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"What do you think, Steve?" The question was addressed to an African-American student.
"I thought O.J. was guilty," he answered. "But when the verdict came down, and I was standing with everyone in the dorm, my white friends gave me dirty looks. It was as if I was being held accountable for being black."
"I always feel that," said an African-American woman in her late 20s who works with Nebraska educational television. "I walk down the street, and I know that many of the whites who look at me are thinking 'inarticulate' or 'stupid.' If I were male, they'd be thinking 'dangerous.' I don't say these words for them. The color of my skin says them."
"Is that it?" someone asked her. "Is it just a difference of appearance?" The woman nodded.
"You know," said a young man, "after Tuesday I walk down the street and I wonder what blacks are thinking. Do you feel like an American?" he asked the black woman.
"Some days," she said.
A HUNDRED YEARS AGO, W.E.B. DUBOIS ascribed a "double consciousness" to black Americans that created the feeling of living in a country within a country. Certain black intellectuals have perceived that separateness as allowing blacks to see America more clearly than the rest of America sees itself, and to grasp the cruelty and injustice that much of the country seeks to deny. LeRoi Jones compared the black person in America to someone locked in one room of a big house: "If you never go into that room, you don't know anything about [it]. If I come out of that room to clean many other things in the rest of the house, then I know about the whole house." Richard Wright said that the "Negro is America's metaphor." The idea is that black people, merely by existing, hold up a mirror to white America, in which it may see itself darkly.
But when the world it sees is literally dark, white America recoils, or as the Nebraska woman said, it retreats to stereotypes. Frantz Fanon explained this phenomenon as a response to an image of the negative; blacks are automatically deemed bad (inferior, dangerous) by being the opposite of whites. African Americans cannot hide their color the way whites can hide their feelings about color. The only ways they can conceal themselves are to "pass" or disappear into white culture (this is a major theme of early African-American fiction), or to develop secret forms of knowledge or communication, as slaves once did. In the opening scene of Spike Lee's movie Clockers, street kids deliberately are shown to speak unintelligibly, as if to say, "This is not your world."
If it is true that less has changed for the better in the past 30 years than white people have believed, or have wanted to believe, it is also true that the will to improve things, which was always strong, is strong still. Baldwin, who wrote Another Country, also wrote Notes of a Native Son. In it he described the day of his father's funeral: