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Or say that the black rage was indeed as serious as that eruption of joy made it appear. It still might be limited to the post-Rodney King L.A.P.D., or to the California system of justice, or, at its broadest, to the American system of justice; but surely never to America as a whole. If the rage was vented on America as a whole, well, it could mean that James Baldwin had been right in Another Country, that African Americans can never feel at home at home.
Yet how could this still be true, 30 years after Baldwin's novel? If the intensity of ill feeling between blacks and whites is the same these days, the causes are new. Many white people look at progress made and think African Americans have little excuse for complaint or for failure. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 secured them the vote; their number in the House of Representatives is close to their proportion of the population; the black middle class has grown so large that it constitutes nearly a third of black families; African Americans of stature and achievement are everywhere in sight (see Colin Powell; Marian Wright Edelman; Ruth Simmons, the new president of Smith College; and Christopher Darden and Johnnie Cochran Jr.).
To many African Americans, on the other hand, these indications of progress are undermined by the facts that about a third of black families live below the poverty line; that 1 in 3 black males in his 20s is in jail, on probation or on parole; that a black lower middle class consisting of blue-collar workers is shrinking; that a resentful white attitude has resulted in attacks on affirmative action and government assistance, which, African Americans contend, rather than disabling black families by creating excessive dependencies has been inadequate to their needs. These antipodal positions have been hardened by an intellectual debate between those who state that antiblack sentiment has never been more harsh and those who claim that racism is dead.
AT THE UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA in Lincoln last Thursday, a group of 30 students, faculty and others met to try to come to terms with their thoughts. Everyone seemed weary and heavyhearted. A young white woman said, "It pains me to think that this is still going on. I take it personally. It upsets me. I've been brought up to believe that there is no difference between the races. Now I think I've been fooling myself."
"Think of it," a young man said bitterly. "O.J.'s lawyer tried to separate the races, and it worked." He shook his head. "It's a payback for Rodney King; that's all it is. Everybody was so stunned to see that police beating on tape."
"I don't think black people were stunned," said another female student. "And to tell you the truth, I'm not sure that we whites were all that surprised either. We just didn't want to look at what we feared was really happening."
"So maybe we weren't as floored as we pretended to be at the Mark Fuhrman tapes," a young man offered. "Somebody on TV said that every black person sees something of Fuhrman in every white person."
"I don't believe that," another student said, not looking too sure of herself.
"We have not been paying attention," said an English professor, who looked exhausted. "Maybe we suffered compassion fatigue. After civil rights, we told ourselves we had solved everything."