The answer is yes, but not in the same proportions and certainly not in the same way.
But that is by no means the whole story; there is also the phenomenon of what Kenneth Rexroth once called “crow-jimism.” There are the broken-down white boys like Vivaldo Moore in Baldwin’s Another Country who go to Harlem in search of sex or simply to brush up against something that looks like primitive vitality, and who are so often punished by the Negroes they meet for crimes that they would have been the last ever to commit and of which they themselves have been as sorry victims as any of the Negroes who take it out on them.
There are the writers and intellectuals and artists who romanticize Negroes and pander to them, assuming a guilt that is not properly theirs. And there are all the white liberals who permit Negroes to blackmail them into adopting a double standard of moral judgment, and who lend themselves—again assuming the responsibility for crimes they never committed—to cunning and contemptuous exploitation by Negroes they employ or try to befriend.
“Crow-Jimism”- In the 1950s, the poet Kenneth Rexroth coined the term “Crow-Jimism.” He was referring to the belief among many white liberals that Negroes, as they were then called, could do no wrong and were in many ways superior to whites. Rexroth recognized that “Crow-Jimism” was an inverse form of racism, which didn’t prevent it from spreading.
And what about me? What kind of feelings do I have about Negroes today? What happened to me, from Brooklyn, who grew up fearing and envying and hating Negroes? Now that Brooklyn is behind me, do I fear them and envy them and hate them still? The answer is yes, but not in the same proportions and certainly not in the same way. I now live on the upper west side of Manhattan, where there are many Negroes and many Puerto Ricans, and there are nights when I experience the old apprehensiveness again, and there are streets that I avoid when I am walking in the dark, as there were streets that I avoided when I was a child. I find that I am not afraid of Puerto Ricans, but I cannot restrain my nervousness whenever I pass a group of Negroes standing in front of a bar or sauntering down the street. I know now, as I did not know when I was a child, that power is on my side, that the police are working for me and not for them. And knowing this I feel ashamed and guilty, like the good liberal I have grown up to be. Yet the twinges of fear and the resentment they bring and the self-contempt they arouse are not to be gainsaid.
I know it from the insane rage that can stir in me at the thought of Negro anti-Semitism; I know it from the disgusting prurience that can stir in me at the sight of a mixed couple;
But envy? Why envy? And hatred? Why hatred? Here again the intensities have lessened and everything has been complicated and qualified by the guilts and the resulting over-compensations that are the heritage of the enlightened middle-class world of which I am now a member. Yet just as in childhood I envied Negroes for what seemed to me their superior masculinity, so I envy them today for what seems to me their superior physical grace and beauty. I have come to value physical grace very highly, and I am now capable of aching with all my being when I watch a Negro couple on the dance floor, or a Negro playing baseball or basketball. They are on the kind of terms with their own bodies that I should like to be on with mine, and for that precious quality they seem blessed to me.
The hatred I still feel for Negroes is the hardest of all the old feelings to face or admit, and it is the most hidden and the most overlarded by the conscious attitudes into which I have succeeded in willing myself. It no longer has, as for me it once did, any cause or justification (except, perhaps, that I am constantly being denied my right to an honest expression of the things I earned the right as a child to feel). How, then, do I know that this hatred has never entirely disappeared? I know it from the insane rage that can stir in me at the thought of Negro anti-Semitism; I know it from the disgusting prurience that can stir in me at the sight of a mixed couple; and I know it from the violence that can stir in me whenever I encounter that special brand of paranoid touchiness to which many Negroes are prone.
This, then, is where I am; it is not exactly where I think all other white liberals are, but it cannot be so very far away either. And it is because I am convinced that we white Americans are—for whatever reason, it no longer matters—so twisted and sick in our feelings about Negroes that I despair of the present push toward integration. If the pace of progress were not a factor here, there would perhaps be no cause for despair: time and the law and even the international political situation are on the side of the Negroes, and ultimately, therefore, victory—of a sort, anyway—must come. But from everything we have learned from observers who ought to know, pace has become as important to the Negroes as substance. They want equality and they want it now, and the white world is yielding to their demand only as much and as fast as it is absolutely being compelled to do. The Negroes know this in the most concrete terms imaginable, and it is thus becoming increasingly difficult to buy them off with rhetoric and promises and pious assurances of support. And so within the Negro community we find more and more people declaring—as Harold R. Isaacs recently put it in these pages2—that they want out: people who say that integration will never come, or that it will take a hundred or a thousand years to come, or that it will come at too high a price in suffering and struggle for the pallid and sodden life of the American middle class that at the very best it may bring.
The most numerous, influential, and dangerous movement that has grown out of Negro despair with the goal of integration is, of course, the Black Muslims. This movement, whatever else we may say about it, must be credited with one enduring achievement: it inspired James Baldwin to write an essay3 which deserves to be placed among the classics of our language. Everything Baldwin has ever been trying to tell us is distilled here into a statement of overwhelming persuasiveness and prophetic magnificence. Baldwin’s message is and always has been simple. It is this: “Color is not a human or personal reality; it is a political reality.” And Baldwin’s demand is correspondingly simple: color must be forgotten, lest we all be smited with a vengeance “that does not really depend on, and cannot really be executed by, any person or organization, and that cannot be prevented by any police force or army: historical vengeance, a cosmic vengeance based on the law that we recognize when we say, ‘Whatever goes up must come down.’”
The Black Muslims Baldwin portrays as a sign and a warning to the intransigent white world. They come to proclaim how deep is the Negro’s disaffection with the white world and all its works, and Baldwin implies that no American Negro can fail to respond somewhere in his being to their message: that the white man is the devil, that Allah has doomed him to destruction, and that the black man is about to inherit the earth. Baldwin of course knows that this nightmare inversion of the racism from which the black man has suffered can neither win nor even point to the neighborhood in which victory might be located. For in his view the neighborhood of victory lies in exactly the opposite direction: the transcendence of color through love.
Yet the tragic fact is that love is not the answer to hate—not in the world of politics, at any rate. Color is indeed a political rather than a human or a personal reality and if politics (which is to say power) has made it into a human and a personal reality, then only politics (which is to say power) can unmake it once again. But the way of politics is slow and bitter, and as impatience on the one side is matched by a setting of the jaw on the other, we move closer and closer to an explosion and blood may yet run in the streets.
Will this madness in which we are all caught never find a resting-place? Is there never to be an end to it? In thinking about the Jews, I have often wondered whether their survival as a distinct group was worth one hair on the head of a single infant. Did the Jews have to survive so that six million innocent people should one day be burned in the ovens of Auschwitz? It is a terrible question and no one, not God himself, could ever answer it to my satisfaction. And when I think about the Negroes in America and about the image of integration as a state in which the Negroes would take their rightful place as another of the protected minorities in a pluralistic society, I wonder whether they really believe in their hearts that such a state can actually be attained, and if so why they should wish to survive as a distinct group. I think I know why the Jews once wished to survive (though I am less certain as to why we still do): they not only believed that God had given them no choice, but they were tied to a memory of past glory and a dream of imminent redemption. What does the American Negro have that might correspond to this? His past is a stigma, his color is a stigma, and his vision of the future is the hope of erasing the stigma by making color irrelevant, by making it disappear as a fact of consciousness.
*Miscegenation-marriage or admixture between people who are members of different races or ethnicities. (I had to Google it, I didn’t know what it meant)
I share this hope, but I cannot see how it will ever be realized unless color does in fact disappear: and that means not integration, it means assimilation, it means—let the brutal word come out—miscegenation. The Black Muslims, like their racist counterparts in the white world, accuse the “so-called Negro leaders” of secretly pursuing miscegenation as a goal.
The racists are wrong, but I wish they were right, for I believe that the wholesale merging of the two races is the most desirable alternative for everyone concerned. I am not claiming that this alternative can be pursued programmatically or that it is immediately feasible as a solution; obviously there are even greater barriers to its achievement than to the achievement of integration. What I am saying, however, is that in my opinion the Negro problem can be solved in this country in no other way
I have told the story of my own twisted feelings about Negroes here, and of how they conflict with the moral convictions I have since developed, in order to assert that such feelings must be acknowledged as honestly as possible so that they can be controlled and ultimately disregarded in favor of the convictions. It is wrong for a man to suffer because of the color of his skin. Beside that clichéd proposition of liberal thought, what argument can stand and be respected? If the arguments are the arguments of feeling, they must be made to yield; and one’s own soul is not the worst place to begin working a huge social transformation. Not so long ago, it used to be asked of white liberals, “Would you like your sister to marry one?” When I was a boy and my sister was still unmarried, I would certainly have said no to that question. But now I am a man, my sister is already married, and I have daughters. If I were to be asked today whether I would like a daughter of mine “to marry one,” I would have to answer: “No, I wouldn’t like it at all. I would rail and rave and rant and tear my hair. And then I hope I would have the courage to curse myself for raving and ranting, and to give her my blessing. How dare I withhold it at the behest of the child I once was and against the man I now have a duty to be?
1 For an account of developments like these, see “The White Liberal’s Retreat” by Murray Friedman in the January 1963 Atlantic Monthly.
2 “Integration and the Negro Mood,” December 1962.
3 Originally published last November in the New Yorker under the title “Letter From a Region in My Mind,” it has just been reprinted (along with a new introduction) by Dial Press under the title The Fire Next Time (128 pp., $3.50).
James Baldwin, right after receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature wrote the following editorial. In response to the above by Norman Podhoretz, father of John Podhoretz — The Neocon God & Godfather — in Commentary Magazine:
April 9, 1967
Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They're Anti-White
By JAMES BALDWIN
When we were growing up in Harlem our demoralizing series of landlords were Jewish, and we hated them.
We hated them because they were terrible landlords, and did not take care of the building. A coat of paint, a broken window, a stopped sink, a stopped toilet, a sagging floor, a broken ceiling, a dangerous stairwell, the question of garbage disposal, the question of heat and cold, of roaches and rats—all questions of life and death for the poor, and especially for those with children—we had to cope with all of these as best we could. Our parents were lashed to futureless jobs, in order to pay the outrageous rent. We knew that the landlord treated us this way only because we were colored, and he knew that we could not move out.
but we feared black cops even more than white cops, because the black cop had to work so much harder—on your head—to prove to himself and his colleagues that he was not like all the other niggers.
The grocer was a Jew, and being in debt to him was very much like being in debt to the company store.
The butcher was a Jew and, yes, we certainly paid more for bad cuts of meat than other New York citizens, and we very often carried insults home, along with the meat.
We bought our clothes from a Jew and, sometimes, our secondhand shoes, and the pawnbroker was a Jew—perhaps we hated him most of all. The merchants along 125th Street were Jewish—at least many of them were;
I don't know if Grant's or Woolworth's are Jewish names—and I well remember that it was only after the Harlem riot of 1935 that Negroes were allowed to earn a little money in some of the stores where they spent so much.
Not all of these white people were cruel—on the contrary, I remember some who were certainly as thoughtful as the bleak circumstances allowed—but all of them were exploiting us, and that was why we hated them.
But we also hated the welfare workers, of whom some were white, some colored, some Jewish, and some not.
We hated the policemen, not all of whom were Jewish, and some of whom were black. The poor, of whatever color, do not trust the law and certainly have no reason so, and God knows we didn't. “If you must call a cop,” we said in those days, “for God's sake, make sure it's a white one.”
We did not feel that the cops were protecting us, for we knew too much about the reasons for the kinds of crimes committed in the ghetto; but we feared black cops even more than white cops, because the black cop had to work so much harder—on your head—to prove to himself and his colleagues that he was not like all the other niggers.
We hated many of our teachers at school because they so clearly despised us and treated us like dirty, ignorant savages. Not all of these teachers were Jewish. Some of them, alas, were black. I used to carry my father's union dues downtown for him sometimes. I hated everyone in that den of thieves, especially the man who took the envelope from me, the envelope which contained my father's hard-earned money, that envelope which contained bread for his children. “Thieves,” I thought, “every one of you!” And I know I was right about that, and I have not changed my mind. But whether or not all these people were Jewish, I really do not know.
The Army may or may not be controlled by Jews; I don't know, and I don't care. I know that when I worked for the Army, I hated all my bosses because of the way they treated me.
I don't know if the post office is Jewish, but I would certainly dread working for it again.
It is true that many Jews use, shamelessly, the slaughter of the 6,000,000 by the Third Reich as proof that they cannot be bigots—or in the hope of not being held responsible for their bigotry.
It is galling to be told by a Jew whom you know to be exploiting you that he cannot possibly be doing what you know he is doing because he is a Jew.
I don't know if Wanamaker's was Jewish, but I didn't like running their elevator and I didn't like any of their customers.
I don't know if Nabisco is Jewish, but I didn't like clearing their basement.
I don't know if Riker's is Jewish, but I didn't like scrubbing their floors.
I don't know if the big, white bruiser who thought it was fun to call me “Shine” was Jewish, but I know I tried to kill him—and he stopped calling me “Shine.”
I don't know if the last taxi driver who refused to stop for me was Jewish, but I know I hoped he'd break his neck before he got home.
And I don't think that General Electric or General Motors or R.C.A. or Con Edison or Mobil Oil or Coca Cola or Pepsi-Cola or Firestone or the Board of Education or the textbook industry or Hollywood or Broadway or television—or Wall Street, Sacramento, Dallas, Atlanta, Albany or Washington—are controlled by Jews.
I think they are controlled by Americans, and the American Negro situation is a direct result of this control. And anti-Semitism among Negroes, inevitable as it may be, and understandable, alas, as it is, does not operate to menace this control, but only to confirm it. It is not the Jew who controls the American drama. It is the Christian.
The root of anti-Semitism among Negroes is, ironically, the relationship of colored peoples—all over the globe—to the Christian world. This is a fact which may be difficult to grasp, not only for the ghetto's most blasted and embittered inhabitants, but also for many Jews, to say nothing of many Christians. But it is a fact, and it will not ameliorate—in fact, it can only be aggravated—by the adoption, on the part of colored people now, of the most devastating of the Christian vices.
Of course, it is true, and I am not so naive as not to know it, that many Jews despise Negroes, even as their Aryan brothers do. (There are also Jews who despise Jews, even as their Aryan brothers do.)
It is true that many Jews use, shamelessly, the slaughter of the 6,000,000 by the Third Reich as proof that they cannot be bigots—or in the hope of not being held responsible for their bigotry. It is galling to be told by a Jew whom you know to be exploiting you that he cannot possibly be doing what you know he is doing because he is a Jew.
It is bitter to watch the Jewish storekeeper locking up his store for the night, and going home. Going, with your money in his pocket, to a clean neighborhood, miles from you, which you will not be allowed to enter.
Nor can it help the relationship between most Negroes and most Jews when part of this money is donated to civil rights.
In the light of what is now known as the white backlash, this money can be looked on as conscience money merely, as money given to keep the Negro happy in his place, and out of white neighborhoods.
One does not wish, in short, to be told by an American Jew that his suffering is as great as the American Negro's suffering. It isn't, and one knows that it isn't from the very tone in which he assures you that it is.
For one thing, the American Jew's endeavor, whatever it is, has managed to purchase a relative safety for his children, and a relative future for them. This is more than your father's endeavor was able to do for you, and more than your endeavor has been able to do for your children. There are days when it can be exceedingly trying to deal with certain white musical or theatrical celebrities who may or may not be Jewish--what, in show business, is a name?--but whose preposterous incomes cause one to think bitterly of the fates of such people as Beside Smith or King Oliver or Ethel Waters. Furthermore, the Jew can be proud of his suffering, or at least not ashamed of it. His history and his suffering do not begin in America, where black men have been taught to be ashamed of everything, especially their suffering.
The Jew's suffering is recognized as part of the moral history of the world and the Jew is recognized as a contributor so the world's history: this is not true for the blacks. Jewish history, whether or not one can say it is honored, is certainly known: the black history has been blasted, maligned and despised. The Jew is a white man, and when white men rise up against oppression, they are heroes: when black men rise, they have reverted to their native savagery. The uprising in the Warsaw ghetto was not described as a riot, nor were the participants maligned as hoodlums: the boys and girls in Watts and Harlem are thoroughly aware of this, and it certainly contributes to their attitude toward the Jews.
But, of course, my comparison of Watts and Harlem with the Warsaw ghetto will be immediately dismissed as outrageous. There are many reasons for this, and one of them is that while America loves white heroes, armed to the teeth, it cannot abide bad niggers. But the bottom reason is that it contradicts the American dream to suggest that any gratuitous, unregenerate horror can happen here. We make our mistakes, we like to think, but we are getting better all the time.
Well, to state it mildly, this is a point of view which any sane or honest Negro will have some difficulty holding. Very few Americans, and this includes very few Jews, wish to believe that the American Negro situation is as desperate and dangerous as it is. Very few Americans, and very few Jews, have the courage to recognize that the America of which they dream and boast is not the America in which the Negro lives. It is a country which the Negro has never seen. And this is not merely a matter of bad faith on the part of Americans. Bad faith, God knows, abounds, but there is something in the American dream sadder and more wistful than that.
No one, I suppose, would dream of accusing the late Moss Hart of bad faith. Near the end of his autobiography, “Act One,” just after he has become a successful playwright, and is riding home to Brooklyn for the first time in a cab, he reflects:
“I started through the taxi window at a pinch-faced 10-year-old hurrying down the steps on some morning errand before school, and I thought of myself hurrying down the streets on so many gray mornings out of a doorway and a house much the same as this one. My mind jumped backward in time and then whirled forward, like a many-faceted prism—flashing our old neighborhood in front of me, the house, the steps, the candy store—and then shifted to the skyline I had just passed by, the opening last night, and the notices I still hugged tightly under my arm. It was possible in this wonderful city for that nameless little boy—for any of its millions—to have a decent chance to scale the walls and achieve what they wished. Wealth, rank, or an imposing name counted for nothing. The only credential the city asked was the boldness to dream.”
It is true that two wrongs don't make a right, as we love to point out to the people we have wronged.
But this is not true for the Negro, and not even the most successful or fatuous Negro can really feel this way. His journey will have cost him too much, and the price will be revealed in his estrangement—unless he is very rare and lucky—from other colored people, and in his continuing isolation from whites. Furthermore, for every Negro boy who achieves such a taxi ride, hundreds, at least, will have perished around him, and not because they lacked the boldness to dream, but because the Republic despises their dreams.
Perhaps one must be in such a situation in order really to understand what it is. But if one is a Negro in Watts or Harlem, and knows why one is there, and knows that one has been sentenced to remain there for life, one can't but look on the American state and the American people as one's oppressors.
For that, after all, is exactly what they are. They have corralled you where you are for their ease and their profit, and are doing all in their power to prevent you from finding out enough about yourself to be able to rejoice in the only life you have.
One does not wish to believe that the American Negro can feel this way, but that is because the Christian world has been misled by its own rhetoric and narcoticized by its own power.
For many generations the natives of the Belgian Congo, for example, endured the most unspeakable atrocities at the hands of the Belgians, at the hands of Europe. Their suffering occurred in silence. This suffering was not indignantly reported in the Western press, as the suffering of white men would have been. The suffering of this native was considered necessary, alas, for European, Christian dominance. And, since the world at large knew virtually nothing concerning the suffering of this native, when he rose, he was not hailed as a hero fighting for his land, but condemned as a savage, hungry for white flesh.
The Christian world considered Belgium to be a civilized country; but there was not only no reason for the Congolese to feel that way about Belgium; there was no possibility that they could.
What will the Christian world, which is so uneasily silent now, say on that day which is coming when the black native of South Africa begins to massacre the masters who have massacred him so long? It is true that two wrongs don't make a right, as we love to point out to the people we have wronged. But one wrong doesn’t make a right, either.
People who have been wronged will attempt to right the wrong; they would not be people if they didn't.
They can rarely afford to be scrupulous about the means they will use. They will use such means as come to hand. Neither, in the main, will they distinguish one oppressor from another, nor see through to the root principle of their oppression.
In the American context, the most ironical thing about Negro anti-Semitism is that the Negro is really condemning the Jew for having become an American white man—for having become, in effect, a Christian.
The Jew profits from his status in America, and he must expect Negroes to distrust him for it. The Jew does not realize that the credential he offers, the fact that he has been despised and slaughtered, does not increase the Negro's understanding. It increases the Negro's rage.
For it is not here, and not now, that the Jew is being slaughtered, and he is never despised, here, as the Negro is, because he is an American. The Jewish travail occurred across the sea and America rescued him from the house of bondage. But America is the house of bondage for the Negro, and no country can rescue him. What happens to the Negro here happens to him because he is an American.
When an African is mistreated here, for example, he has recourse to his embassy. The American Negro who is, let us say, falsely arrested, will find it nearly impossible to bring his case to court. And this means that because he is a native of this country—”one of your niggers”—he has, effectively, no recourse and no place to go, either within the country or without.
He is a pariah in his own country and a stranger in the world. This is what it means to have one's history and one's ties to one's ancestral homeland totally destroyed.
This is not what happened to the Jew and, therefore, he has allies in the world. That is one of the reasons no one has ever seriously suggested that the Jew be nonviolent. There was no need for him to be nonviolent. On the contrary, the Jewish battle for Israel was saluted as the most tremendous heroism. How can the Negro fail to suspect that the Jew is really saying that the Negro deserves his situation because he has not been heroic enough?
It is doubtful that the Jews could have won their battle had the Western powers been opposed to them. But such allies as the Negro may have are themselves struggling for their freedom against tenacious and tremendous Western opposition.
This leaves the American Negro, who technically represents the Western nations, in a cruelly ambiguous position. In this situation, it is not the American Jew who can either instruct him or console him. On the contrary, the American Jew knows just enough about this situation to be unwilling to imagine it again.
Finally, what the American Negro interprets the Jew as saying is that one must take the historical, the impersonal point of view concerning one's life and concerning the lives of one's kinsmen and children. "We suffered, too," one is told, "but we came through, and so will you. In time."
In whose time? One has only one life. One may become reconciled to the ruin of one's children's lives is not reconciliation. It is the sickness unto death. And one knows that such counselors are not present on these shores by following this advice. They arrived here out of the same effort the American Negro is making: they wanted to live, and not tomorrow, but today.
Now, since the Jew is living here, like all the other white men living here, he wants the Negro to wait.
And the Jew sometimes—often—does this in the name of his Jewishness, which is a terrible mistake. He has absolutely no relevance in this context as a Jew. His only relevance is that he is white and values his color and uses it.
He is singled out by Negroes not because he acts differently from other white men, but because he doesn't. His major distinction is given him by that history of Christendom, which has so successfully victimized both Negroes and Jews. And he is playing in Harlem the role assigned him by Christians long ago: he is doing their dirty work.
No more than the good white people of the South, who are really responsible for the bombings and lynchings, are ever present at these events, do the people who really own Harlem ever appear at the door to collect the rent. One risks libel by trying to spell this out too precisely, but Harlem is really owned by a curious coalition which includes some churches, some universities, some Christians, some Jews, and some Negroes.
The capital of New York is Albany, which is not a Jewish state, and the Moses they sent us, whatever his ancestry, certainly failed to get the captive children free.
A genuinely candid confrontation between American Negroes and American Jews would certainly prove of inestimable value. But the aspirations of the country are wretchedly middle-class, and the middle class can never afford candor.
What is really at question is the American way of life.
What is really at question is whether Americans already have an identity or are still sufficiently flexible to achieve one.
This is a painfully complicated question, for what now appears to be the American identity is really a bewildering and sometimes demoralizing blend of nostalgia and opportunism. For example, the Irish who march on St. Patrick's Day, do not, after all, have any desire to go back to Ireland.
They do not intend to go back to live there, though they may dream of going back there to die. Their lives, in the meanwhile, are here, but they cling, at the same time, to those credentials forged in the Old World, credentials which cannot be duplicated here, credentials which the American Negro does not have. These credentials are the abandoned history of Europe—the abandoned and romanticized history of Europe.
The Russian Jews here have no desire to return to Russia either, and they have not departed in great clouds for Israel. But they have the authority of knowing it is there.
The Americans are no longer Europeans, but they are still living, at least as they imagine, on that capital.
I also know that if today I refuse to hate Jews, or anybody else, it is because I know how it feels to be hated.
That capital also belongs, however, to the slaves who created it for Europe and who created it here; and in that sense, the Jew must see that he is part of the history of Europe, and will always be so considered by the descendant of the slave. Always, that is, unless he himself is willing to prove that this judgment is inadequate and unjust. This is precisely what is demanded of all the other white men in this country, and the Jew will not find it easier than anybody else?
The ultimate hope for a genuine black-white dialogue in this country lies in the recognition that the driven European serf merely created another serf here, and created him on the basis of color. No one can deny that that Jew was a party to this, but it is senseless to assert that this was because of his Jewishness. One can be disappointed in the Jew if one is romantic enough—for not having learned from history; but if people did learn from history, history would be very different.
All racist positions baffle and appall me. None of us are that different from one another, neither that much better nor that much worse. Furthermore, when one takes a position, one must attempt to see where that position inexorably leads. One must ask oneself, if one decides that black or white or Jewish people are, by definition, to be despised, is one willing to murder a black or white or Jewish baby: for that is where the position leads.
And if one blames the Jew for having become a white American, one may perfectly well, if one is black, be speaking out of nothing more than envy.
If one blames the Jew for not having been ennobled by oppression, one is not indicting the single figure of the Jew but the entire human race, and one is also making a quite breathtaking claim for oneself. I know that my own oppression did not ennoble me, not even when I thought of myself as a practicing Christian. I also know that if today I refuse to hate Jews, or anybody else, it is because I know how it feels to be hated. I learned this from Christians, and I ceased to practice what the Christians practiced.
The crisis taking place in the world, and in the minds and hearts of black men everywhere, is not produced by the star of David, but by the old, rugged Roman cross on which Christendom's most celebrated Jew was murdered. And not by Jews.
—James Baldwin, New York Times Magazine
Response to James Baldwin in New York Times Magazine in the following issue. As much controversy as Podhoretz piece created, as did James Baldwin’s.
Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They Want a Scapegoat; A Reply to James Baldwin
By Robert Gordis
April 23, 1967,
Section “The New York Times Magazine,” Page 235
For decades Negroes have been battling energetically to destroy the white man's various stereotypes of the Negro as shiftless, irresponsible, happy-go-lucky and contented with his inferior lot. Nevertheless, Baldwin does not hesitate to set up a series of stereotypes of the Jew in Harlem in order to explain the anti-Jewish prejudice of Negroes.
THE brilliant Negro writer, James Baldwin, wrote a characteristically articulate and frank article on Negro anti-Semitism in The New York Times Magazine two weeks ago, His, thesis was clearly expressed in the headline: "Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They're Anti-White." In a prefatory note we are informed that Mr. Baldwin resigned from the black nationalist magazine Liberator, which had published a series of anti-Semitic articles, saying, “I think it is distinctly unhelpful, and I think it is immoral, to blame Harlem on the Jew. . . .” He concludes his piece with these words: “The crisis taking place in the world, and in the minds and hearts of black men everywhere, is not produced by the star of David, but by the old, rugged Roman cross on which Christendom's most celebrated Jew was murdered. And not by Jews.” Thus, he graciously absolves the Jews from the crime of deicide which for centuries, in Israel Zangwill's words, “has made the people of Christ the Christ of peoples.” Baldwin also declares, “I know that if today I refuse to hate Jews, or anybody else, it is because I know how it feels to be hated.”
Here is impressive evidence indeed of James Baldwin's anti-anti-Semitism. These credentials notwithstanding, he devotes the bulk of his lengthy article to a passionate justification of Negro anti-Semitism today. In the process he utilizes all the time-honored devices of propaganda perfected in our century. For decades Negroes have been battling energetically to destroy the white man's various stereotypes of the Negro as shiftless, irresponsible, happy-go-lucky and contented with his inferior lot. Nevertheless, Baldwin does not hesitate to set up a series of stereotypes of the Jew in Harlem in order to explain the anti-Jewish prejudice of Negroes.
The landlord who exploits the Negro tenant, the grocer and the butcher who overcharge and short-weight their customers, the pawnbroker who battens on the misery of the Negro-all these, we are told, are Jews, and the Negro therefore hates the Jews.
Baldwin “does not know” whether Grant and Woolworth are Jewish names, but the Negro hates the Jews.
He hates the welfare worker and the policeman; “we hated black cops even more than white cops.” Though Jews on the police force are not particularly numerous, the Negro hates the Jews.
Not all public-school teachers in the Negro ghetto are Jews, but he hates the Jews.
He feels the same way toward the union to which his father belongs, which is “a den of thieves.”
So, too, with the Army which “may or may not be controlled by Jews; I don't know and I don't care [italics mine(author)]. I know that when I worked for the Army, I hated all my bosses because of the way they treated me.”
The same reaction applies to the great business corporations, to Hollywood and Broadway, to the post office, to the television industry and to Wall Street. To be sure, Baldwin doesn't think that they are all controlled by Jews, but the consequence is anti-Semitism, which is both inevitable and understandable." Baldwin would dismiss as irrelevant such factual questions as the degree to which Jewish businessmen and landlords dominate Harlem and other Negro ghettos stretching from Boston to Miami, from New York to Seattle, from Washington to Los Angeles. It does not occur to him to compare the exploitation of Negroes allegedly practiced by Jews with the treatment they receive at the hands of non-Jewish merchants and landlords, both white and black.
He ignores the fact that preliminary studies by social scientists at the University of California suggest that the attitude of Negroes toward Jews is less negative than toward white non-Jews, and that Negroes tend to recognize that Jews have often treated them with a greater degree of fairness and decency than have white Christians.
Since the substantial funds contributed by Jews to the civil-rights movement are denounced as "conscience money,” it is fatuous to expect any recognition-let alone any appreciation of the disproportionate role that Jews have played in the civil-rights struggle. The deaths of Jewish civil-rights workers are passed over in total silence. To recall the earlier work of Julius Rosenwald in Negro education and of Joel E. Spingarn in the founding of the N.A.A.C.P., or the current efforts of Morris Milgram in inter-racial housing, would obviously be out of place.
It is a truism of military strategy that the best defense is an offense. We are warned against examining critically the exaggerations which Baldwin seriously advances as legitimizing Negro anti-Semitism. Thus, he writes: "The uprising in the Warsaw ghetto was not described as a riot, nor were the participants maligned as hoodlums: the boys and girls in Watts and Harlem are thoroughly aware of this, and it certainly contributes to their attitude toward the Jews.” Baldwin recognizes that his comparison of Watts and Harlem with the Warsaw ghetto "will be immediately dismissed as outrageous" and declares that there are many reasons for this. He overlooks the only important reason: the comparison is totally false. In the Warsaw ghetto, defenseless men, women and children were systematically attacked and butchered by the world's most powerful military machine. In the Watts and Harlem riots, Negro youths, abetted by their elders, were the attackers, beating and killing white men and women upon whom they chanced to come, and looting and destroying millions of dollars of property. Whatever reasons the rioters had for resentment and bitterness, there was no physical attack upon their lives to justify the resort to mass violence. In the best tradition of the purveyors of prejudice, the Jew is blamed for his virtues as well as for his vices. Thus the complaint is advanced that "the Jew is recognized as a contributor to the world's history: this is not true for the blacks.” Here again the distortion underlying the comparison is patent. It is no criticism of Bulgarians or Algerians or, for that matter, of Belgians or Swiss-to say that their group contributions to Western civilization are less than that of the Jewish people, and that their respective literature and history are correspondingly less familiar to the rest of the world than the traditions enshrined in the pages of the Hebrew Bible. There can be no doubt that the time is long overdue for a greater knowledge and appreciation, by whites as well as by blacks, of Negro culture created both in Africa and in America. But to offer this condition as an apology for anti-Semitism (since no note of objection is interposed) is indeed going far afield. Nor is it true to say that the American Jew tells the Negro "his suffering is as great as the American Negro's suffering. We suffered, too, but we came through, and so will you. In time.” Baldwin's reticence in opposing anti-Jewish prejudice is all the more striking when contrasted with the vigor of style he employs in criticizing Jews. He declares, "It is true that many Jews use, shamelessly, the slaughter of the 6,000,000 by the Third Reich as proof that they cannot be bigots-or in the hope of not being held responsible for their bigotry" (italics mine). The italicized adverb is deeply revealing and disturbing. The statement, of course, is false. I challenge Baldwin to offer evidence that the slaughter of 6,000,000 Jews by Hitler is used by Jews, shamelessly or otherwise, to prove that they cannot be bigots. Jews have demonstrated their capacity for bigotry and, by that token, their link with all humanity-time and again. And not only vis-à-vis non-Jews, but also in their relations with one another! It may be true that, in general, Jews are like other people, only more so. In their relations with Negroes, they, like all other white Americans, have been guilty of major sins both of commission and of omission. But their record, though far from admirable, is nonetheless at least as good as and in most respects better than that of others. If Baldwin is right and the Jew is "singled out by Negroes not because he acts differently from other white men, but because he doesn't," Negro leadership is confronted by a crucial moral issue and not merely a problem of strategy and finances.
WHAT is most disturbing in the approach of Baldwin and other apologists for Negro anti-Semitism is not so much what is said, but what is left unsaid. One searches in vain in the article for any forthright recognition that hatred is as disastrous to its perpetrator as to its victim. No effort is made to grapple with the problem of
MARCHERS Police throw tear gas at civil-rights supporters in Selma, Ala., during the demonstrations there in early 1965. a possible cure or amelioration of the disease. Nowhere is there one word of admonition or warning addressed to the Negro community, urging them to fight the incubus of Jew-hatred which he finds both ubiquitous and justified. Instead, all the ills of contemporary society in general and the plight of the Negro in particular are placed at the doorstep of the Jew, the scapegoat of the ages. Jews and all white men of decency and good will do wish to speak with their Negro brothers in fruitful confrontation. But the undertaking does not become easier in the face of the exaggerations and distortions which are being advanced.
ONE of the gravest intellectual errors of which men are capable-and its consequences in the practical sphere are devastating-is simplism. The phenomenon of Negro anti-Semitism is tragically oversimplified and by that token dangerously distorted when it is explained-and justified-in terms of one cause only. Undoubtedly the social and economic factor is a basic element in the anti-Semitic complex. But other strands are woven into the age-old chain of Jew-hatred. Anti-Semitism in the Christian world derives its original impetus, and much of its present hold on men's spirit, from religion. This remains true even in an age marked by both unbelief and ecumenicalism, and the two phenomena are not unrelated.
Yeoman efforts are being made today to extricate Western society from the burdens of prejudice and ill will inherited from the earliest period of traditional Christianity. When the Christian church first came into being, its leaders confidently expected that Jews would flock to its fold since it claimed to be the new Israel, the heir and successor of the old. The hoped-for mass conversion, however, did not take place and Jews, by and large, refused to accept the new dispensation. The church expressed its resentment by charging the Jewish people not merely with the rejection of the Savior but with His death. Thus the Jew became the cosmic villain in the Christian drama of salvation. In every age there were a few great-souled exemplars of religion who spoke out for brotherhood and love, but they were usually voices crying in the wilderness. For 19 centuries Jew-hatred was not merely condoned but glorified as a religious virtue. Even today, anti-Semitic prejudice is difficult to dislodge because it is so often sustained by a conviction of self-righteousness and piety. When the American Negro was kidnaped from his native Africa and brought to the United States and cast into slavery, he was converted to Christianity in its most literalistic form. Lacking the education and sophistication which even his white masters rarely possessed he could hardly be expected to counter the outspoken anti-Jewish bias of the Gospels. He therefore tended to identify the Jew, whom he knew from the New Testament, with the enemy of God. The seeds of prejudice, having been sown in the soil of faith, continued to produce their bitter fruit in the arena of life. When the Negro met Jews, rarely in the rural South but more commonly in the urban North, and often in situations of economic hostility, the religious basis for anti-Semitism was strengthened. This prejudice has remained even with the Negro who has surrendered or attenuated his commitment to Christianity. As Zangwill pointed out with bitter irony years ago, many a Christian who is sure that Jesus never existed is certain that the Jews killed him.
BOTH the religious and economic motives for Negro anti-Semitism have provided the basis for a deep psychological need in the lives of many Negroes. Oppressed, exploited and despised by the white majority, often suffering from the malaise of a sense of inferiority, he needs an avenue of relief. He often finds it in anti-Semitism because here, at least, he can identify with the dominant white majority, give vent to his pent-up hostilities and indulge a sense of imaginary superiority. The same psychological mechanism explains why "poor whites" in the South have historically been among the most rabid supporters of "white supremacy" and the most active practitioners of violence against their Negro neighbors. Similarly, the Negro anti-Semite who echoes the prejudice of white Americans compensates for his sense of inferiority by believing that he is "better than the Jew." It is only when this deeply intertwined complex of factors in Negro anti-Semitism-religious, psychological and socio-economic-is understood and clearly recognized that we can hope to attack the disease at its roots. Without abating an iota of their zeal in the battle for equality on every front, Negro leaders have an obligation to fight black anti-Semitism, not merely because it is a dangerous diversion from the long and arduous struggle for Negro freedom and equality, but for the sake of their own moral and intellectual integrity. Nearly 70 years ago, the Socialist leader August Bebel, speaking of the Jew-hatred endemic in his native Germany, declared: "Anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools." We may add that black anti-Semitism is the democracy of charlatans. In the difficult struggle for racial justice that confronts Negroes and all Americans, Jews have not been altogether idle. Without minimizing in the slightest the obligation of white Americans, individually and collectively, toward the Negro community, and in deepest friendship and sympathy for their problems, American Jews are perhaps more conscious than others of another moral challenge confronting Negro leadership: the obligation to mobilize its resources for self-help and mutual responsibility. Here, the past experience of the American-Jewish community is by no means irrelevant. During the four decades from 1880 to the outbreak of World War I most Jewish immigrants to America arrived penniless and from backward countries. They were unfamiliar with the language and the customs of the new land, faced by countless temptations and exposed to poverty, overcrowding and disease. It is true that some agencies for the new arrivals were established by their coreligionists who had settled here earlier. But the East European Jews who crowded the ghettos of our great cities were not long content to be recipients of help, even from their fellow Jews. Almost immediately they created a vast network of institutions of philanthropy, education, recreation and culture of their own. I do not suggest that the pattern of the American-Jewish experience can be taken over ready-made by the American Negro, but there is a lesson to be derived nevertheless. To the outside observer, however sympathetic, there seems to be too little evidence of self-help and mutual responsibility within the Negro community. Growing numbers of Negroes are today well-to-do, if not wealthy. Many thousands of Negroes employed in government, industry and commerce live considerably above the subsistence level. Yet in Harlem, in Bedford-Stuyvesant, and in other areas of Negro settlement throughout this city and nation, Negro-sponsored and Negro-maintained settlement houses and schools, cultural, vocational and welfare institutions are few and far between. It is true that Jewish immigrants to America possessed one great and incalculable advantage. In Judaism there has existed for centuries love of learning and a tradition of mutual responsibility. The Negro, on the other hand, is a comparative newcomer to the Western world. In the face of intolerable brutality and oppression he has had to close the gap of centuries in one or two generations. His position has been heartrendingly difficult since his period of physical slavery lasted until only a century ago and his social and economic burdens have remained heavy. Particularly in view of the grave responsibility the American people must bear for the condition of the Negro, both before and since the Emancipation Proclamation, the Negro cannot be expected to "go it alone" in raising his present status and his future prospects. But he still has the obligation to put forth his best efforts to do as much as he can for himself. Help from others, however necessary, inevitably breeds ill will, ingratitude and a sense of inferiority. La Rochefoucauld observed that we are never able to pardon those we have injured. As a corollary one might say that the existence of Negro anti-Semitism testifies that we can rarely forgive those who have helped us.
AS the battle for the removal of all external restraints on the Negro enters its next, difficult phase-and it must be crowned with success if America is to survive-we need to recall a truth, painfully discovered by Moses when he liberated the Israelites from Egyptian bondage. The Negro, like Everyman, can attain real freedom not through emancipation but through self-emancipation. Twenty centuries ago, a Hebrew sage set forth what might well become the slogan of the American Negro: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, what good am I? And if not now, when?” Mature and intelligent men and women in the Negro community should recognize and act upon the recognition-that hatred of whites in general, and of Jews in particular, points not to liberation but to perdition. There is a better way.
WATTS “In comparing what happened at Watts with the Warsaw ghetto uprising, novelist James Baldwin recognizes that the comparison 'will be immediately dismissed as outrageous' and declares that there are many reasons for this. He overlooks the only important reason: the comparison is totally false."
The following is taken from The Martyr Made Substack’s article “Blacks and Jews Pt. One", on the tensions throughout the 20th century between African Americans and Jewish Americans, of which I wouldn’t know took place if I hadn’t read/listened to his series on this. I couldn’t find the original anywhere of the following, but it’s too good, I couldn’t leave it out
Some congratulated Podhoretz’s courage to write the essay, but others were outraged. One of the latter was the black author, and Village Voice columnist, Joe Wood, wrote a blistering essay in response, accusing Podhoretz of repressed homoerotic feelings for black men, envy of the black penis, Jewish self-hatred, and many other defects of body and character (and, of course, of racism).
Podhoretz is barking from the shadows, gentle reader. Don’t be afraid - read the record and see for yourself: remember how much the writer envied Negro strength, notice how he fails to mention the millennia of “stigma” between Jewish “past glory” and “imminent redemption,” notice how easily his lunatic description of black experience could be used to describe Jewish experience. Then dare to follow my reasoning to its unattractive and obvious conclusion. At bottom, a profound self-hatred menaces in (Podhoretz’s essay): each time he reveals his weakness, as whiteness, he is confession how much he hates his weakness, as Jewishness, gentle reader…
Throughout (his essay), Podhoretz unwittingly gives readers a glimpse of the peculiar blend of desire, anxiety, and racism that informed the Jewish American discourse during the Depression. This collision of impulses is never better revealed than in the writer’s discussion of his black playmate named Carl… It is here that Podhoretz comes closest to describing how his boyhood world shaped his ideas about black people. The scrape with Carl is perfectly typical of New York City, where ethnic clashes are routine, but the incident also condenses nicely a worldview peculiar to immigrant Jews at the time, which can be boiled down to a question: With goyim slamming you from above, and blacks threatening from below, what is a person to do?...
In choosing to open his essay with a spotty memory of a black boy whose most notable feature is his moral equivalence to goyim, Podhoretz dismisses the idea of a special black moral station. It is an understandable move. African-Americans’ history of subjugation bestowed a moral authority historically reserved for Jews by Jews in Christian Europe… Since Jewish Americans could basically be themselves without the kind of penalties they had suffered in Europe, a Jewish identity based on that oppression made no sense. One way to deal with the resultant confusion was to hate the displacers, the blacks.
And here we have Commentary Magazine's “Letter to the Editor” in response to Norman Podhoretz “Negro Problem” that he shares with all of us.
“My Negro Problem”—II
by Our Readers
To the Editor:
Here is where I am: I found Norman Podhoretz’s unfortunate contribution on the stance of one liberal an ugly item. Ugly because of its arbitrary excision of history in order, apparently, to indulge in a personal aggravation against history. It is the only reason that I can think of that his amazing explication preferred to ignore the sophistication of concern with the commodity value of the blanket opposition of an entire people and roam around instead, presumably as befits a “psychoanalytical” age, in the field of narrative of boyhood iniquities tellingly peppered with the traumatic impact of lots and lots of “mo’ f—r’s”. . . .
I mean to say that an attempt to reduce the situation of U.S. Negroes to an exchange of personal memorabilia of the brutalizing hazards of an urban upbringing is a sheer outrage. I would have supposed even that Mr. Podhoretz’s sensibilities would enjoy more dignity had his lingering distaste for bullies led him, if not to a bus due South, then to a fiercely angry, if safe, pen, in behalf of the objects of the most notorious and institutionalized bullying of the moment.
Above all was I struck with Mr. Podhoretz’s hanging implication that he feels absolved from any crimes that might have been going on around here because, after all, his ancestors were somewhere else when the slave ships docked. To long for that particular absolution Mr. Podhoretz and everyone else will have to give up that sweeping phrase which he uses without hesitation in the middle of his article—“we white Americans.” . . .
The main impression gained from the article was that the world is changing and Mr. Podhoretz is agitated because it is so apparent that the liberal ought be saying and doing something; that he ought be stepping into the street to join the parade but that, as always, His Majesty has discovered that he hasn’t got a stitch on, despite the weaving of intricate platitudes of liberalism for generations.
Thus that “blood” which has been flowing in our streets for three hundred and forty-four years of racial antagonism finally seems a threat; that same three hundred and forty-four years of “miscegenation” in which so much blood has mingled that at least about 40 per cent of the writer’s remembered bullies probably were “misceged”—is now seen by him as the “only solution.” This despite the fact that he can only feel “prurient” stirrings at the mere sight of a “mixed couple”; and is sent into ravings and rantings at the thought of his daughter marrying “one.” But history, once again, has not waited for Mr. Podhoretz’s adjustments and education and it would be beside the point that he would probably be confounded in the face of our own black ultras, and not only the “separatists,” who perceive and curse the implication in This House that the presence of the undiluted black is intolerable and therefore this nation must now weigh, in a manner suggesting the taking of hemlock to the lips, sexually absorbing what it will not love! Black pride, including that untouched by fanaticism or racism of any kind, is, it must swiftly be understood, more ferocious than that! The Negro demand is for equality for Negroes; the biological and sociological reality of Negroes as they presently exist. Which individuals shall choose to marry or otherwise have sexual union with whom remains on all counts outside the scope of any kind of politics.
Finally, reading Mr. Podhoretz’s article, I was ashamed for it in a particular way for I thought that I recognized in it an adolescent expectation and hope that the writer would be congratulated by black and white alike on his—“honesty.” As if, somehow, his recitation of perfectly old fashioned racist motifs would lend a refreshing bit of ambiguity to the tasks at hand and be properly appreciated by all like himself who are trying like the devil to avoid the enormity of the actual confrontation before us. It is a saddening posture for the editor of a responsible journal.
I charge Mr. Podhoretz with not dealing with the greater honesty at all; I charge him with offering up a confessional which will merely be a device of those anxious to see the world stay as it is—“just a little longer.” But most painfully of all, I charge him with something I know that he cannot presently appreciate the seriousness of: of having given those impassioned young black folk who have “given up the Mr. Podhoretz’s” a document with which to heighten their ever-deepening articulation of their contempt of his self-exemption. Those of us who feel that we stand between, trying to maintain the chain, have been handed a body blow. . . .
Lorraine Hansberry
New York City
To the Editor:
. . . God knows the white liberal needs help, and both Baldwin from the outside and Podhoretz from the inside have been of help in discussing the problem. But does the February 1963 COMMENTARY hint at solution? Yes, on the last page the editor proposes one. For a moment I thought it was important: the problem will disappear when color in fact disappears. Assimilation and miscegenation he says are solutions. Then comes the letdown: “I am not claiming that this alternative can be pursued programmatically or that it is immediately feasible as a solution,” says the editor. . . . For a moment I could picture Southern Gentleman-hood rolling up sleeves and taking delight in resuming extra-curricular activities which have been hampered for exactly 100 years this winter. But, no, “programmatic” solutions are to be denied the white male, anti-liberal though he be, who works toward assimilation. He is only to talk about it.
It is not the programmatic assumption that disturbs me so much as the theory be-behind it. The footnote on page 93 suggests that the editor is a bit diffident about undertaking so controversial a topic in a journal devoted to better intergroup relations. He should not worry about that. All solutions that can be conceived ought to be proposed in these dark days. He is wary about spitting out the word “miscegenation” though I know of few high religions that intrinsically rule it out, however aesthetically improbable it is to most. There is some health to bringing into the open the most radical solution; it makes the more moderate steps seem possible. That could be in Podhoretz’s mind. But that is not in his words, and we are analyzing words. . . .
Baldwin and Podhoretz and all of us find it necessary to reach back to boyhood to find the matrix from which bad attitudes are born. Here is a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant sample. Mine comes from a prairie boyhood in the white-majority culture of Nebraska (I’ll bet neither B. nor P. has ever met anyone else from there!). We loved the Negro because the nearest one was ninety miles away in Omaha and each summer the Piney Woods singers, as they came through town to clap their hands and sing their spirituals, showed us how simple, lovable, and godly the Nigger Soul is. Our Sunday School literature told us that the Jew was being punished because his grandfather had shouted to the heavens and to Pontius Pilate: “Jesus’s blood be on us and on our children.” Like Podhoretz, I was puzzled by this kind of mythological approach. The only Jews I knew were the merchants in Norfolk, Nebraska—five or six of them—who were being punished by making more money than all the gentiles in sight. Everyone knew how the Jews are, after all. But we could love even them. They were potential converts.
Our problems were more with the like, not the unlike. First there were the “Cathlicks.” Tension took no more violent form than the snowball fights with the gangs from the Guardian Angels school. But to be told that Catholicism was a beleaguered minority (even in a state where today it is a majority in only ten counties!) was an unbelievable improbability. Our battle cry was always the plaintive, “They that be against us, O Lord, are more and mightier than those that be with us.” They were consolidated, better organized, and like all Polacks, Bigger than we. We always lost. But we still loved them, for they were separated Brethren long before the Pope started calling us that.
Our problems, the location of our real passionate intensities, were the other Protestants in that Protestant county, the other brands of Lutherans in that county of Lutheran majority. The people we were taught to mistrust, despise, and hate: the people concerning whom we drew practical conclusions that we were to stand off, were the people most nearly like us. We did stand them off, and vice versa. “The United Lutherans are all right, but would you want your daughter to marry one?” was a question that was real and practical and thus more threatening than the dramatic ones Baldwin and Podhoretz ask. I hope the parable seems trivial. God, it was and is trivial! And in its triviality is its point: we do no better with the most obscure and subtle shadings of difference than we do with the vastly different. We do worse. For we: Baldwin in Harlem, Podhoretz in Brooklyn, I in Nebraska, were insecure. The former two had real reason to be—I think—and we did not. In that lies a great sociological difference. But theologically and personally the problem was the same for all of us and remains so.
Our Negro problem; our Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, and secularist problem is unbelief. We do not believe anything. We do not really believe in the God or gods in whom we profess to place our trust or in His or their revelations of plans and programs for man. . . .
Baldwin and Podhoretz are showing how Will Rogers’s observation is useless in intergroup relations. They are willing to admit that they did meet men they didn’t, they couldn’t like. . . . But their religion and ours, which let us down at the crucial test, told them that they would never meet a man they couldn’t love. Sociology was against them and us, in boyhood as today. But theology and personhood were for them, and neither they nor any of us will get anywhere if we wait until difference disappears. When difference diminishes we will grow more insecure, more fierce—Next Time, The Fire.
Martin E. Marty
Associate Editor
The Christian Century
Chicago, Illinois
To the Editor:
Sad, sad are the statements in Mr. Podhoretz’s “My Negro Problem—And Ours.” The current militancy (a word coined by whites) of the Negro can be partially laid to just such honesty set down by Mr. Podhoretz. To be more specific, he has revealed the classic in-depth feelings of the liberal now and perhaps always perceived by the Negro.
. . . It appears that it is self-hate rather than hatred that the author feels, and it had early inheritance from school days when he was beaten on the street by Negroes. He quite carefully points out that he did not fight back, hated himself, and transferred this hatred to the Negro boys. Forget about the black boys who have been beaten in the streets, not because of medals, not because of giving correct answers in the classroom, but just because they were black.
So the son of countless victims of East European pogroms and the sons of numerous lynching victims, forced into the poverty box, turned even as rabbits will to a kind of cannibalism. A further line will help Mr. Podhoretz to understand the neo-nihilism of the Negro boys. . . . The Negro has been in America for over four hundred years. From then until now he has acquired little. But an Irishman runs the government with a good many Jews in it (and a token group of Negroes), the old Italian with the handlebar moustache has vanished. Postwar refugees, Hungarian Freedom Fighters, Cuban refugees, all move ahead. The Negro waits, history having a way of by-passing him in terms of advancement. If not in the spoken word all this was the sense of things in the 30’s and now. Those black boys who were the author’s classmates knew it and those who are boys today know it. . . .
I do not agree with Mr. Baldwin’s opinion that every Negro person hates every white person. There are times—God, yes. But hate cannot be lived with continually; it is too energy-sapping and too, too overwhelming in its ultimate sense, a love for those who are so hated.
I cannot understand the shock of the Jews at what Mr. Podhoretz calls “Negro anti-Semitism.”. . . Massive historical conditions which to a large extent have excluded Jews from sharing to the full the benefits of American capitalism, have brought Jew and Negro into harsh commercial contact. It is sheer delusion to ignore the fact that 90 per cent of the stores in Harlem are Jewish-owned or to deny that on the upper West Side where Mr. Podhoretz now lives the apartment-hotels are largely owned by Jews who charge exorbitant rents and permit sub-human living conditions and the accompanying violations. The result of all this is not anti-Semitism, but a striking back at whoever seems to be in control, seems to block the nervous progress of the Negro. . . .
And yet for all this confusion and misunderstanding . . . our primary “advance” organizations are officered, staffed, and superbly aided by Jews. Few people of any other Caucasian kind have been so concerned with the lot of the Negro. A former officer in such an organization remarked privately (for the facts are hard) that Jews realize subconsciously that their future goes hand in hand with that of the Negro. . . . Furthermore, he went on, there is that “tradition” rooted in Judaism which submits . . . not that all men are equal, but that all men shall be equally judged, a concept more splendid at the root than the Bill of Rights.
With such a concept in mind, why is it that the Black Muslims cannot be seen in proper perspective? . . . To my mind their work has been good. They’ve salvaged junkies, worked savagely to replace the pride lost through generations of second-class citizenship. . . . They say they will defend themselves if attacked. Can one ask more of a man? To cloud this issue of self-defense, turn its meaning into a perpetual threatening offensive against whites is to misunderstand for the sake, not of misunderstanding, but to give excuse for additional mayhem against all Negroes. . . .
But I disagree with separation. Perhaps I am blind. Speaking for myself, I have no intention of giving up what several generations of my people have rightfully earned by hard, hard labor. This land upon which we walk, especially the South, was sown with the bones of my forefathers. That is a truth not worth arguing. And, like the Jew who sought Israel, I mean to have it, and further, I will have it and my rights as well.
Mr. Podhoretz is aware of this sense; it contributes, I believe, to his anguish which is painfully clear. For how may a man see the solution of our racial dilemma through legal or condoned or completely acceptable miscegenation, and in the same breath voice his hatred for the mixed couple? But the author is quite through, it seems, deluding himself. This is an important step and indicates, as trite as it may seem, blessed hope for us all.
John A. Williams
New York City
To the Editor:
The publication of Norman Podhoretz’s article is to be commended. The experiences he describes have the ring of truth. Precisely because this “truth” is likely to be distasteful, it is vital that it be presented and understood.
Unfortunately, his proposed solution (miscegenation) does not appear to resolve the issue which he poses. . . . Is the “melting pot” an appropriate goal in the fight against discrimination? Granted that a society is desirable in which miscegenation is accepted, should not the true goals of the humanist in this connection be: (1) preservation of ethnic differences; (2) loyalty of an individual to his own ethnic group; and (3) respect by the individual for other ethnic groups and their members? My belief is that our social health would be better served by the continuation of a variegated culture with respectful competition among the several ethnic groups.
Mr. Podhoretz has, of course, presented the supreme challenge to my position in asking: “In thinking about Jews I have wondered whether their survival as a distinct group was worth one hair on the head of a single infant. Did the Jews have to survive so that six million . . . people should be one day burned in the ovens of Auschwitz?” While this question may, as he stated, be unanswerable, I wonder whether the assimilation of the European Jew could have insulated him from the terrors of Nazism. It certainly afforded no protection to that most assimilated of all Jewish communities, that of Germany.
Jerome Lefkowitz
New York City
To the Editor:
. . . . I feel that Norman Podhoretz’s article represents a beginning of the unpleasant educational process that the “enlightened” white liberal must undergo before any real progress can be made in race relations in this country. Everyone tells everyone else that race relations are just as deplorable in the North as in the South, because there is so much hypocrisy about them here. But to my knowledge Mr. Podhoretz is the first established white liberal to make an effort to explain why, from his own experience and not just from psychological theories, northern liberals are such hypocrites. . . .
My background could hardly be more different from Mr. Podhoretz’s—I am a middle-class, small-town, Midwestern Protestant who had no contact at all with Negroes when I was growing up. . . . I can’t point to any actual experiences in my background that give me a right to the confused and conflicting feelings I have regarding the Negro. But I have these feelings, and I know that everyone with whom I talk about this question . . . has feelings just as “sick” as mine. . . .
Why can’t it be realized (or even discussed), by Negroes and whites alike, that the society that has done what it has to the Negro has also taken its toll among the oppressors? . . . I am convinced that my feelings—and those of others like me—are important, and that if more whites understood themselves and each other we might truly begin, as Mr. Podhoretz says, to free ourselves from the sickness that keeps us and our leadership from being anything but hypocritical in our attitudes. This doesn’t mean that I am so optimistic as to think that, even if we do become more honest, our actions will necessarily be much more positive; I too am a pessimist. But at least it wouldn’t be quite so easy for us to declare that we are free of prejudice, which is the kind of declaration that makes a mockery of liberalism.
I suppose we shouldn’t ask the Negro to try to understand that our feelings, too, are complex and that we too have been victimized by our white society. He’s got enough troubles of his own. But I have tried and I suppose I will continue to try not only to understand the Negro’s position and feelings but to get him to understand mine. . . .
And I will continue to prod my white friends; I think there is no excuse for them, if they have any integrity in this matter, to put off much longer an honest attempt to analyze and admit to their own attitudes. The white liberals are a big stumbling block to the improvement of race relations. (In time this too will become a cliché if it isn’t already). . . . Surely there is more harm in pious platitudes and empty gestures on the part of the white liberal, in the long run, than there is in an honest expression such as Mr. Podhoretz’s, even if it seems unkind or cavalier in the short run. . . .
In all, I am grateful to Mr. Podhoretz for his honesty and intelligence, and hope that more of us, myself included, will be prompted to display some of our own, no matter how unpleasant the immediate consequences might be.
Georgia Griggs
New York City
To the Editor:
COMMENTARY deserves great credit for having the courage to publish what must be an agonizing self-appraisal of a liberal. However, I feel that there are several points in Mr. Podhoretz’s article which merit and undoubtedly will receive vigorous further discussion. His feelings toward Negroes are admittedly conditioned by his childhood traumatic experiences in contact with some of them, yet he somehow fails to grasp the essential fact that Negroes’ feelings toward whites are similarly conditioned by a collective traumatic experience which extended over a period of several hundred years. . . .
Indeed, the profound effect of slavery on the psyche of the American Negro is something which must be increasingly reckoned with by all who are interested in the future of race relations in this country. Frequent or sporadic outbreaks of apparently senseless brutality, violence, and amorality must be viewed against the background of that institution which relegated us to the position of animals, and subjected our forebears to the inhuman condition of being bartered and sold, and bred like horses and cows. . . .
I find it quite significant, also, that Mr. Podhoretz, in company with the Black Muslims and others, in looking toward the future, can envision, with peculiar blindness, only the two extremes of further, more fervent hatred, on the one hand, or miscegenation on the other. . . . He asks, rather derisively, what does the Negro have that could possibly make him wish to survive as a distinct ethnic group, yet, a few paragraphs earlier, he waxes almost eloquent about those very qualities of “physical grace and beauty” which characterize our physiognomy. Perhaps the terms hate-love, rather than hate-envy, could better be used to describe this dichotomy of the emotions, and explain this tendency to think of bloodshed and rioting in the same breath with sexual intermingling, and perhaps the psychiatrist’s couch for all of us would be a fortunate substitute for a mad dash to the marital bed of miscegenation and/or the bloody streets of race rioting.
Most of us believe that there is a middle way, a path which avoids both of these extremes. And the patient, careful search for this way must be the ultimate goal of all liberals.
(Dr.) Robert E. Fullilove, Jr.
Newark, New Jersey
To the Editor:
The significant quality of Norman Podhoretz’s article is the high sense of irrelevance reflected in its personal emphases. The Negro problem in America in the last one hundred years has been the denial of equal status before the law. It is not basically a problem of racial brotherhood. That aspect might take time but we cannot wait, ever, to rely on public attitude in assuring equal status before the law. That must be guaranteed to every individual, particularly against hostile prevailing majority hate.
Irving Ferman
Vice President
Playtex
Washington, D.C.
To the Editor:
. . . As, I hope, a good Jew, and as the wife of a Negro, I think I have some insight into Mr. Podhoretz’s feelings. Even though I must admit I was stopped short by his prurience (disgust?) at the sight of an interracial couple, I forced myself to go beyond that—something perhaps that his detractors have not done—and complete his piece. I want him to know that we—my husband and I—do understand what he is trying to say and respect him for it. . . .
Having said all this, may I then take a few lines to indicate where I think he has not been completely honest—or perhaps realistic is a better word. For example, he says that in the world of his boyhood there was little difference in the poverty of the Jew and the poverty of the Negro. And yet, I wonder if he really thinks back hard, wouldn’t he find that perhaps all—or most—of the shopkeepers—however hard they may have worked and however small their profits—weren’t they usually Jewish? And the consumers—who were perhaps sometimes overcharged or sold defective goods (because, let’s face it, that poor little grocer had to sell the stale rolls to somebody)—weren’t they almost always Negro? The problem with being exploited is that you don’t always see the man at the top. When I was a little girl in the Bronx—we were refugees from Vienna and Hitler, circa ’38—we lived in a neighborhood mostly Irish and Italian. (Incidentally, I was afraid of them as Mr. Podhoretz was of Negroes, and for the same reasons. . . .) My parents, in their stinking little grocery, worked seven days a week, sometimes fifteen and sixteen hours a day, delivering bottles of milk to the sixth-floor walk-ups to keep a customer, never looking right or left, but only to “get ahead.” They, on the other hand, had parents who worked in banks, factories, and the like; they got new outfits (cheap, but flashy) for all their holidays (while on the High Holy Days, as well as the rest of the time, I wore hand-me-downs); their parents got drunk every Saturday night, and I, too, envied and despised them, all at the same time. Of course, my parents did get ahead a little, and then they accused us of being secretly “rich” and cheating them!
What I am trying to say is that one serious mistake in Mr. Podhoretz’s generalization about the very real chasm between the races in this country is that he thinks that all white children who grew up near Negroes, grew up with the same feeling toward them. That there is hatred, jealousy, and even fear, I am not denying. But I am suggesting that they are based on something different from what Mr. Podhoretz’s personal case suggests. My husband, as a shy, frightened, black boy from Jamaica, moving to the States when he was twelve, was prone to the same emotions Mr. Podhoretz describes for himself when, on moving into a formerly “all white” neighborhood, he and his friends were terrorized by a group of young white hoodlums whose ferocity might have made a good match for Mr. Podhoretz’s childhood nightmares. Their favorite word may not have been “m’t’r f’kr,” (a word probably originated by Southern whites, according to the best of sources) but they were pretty free with their own obscenities and racial epithets, so it all kind of works out to the same thing.
And still I agree with Mr. Podhoretz—for him, and me, and people like us only—more than I disagree. As I grew older, as the state of Israel emerged, and I realized that to be a Jew didn’t have to mean letting yourself get abused without fighting back, as I learned more about my religion and culture (perhaps fortunately, for my development, not from official sources, but, as with all lonely children, from books), I took the same path he did of having intellectual convictions which were for a long time not matched by emotional growth of the same order. By the time I was sixteen and lived in a middle-class Jewish neighborhood in Yonkers, I had still had little personal contact with Negroes. . . . Then, I read Native Son, and my awakening nationalism, my new Jewish pride, seemed to insist that I see the fight for Negro rights in this country as my fight. Those few Negroes I had in my classes at this time were similar to the ones Mr. Podhoretz has described, except that this middle-class environment did not permit them to terrorize white children, only each other. Nevertheless, I began consciously to seek to change my feelings—to regard what had seemed to me almost another species (don’t forget I was European, and they were strange to me) as equals. I blush with shame at the thought of all the patronizing I must have done in my own kind, stupid way, on the road to salvation.
This was not meant to be the story of my life, and yet I must, for Mr. Podhoretz, add a few more words. He ends his article by saying what his reaction would be if his daughter decided to marry black. When I was finally faced with a man whom I loved, who loved me, whose simple fault in the eyes of the world was his black skin, I could not morally, intellectually, or any other way reject him for that reason only. What did I owe white? Hadn’t our people been murdered by them for two thousand years? There would have been more hesitation on my part if he had been a practicing Christian. And did I not know that the child of a Jewish mother is Jewish? My thoughts of our future children were set at rest in this way. I told my parents of my decision. They were, naturally, quite upset. My mother said I would soon be sitting shive for them. My father—who does not stoop to such tactics—said that I was throwing my life away, it could not possibly work, and they both agreed that we would not be able to see each other if I went ahead with my plan.
It was a lovely wedding. My mother took only a few weeks to come around. She had done everything she could to stop me, and having failed, she still wanted her daughter. My father took longer. . . . Nevertheless, our little daughter has been the apple of my parents’ eyes since her birth, and whatever my papa still holds against the marriage, he couldn’t love her more. She’s almost eleven, incidentally, quite proud of being a “Jewish-Negro” girl, and one of the better students at the Hebrew school she attends.
I agree with Mr. Podhoretz completely about the phony liberals who move to the suburbs, the sick ones who come to Harlem looking for thrills and vitality (and oh, do they get abused for their troubles), and the ones with a double standard of morality. I also think that the many problems faced on the West Side are problems of poverty and ignorance. If Mr. Podhoretz ever meets one of what the late Dr. Franklin Frazier called the “black bourgeoisie,” he will find that he is as frightened of violence, unrepressed sex, and nonconformity as any middle-class Jew. . . .
Finally, as long as Mr. Podhoretz remains on the West Side, probes honestly and deeply (à la James Baldwin), and is willing to contemplate so radical a solution (to what is, after all, an American dilemma) as a Negro son-in-law, then only the foolish and misguided dare call him racist. I call him friend.
(Mrs.) Ronald Gibel
New York City
To the Editor:
My congratulations and gratitude for Norman Podhoretz’s courageous and liberating article. . . .
Melvin J. Lasky
Editor
Encounter
London, England
To the Editor:
When a brilliant writer, Negro, describes his childhood and youthful experiences in order to give the unknowing white man a glimpse into the ghetto, this should not constitute an invitation to a less talented writer, liberal and Jewish, to answer with a reminiscence of his own. Unfortunately every Negro knows and understands the antipathy Norman Podhoretz feels for him. . . .
The liberal must begin to understand that Negroes are different from whites, they have a culture white men are not part of. The Negro’s past is no more a stigma than the Jew’s—it is filled with a heroic battle to survive, with poetry and music. . . .
Mr. Podhoretz’s program for miscegenation is a sophisticated racist argument; to wit, we can only solve the Negro problem when there are no more Negroes; everything will be all right when everybody looks alike. Miscegenation is probably the most radical sounding reactionary slogan a white liberal can find. . . . Until Mr. Podhoretz begins to understand that Negroes are human beings who are brutalized in this society, and that it is their responsibility to stop the brutalization, relations between Negroes and white liberals will deteriorate. . . .
Rachelle Horowitz
New York City
To the Editor:
When Mr. Podhoretz in “My Negro Problem—and Ours” writes autobiographically of his youthful experiences with Negroes in a specific part of Brooklyn, I am sympathetic. When, however, on the basis of such experiences, he vaults to the conclusion that “the Negro problem can be solved . . . in no other way” than miscegenation, I must object strongly. . . .
Whether granting the Negro his constitutional rights might lead to increased intermarriage is presently irrelevant. Marriage is a personal decision and one’s sister or daughter can always say “No.” . . . To grant or to deny the Negro his rights as an American citizen on the basis of “the wholesale merging of the two races,” or on the disappearance of color “in fact” is to introduce inflammatory nonsense into an already blazing conflict.
Lawrence Jarett
Roslyn Heights, New York
To the Editor:
Having just read Norman Podhoretz’s courageous and strugglingly honest account of the Negro-white dilemma, I am moved to suggest that the prospect is not as near-hopeless as he suggests. Nor as James Baldwin had previously suggested in the New Yorker.
For, Ecclesiastes to the contrary, there is something new under the sun, something I believe that can be “caught, not taught” by the American Negroes and may help them walk with pride down those streets to which, by their own efforts and those of the forward-looking whites, they are now gaining access. This “something” is the appearance on the world scene of the independent African nations and, on the domestic scene, because of African curiosity and willingness to travel, the appearance throughout the country of these new nations’ UN representatives. . . .
By and large—with exceptions of course—these Africans do not have the proverbial chip on shoulder. They are whole and rich and vital persons who turn out to be, with their openness and their humor, more like Americans than are many of the more skeptical Europeans or more reserved Asians. . . .
The result is that, today, when such an African suffers a racial slight in this country, his reaction is not one of diminishment but of righteous wrath. . . . The experience of growing up as part of the majority, a majority, moreover, which in former times had regally ruled itself, appears to be such a wholesome one that not only the person involved but those who later identify with him can profit from it. . . .
For what has been imported into this country, duty-free, as a by-product of the UN’s being established here, is precisely the consciousness of being black as something good, something to be respected by those of paler hue and perhaps thinner blood. The Africans themselves refer to this consciousness as Négritude or The New African Personality. . . .
In addition to the personal impact of these UN Africans, there is also the new political dimension to which Harold Isaacs referred (COMMENTARY, December, 1962). For as the African nations grow individually and collectively in international importance—and if they succeed, as they hope to, in developing a “third force” which may prevent the white nations from blowing each other to ashes—then the American Negro, more and more, may lift up his eyes unto the (African) hills whence cometh what may feel like salvation, namely the removal of the stigma Mr. Podhoretz talks about. The UN Africans in their robes may thus be paving the way for American Negroes not only into previously lily-white restaurants, hotels, and clubs, but, more importantly, into the inner realm where self-acceptance is nurtured. . . .
(Mrs.) June Bingham
Riverdale, New York
To the Editor:
As neither I nor Mr. James Baldwin is a psychoanalyst, perhaps I can with at least equal authority on one point presume to disagree with him, or with Mr. Podhoretz’s interpretation of his feelings. I am a Negro and I do not hate all white people. However, as a sociologist, I have long been interested in the expression of values and conflict within the society of whites. . . .
I believe Mr. Podhoretz’s comments would have represented a more useful agonizing reappraisal if he had chosen to write either as a Jew relative to the Negro or as a white American relative to the Negro. The alternating perspective, incomplete in both instances, weakens the reader’s understanding of either. . . .
To the extent that categorized social relationships can be usefully analyzed between the various groups in America and American society as a whole and/or between themselves as separate entities, it seems clear and supported by data that the relationship between Negro and Jew in either its positive or negative manifestations is not identical with that between white Americans and Jews. That there are certain common features which make them similar in many respects is quite another matter. . . .
A forthright personal expression in the field of race or ethnic relations is always very welcome because it is so rare. Its greater value, however, beyond that of personal therapy, rests on giving it the proper theoretical, or if you will, categorical focus.
(Mrs.) Adelaide Cromwell Hill
African Studies Program
Boston University
To the Editor:
Mr. Podhoretz’s article is a moving confession of his feelings about Negroes but throws light only on his own state of conflict. It has the virtues of honesty and good will but, alas, not of insight....
Mr. Podhoretz was intimidated and persecuted by some boys acting in groups and singly. Had they been white or mixed or unidentifiable to him in ethnic background, they would simply have been malicious boys. How is it that the fact that they were Negro boys remains so salient in his memory?... They could have been identified in a number of ways—“group 3” boys, or boys from a certain block, or boys from bad homes or from the opposing team. It is not the fact of their skin color but the meaning given to this fact in our culture by its agents of transmission that is crucial....
If this were not so, why should it be that many middle-class whites who have never been beaten or threatened by any Negroes, who may have never even been close to a Negro, share the same fears as Mr. Podhoretz (and, I would submit, probably to an even greater degree)?...
As any Jew should know... the essence of the minority problem... is the deeply-held conviction that there exists an evil or inferior Negroid or Jewish essence which makes the ethnic adjective seem appropriate. Otherwise, why include it? This is the conviction against which minority group members continually bang their heads in a hopeless and frustrated attempt to demonstrate and explain the facts of biological and cultural life to the majority....
No, Mr. Podhoretz, your experiences, traumatic as they may have been, are probably irrelevant to your present feelings. As a social psychologist once observed: “We get our attitudes toward minorities not from contact with minorities themselves but from contact with the prevailing attitude toward minorities.”
Charles Herbert Stember
Department of Sociology
Rutgers University
New Brunswick, New Jersey
To the Editor:
Norman Podhoretz’s “My Negro Problem—And Ours” is bound to evoke howls of rage from some quarters, but I found his article both a beautiful piece of prose and an uncommon act of courage. I am not myself a partisan of miscegenation, possibly because it has always seemed to me a union between guilty whites and self-hating Negroes. And since we are all losing our color so rapidly in a world without distinctions, I would prefer a solution which allowed to both races their self-respect, privacy, and special identity. Still, Mr. Podhoretz has carried liberal thought to its inexorable conclusion, an intellectual feat which contrasts refreshingly with the pious platitudes of most white spokesmen, and even with the ambiguous exhortations of James Baldwin, who invariably mitigates an orgy of anger and hatred with contradictory pleas for Love. It is Mr. Baldwin’s individual experience, like that of Mr. Podhoretz, which, if honestly and courageously presented, can be of most value to us; for it is as personal witnesses, rather than as public spokesmen, Brotherhood peddlers, or salvation salesmen, that both are making genuine contributions to this necessary debate.
Robert Brustein
Department of English
Columbia University
New York City
“My Negro Problem-and Ours” at 50
Reflections on a controversial essay and its legacy.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of possibly the most controversial but certainly the most notorious piece ever published in COMMENTARY from that day to this. Its title was “My Negro Problem—and Ours,” and it was written by me. Over the years I have often been asked what impelled (or as it was sometimes put, “possessed”) me to write such a thing when I must have known that (in the words used by a critic when it first came out) “there was something in it to offend everyone.” Yes, of course, I would usually answer, I did know that many readers, both white and black, would be outraged. But contrary to a widely held suspicion that this was precisely my purpose in writing it, I had no conscious desire “to offend everyone.” Nor did I enjoy having provoked so much anger (though I very much enjoyed being applauded by those who admired the essay for one reason or another). In any case, the truth is that both the idea and the instigation came not from me but from James Baldwin. And thereby hangs a tale.
In those days, in common with just about everyone else in the literary world, I considered Baldwin one of the best writers of any kind in America, and among black writers Ralph Ellison’s only rival for the crown. As a novelist, he had produced nothing to compare with Ellison’s Invisible Man, but his essays were much better than Ellison’s, and there was no more elegant prose stylist then writing in any genre in English. Nor was there anyone, white or black, who had cast more light on the complexities of the relations between the races—a subject about which passions ran even higher than they do today and that were about to be further exacerbated by the rise of the Black Muslims.
This movement, whose leading spokesman was the incendiary Malcolm X, totally rejected the idea held by the dominant civil-rights movement that the solution to what everyone then called the Negro Problem1 lay in the “integration” of the two races. The goal of the integrationists, both white and black, was a society in which the two races would live and work and rub shoulders together, and the way to get there was through a gradual dismantling of the discriminatory barriers that were forcibly keeping them apart and denying blacks an equal chance in the “pursuit of happiness.” But the Black Muslims had no wish to associate with whites on any terms whatsoever. What they wanted was to have as little to do with them as possible. Indeed, they did not flinch from (literally) denouncing the whole white race as a creature of the devil.
To the surprise and consternation of the devout liberals who led and supported the civil-rights establishment, the Black Muslims seemed to be gaining influence within the black community. This was due in no small part to the brilliant oratorical skills of Malcolm X, but the main cause was that many blacks were beginning to feel that progress toward integration was too slow and that in the end whites would never stop resisting it.
As for me, I was then on the left and still about five years away from “breaking ranks” with my erstwhile political friends. I was also at the beginning of my fourth year as the editor of COMMENTARY, where a number of Baldwin’s most powerful essays, later collected in Notes of a Native Son, had first appeared. This was before my time, but having traveled for ages in the same literary circle and attended all the same parties, we had come to know each other, and—because I liked him for the work he had done, and he liked me because I admired him as a writer—we had become fairly friendly. Inevitably, then, when it struck me that an important article was clamoring to be written that would explain why the Black Muslims were becoming more and more influential and how this wholly unanticipated development might play itself out, I simultaneously decided that no one could do the job as well as, let alone better than, Jimmy Baldwin. As a passionate antagonist of separationism, he would undoubtedly hold out against the pernicious ideology of the Black Muslims, but as an imaginative observer with a wonderfully perceptive eye and a pen to match, he could also be relied on to understand and elucidate the growing appeal of Malcolm’s message.
The minute I proposed it to him, Baldwin immediately saw the possibilities of such an article and he accepted the assignment with alacrity and enthusiasm, promising moreover to deliver the manuscript in just a few weeks. But a few weeks came and went and then another few weeks, and still no manuscript. When I finally reached him after a string of unanswered calls, he nervously confessed that he had finished the piece but that his agent had sent it to the New Yorker.
Now, selling an article proposed and commissioned by one magazine to another was so egregious a breach of trust and common practice that it could not be justified, at least not in my eyes, even by the fact that the New Yorker could pay him about 10 times as much as COMMENTARY could have done. And to deepen my chagrin at having been robbed of a major editorial coup, it (deservedly) created one of the great journalistic sensations in living memory when it came out under the title “Letter from a Region in My Mind”—and then in book form as The Fire Next Time.
The poet Kenneth Rexroth had recently coined the term “Crow-Jimism” to describe the tendency of white liberals to make special allowances for blacks who were guilty of any sort of offense, up to and including violent crimes. This was exactly how most of my friends and colleagues responded on hearing what Baldwin had done, but I was having none of it. Consequently when, at his request, I agreed to meet him for a drink “to talk this thing over,” I let him have it with both barrels even after the minimal contrition he now showed. His refusal to justify himself was all very well, I told him, but it did not make what he had done any less dishonest and dishonorable, especially coming from someone who went around preaching the virtue of “paying one’s dues.” The truth was that the only reason he had dared to behave so abominably was that, thanks to the white liberal guilt he himself had often written about with the authority of a frequent beneficiary, he could count on getting away with it. But he was very much mistaken if he thought that I felt even the slightest degree of guilt toward him or toward Negroes in general. How could I, when I had grown up in a slum neighborhood where it was the Negro kids who persecuted us whites and not the other way around?
I then proceeded to tell him a few stories about my childhood encounters with black thugs of my own age and about the resentment and bitterness and even hatred with which this experience had left me. It had also left me, I said, with an irritable attitude toward all the sentimental nonsense that was being propagated about integration by whites who knew nothing about blacks and by blacks who imagined that all their problems would be solved by living next door to whites. The trouble went deeper than the integrationists seemed to understand; there was something almost psychotic in the relation of whites to blacks in America, resembling in its imperviousness to rational analysis or political action the feeling of Christian Europe toward the Jews. You yourself, I went on, have told us that all blacks hate whites, and I am here to tell you that all whites are twisted and sick in their feelings about blacks. This was where the Black Muslims, for all the craziness of their “white devil” theology, had a point. But if they were right that integration was not the answer, they were dead wrong to place their faith in separation. In fact, the ideal conclusion to the whole sorry story would be the opposite extreme: the wholesale merger of the two races through miscegenation.
As I talked, Baldwin’s normally bulging eyes bulged and blazed even more fiercely than usual. “You ought,” he whispered as though participating in a conspiracy, “to write all that down.” It was important, more important than I realized, for such things to be said; and they had to be said in public. Thus it was that Baldwin repaid me for giving him the idea and the incentive for The Fire Next Time with the idea and the encouragement for “My Negro Problem—and Ours.”2
Relatively speaking—since the circulation of the New Yorker was about 20 times greater than COMMENTARY’s—the sensation “My Negro Problem—and Ours” caused upon its publication in February 1963 was, in its own league, almost as great as the one that had greeted Baldwin’s piece. Rarely in the history of COMMENTARY had there appeared an article that drew more than a few letters. Even for controversial articles, 10 was a lot and 20 extraordinary. “My Negro Problem—and Ours” drew more than 300, and it also elicited dozens of pieces in newspapers and other magazines.
All this comment did indeed bear out the critic who would later say that there was something in the essay to offend everyone. Integrationists were beside themselves over my dismissal of their ideas as naive and even deluded. Separationists—including, along with the Black Muslims, various other groups waiting in the wings such as the ultra-left Black Panthers who would in the near future coalesce into the Black Power movement—were outraged by the slighting references to the history and culture of their people I made in the course of arguing for the desirability of miscegenation. Nor were black nationalists alone in feeling this way. Ralph Ellison, as fervent an enemy of separatism as could be found, lashed into me in private for my blindness to the central place that black culture held in American culture at large. And finally, many of my fellow Jews were horrified when, piling injury to them on top of this insult to blacks, I said that if the survival of the Jewish people, who carried so rich a culture with them, might not have been worth the suffering it entailed, how much less would it matter if the blacks, who had nothing to lose but their “stigma,” were to disappear through miscegenation.
Still, not everyone was offended. To be sure, hardly anyone agreed with my endorsement of the hope Baldwin had held out in The Fire Next Time that “color as a fact of consciousness” could some day be made to disappear in America and my own addendum that wholesale miscegenation was the only way to banish it. Nevertheless, while taking issue with me over miscegenation, a fair number of the 300 letters we received and even a few of the pieces in other periodicals commended the essay for its “intellectual integrity” in refusing to back away from the logical conclusion of the analysis, however shocking or distasteful it might be. But the majority of those who admired the essay mainly focused on its “honesty” in confessing to feelings that they themselves also unhappily harbored and that they could now begin to confront and try to overcome. Most also commended me for my “courage” in exposing myself so nakedly to attack. And what was most gratifying of all (as any writer will understand), more than a few letters hailed the essay as an exceptionally powerful and eloquent piece of writing
This, then, is how things stood in 1963, and since then “My Negro Problem—and Ours” has been cited and reprinted more times than I can count. I like to think that what accounts for this continuing interest is its literary qualities. But my guess is that another factor was at work that had far more to do than prose style with keeping it alive for half a century. For as the years went on, a curious reversal occurred, as a result of which this essay that originally had something in it to offend everyone turned into a piece that now had something in it to please, if not everyone, then a growing number of both blacks and whites.
This something was the idea that all whites hated blacks.3 Of course, that was not exactly what I had said. My own words were that all whites were “twisted and sick” in their feelings toward blacks. But to many readers, it turned out, this formulation was indistinguishable from the charge that all whites, very much including the liberals among them who had been lifelong participants in the black struggle for equal rights, were incorrigibly racist in their heart of hearts. (As I write, an op-ed piece by Ta-Nehisi Coates in the New York Times has just leveled this very accusation at all “the good people” living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, the very heartland of American liberalism.) And just as I had invoked the authority of Baldwin in saying that all blacks hated whites, “My Negro Problem—and Ours” was made to serve as definitive evidence of the universally reciprocal feeling among whites. The reason it was made to do so, of course, was that this interpretation lent itself perfectly to the view that the “Negro problem”—the only Negro problem—was external oppression, and that nothing blacks themselves did or failed to do made, or could ever make, more than a trivial difference.
It pains me to think that “My Negro Problem—and Ours” may have played a part, however small, in this kind of thing. For the almost complete abdication of black responsibility and the commensurately total dependence on government engendered by so obsessive and exclusive a fixation on white racism as the root of all racial evils has been nothing short of calamitous. It has spawned attitudes and policies that have undermined the very habits and behaviors that are essential to the achievement of independence and self-respect, and it has thereby helped consign three generations of black kids to the underclass while contributing to the immiseration of countless black lives.
It has also had the indirect consequence of fostering thuggery and aggression. In 1963, the stories I told about my own childhood experience of such thuggery and aggression were very shocking to most white liberals. In their eyes, blacks were all long-suffering and noble victims of the kind who had become familiar through the struggles of the civil-rights movement in the South—the “heroic period” of the movement, as one of its most heroic leaders, Bayard Rustin, called it. Although none of my white critics denied the truthfulness of the stories I told, they themselves could hardly imagine being afraid of blacks when their first-hand acquaintance with them was limited to nannies and cleaning women.
Today, it is still other blacks who are most often the victims of black crime, but black-on-white violence is much more common than it was in 1963, so that many whites could now top my stories with worse. And yet even today, few of them would be willing to speak truthfully in public about their entirely rational fear of black violence and black crime. Doing so remains dangerous to one’s reputation: To borrow the phrase I once appropriated from D.H. Lawrence in talking about ambition, white fear of blacks has become a “dirty little secret” of our political culture. And since a dirty little secret breeds hypocrisy and cant in those who harbor it, I suppose it can still be said that most whites are twisted and sick in their feelings about blacks, albeit in a very different sense from the way they were in 1963.
It therefore seems to me that the narrative section of “My Negro Problem—and Ours” is perhaps as resonant today as it was then. I cannot, however, say the same for other parts of the essay.
Obviously I was right in predicting that integration as it was naively envisaged in those days would never, if ever, come about. Yet I have to admit that some of the goals of integrationism have been achieved. For example, a larger proportion of the black community is economically better off than was the case in 1963, and blacks have acquired much more political power than they had then. But at the same time relations between the races have deteriorated. Gone on the whole are the interracial friendships and the interracial political alliances that were quite common 50 years ago. In their place we have the nearly impassable gulfs of suspicion and hostility that are epitomized by the typical college dining hall of today where black students insist on sitting at tables of their own and whites are happy to accept this segregated arrangement or feel hurt at being repulsed.
Ironies abound here. For one thing, this development represented the cooptation of an integrationist goal by the black-nationalist ideal. By this I mean that the process of reverse discrimination euphemistically known as affirmative action, whose intention was to further the integrationist vision of a society in which blacks would mingle on equal terms with whites, ended up serving the separationist purposes of the Black Power movement (not to mention how it also ended up aping the segregationist practices in the South that the civil-rights movement had fought so hard to abolish).
Because I failed to anticipate such developments, I found in 1963 no path to the elimination of “color as a fact of consciousness” except the wholesale merging of the two races. I knew of course, as Baldwin did too, that there was an even smaller chance of this coming to pass in the foreseeable future than the much less ambitious goals of the integrationists. But because my objective in writing the essay was to speak the truth as I saw it and to go where it took me no matter what the consequences, it would have been a cowardly betrayal to shrink from the conclusion to which my analysis inexorably led.
Yet if I did the right thing from the perspective of intellectual coherence and literary fitness, I was wrong to think that miscegenation could ever result in the elimination of color-consciousness. I had already been half convinced of this in 1963 by an angry Ralph Ellison, who stopped me in my tracks, again in private, with the biting observation that, far from making us color-blind, racial intermarriage would only succeed in producing more babies who would be considered black. But what settled the matter once and for all for me was what has happened since the election to the presidency of a pure product of miscegenation. For the ascension of Barack Obama from out of nowhere to the White House has if anything heightened the American consciousness of color. Worse yet, instead of putting an end to the compulsive insistence on the racism of American society, it has given this obsession a new lease on life. Thus, any and every criticism of Obama’s policies is now ascribed to racist motivations, and any and every little incident involving the mistreatment—or the alleged mistreatment—of a black is seized upon and blown up into another proof that racism remains rampant, if largely hidden, in American society. So far has this libel traveled that no less mainstream a personage than the editor of the New York Times Book Review has recently disgraced himself with a long article arguing that the ideology of the entire conservative movement is a covert species of racism, and that this ideology has now infected the Republican Party and sickened it unto death. In this intellectually and morally perverted reading, the party of Abraham Lincoln is magically metamorphosed into the party of John C. Calhoun, his greatest political enemy.
I now think that Ellison was also right to excoriate me for my dismissive attitude toward black culture, and that my Jewish critics were right to take offense at my questioning whether the survival of the Jewish people was worth the suffering it entailed (though at the time, the proximity to the Holocaust made it very hard for me to keep this question out of my mind and to refrain from raising it in print).
On the other hand, though I think what I said about white racism in 1963 was right, the contention that nothing has changed since then seems to me almost demented. Surely the election of Barack Obama proves beyond any reasonable doubt that there is infinitely less anti-black bigotry than there was in 1963, when such a thing was simply unthinkable.
No, the problem today is not white racism. Today the root cause of all the ills that plague the black community is the astounding proportion of black babies born out of wedlock who grow up without fathers, and who are doomed to do badly in school, to get into trouble on the streets, and to wind up in jail. Efforts have been made to blame even this tragic state of affairs on white racism, but they all founder on the simple fact that in 1963, when white racism was by any measure far more pervasive than it is today, only about 23 percent of births among black women were illegitimate, whereas the number is now fast approaching 75 percent.
Which points to yet another of the ironies abounding in this unhappy story. For if there is white racism at work here, it is precisely the perverse liberal variety that lies in the contemporary multiculturalist mutation of such “Crow-Jimist” efforts. A perfect recent example is the Planned Parenthood attack on the campaign launched by New York City to discourage unmarried teenage girls from having babies. Since most of these girls are black, Planned Parenthood felt obliged to denounce the “stigmatizing” assumption that there was something wrong with what they were doing.
Given all these disagreements with my younger self, why have I permitted “My Negro Problem—and Ours” to be reprinted so many times without revision? The answer is that I have always been proud of it for the boldness it exhibited in grappling with what was then, and still is, the most difficult subject for any American to discuss without hiding behind the usual clichés and pieties and without taking refuge in cant.
But to be as recklessly candid about this question as I was about race in the essay itself, I also have to admit that looking at it through the eyes of the literary critic I used to be, I cannot help seeing it as a fully realized piece of writing. It is in the nature of such a work that it achieves an existence independent of its author, and so it is with “My Negro Problem—and Ours.” Almost from the day it was published, I have felt that it no longer belonged to me and that I had no right to tamper with it, let alone to kill it off. All the more is this the case now that it has survived to the ripe old age of 50.