(4 of 5)
"That bleakly memorable morning I hated the unbelievable [Harlem] streets and the Negroes and whites who had, equally, made them that way. But I knew that it was folly, as my father would have said, this bitterness was folly. It was necessary to hold on to the things that mattered. The dead man mattered, the new life mattered; blackness and whiteness did not matter; to believe that they did was to acquiesce in one's own destruction. Hatred which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated and this was an immutable law."
Many thoughtful observers of last Tuesday's events do not interpret them as signs that race relations are worse than ever. Russell Adams, chairman of Afro-American studies at Howard, says that "we have set a higher standard for evaluating racial conduct now. I don't mean to sound Pollyannaish, but the bar has been lifted. We expect more. We have been unfair to ourselves in not recognizing that." Writing in the current New York Review of Books, George Fredrickson, a professor of history at Stanford University, notes that what is often played up as racial division is equally divisions of region, religion and class. "The notion that race automatically overwhelms" such other considerations, he writes, "strikes me as untenable." Fredrickson would probably agree that most middle-class blacks would not understand the Clockers language either.
The problem America faces, however virulent race hatred remains, is how not to bury it again. A black young woman walks down a Lincoln, Nebraska, street, and she believes the whites she passes are thinking the worst of her. The white young man who passes her believes she is thinking the worst of him. If they were to tell each other what was really on their mind, they might both be surprised, or at any rate instructed. Each has the capacity to make another country, which was as much Baldwin's theme as his condemnation of the existing one. America is still another country from the one it seeks to be, and that ideal always hovers within reach.
Everyone agrees that the answer lies in talk and more talk, but the conversation has to be candid. If the reactions to the O.J. verdict proved anything, it was that the polite niceties shared and the dirty little secrets kept in recent years do nothing but infect the wounds. In future conversations it might be said by whites that some part of them reluctantly believes the accusation of genetic intellectual inferiority leveled at African Americans. It might be said by African Americans that they are as fearful, and perhaps as ashamed, of the black underclass as whites are. Both might speak of anti-Semitism, the white responsibility as well as the black. Some Jews might speak of prejudices of their own.