Bitter And No Sweet

THE BOARD of Cambridge's Civic Association (CCA)--the local liberals--were embroiled last month in a nasty fight over whether to endorse Alvin Thompson, a Black candidate for city council. The CCA are well-intentioned, hard-working people, and, the truth be told, think highly of themselves. So there was some displeasure when an elderly Black man stood up to say his piece--an attack on the group and its upper-class constituency for prejudice and racism. It was a bitter speech, full of recriminations for past wrongs, and it made a lot of people, including many who opposed the endorsement on fairly pure political grounds, squirm.

And more than a year ago, in the offices of this newspaper. Black students came by to air their grievances. The mostly white executive board--all well-intentioned, all liberal--was prepared to sit and discuss. They weren't prepared for the bitterness, not diluted with any appreciation for "trying hard." "This is not a discussion; it's a confrontation," several editors quoted one Black student as saying.

That same bitterness, powerfully expressed, lies at the heart of nearly every conversation John Gwaltney has recorded in his new book, whose title means "ordinary" in one American Black argot. One man, a coal miner, says this of whites: "Just thinking about them makes me feel like I have swallowed shit. I mean, a rat or a maggot is better than the best white cat who ever drew breath. Just looking at those things makes me want to spit up. Everything they do is rotten." Or this from a cook: "These people hide their dirt or make everybody lie and say their dirt is not dirt or they lie to us about their dirt. I know these are the rottenest people on God's earth, and they know it too. But as long as they can get folks to say that shit is shinola they would rather deal in shit any day."

White people thought, and many still think, that breaking down that bitterness should be simple. Walk around this campus and talk about affirmative action, and plenty of people will tell you that most discrimination here is against whites, not Blacks and that they are sick of it. Probably, they are more tired of being supposed to feel guilty than of worrying about med school admissions; probably, the rhetoric more than the result of affirmative action troubles them. And if that is the case, it is all the sadder, for if Gwaltney's chilling work proves one thing, it's that commitment, that admission of error, even of guilt, leading to a true change in attitude, is the only possible cure.

Gwaltney, following the lead of interviewers like Studs Terkel, lets dozens of average people talk into his tape recorder. He didn't seek out activists or politicians; he seemed, instead, to meet many of the sort of people respected for living quiet, aboveboard lives; the they hate, so much and with so much fire, is what makes this book so scary.

Racial oppression, an anthropologist reading this collection would conclude, has played a major role in shaping the ideas, and, of course, the day-to-day lives of Black Americans. Almost everyone who talks about Black American to Gwaltney defines it in contrast to white America. "I get tired of that one-nation-under-God boogie-joogie. We are ourselves. We are our own nation or country or whatever you want to call it. . . That man has got his country, and we are our country," one man insists. If their days are dominated by a single theme--the fraud of white rule--than their minds will be dominated by that idea, too. And the knowledge of prejudice and oppression is so well-founded that even if it is uncomfirmed for a little while or in a small place, it persists. The Cambridge Civic Association may not be full of racists; the editors of The Crimson may not be bigots. But their whiteness means something in and of itself, just as it did to the Black militants who drummed whites out of their ranks during the '60s civil rights movement. It wasn't that they thought the whites were prejudiced, but they knew they were white, and that meant something.

THE DEPTH--and the myriad valid justifications--suggests that surmounting the bitterness will be hard, much harder than stretching out some mythical, folksinger hand of brotherhood, much harder than pinning a green ribbon on the lapel, much harder than announcing that you will begin to consider Blacks for faculty positions--even with the best intentions. "We are, by reason of the lives we have led, a suspicious people. We are the children of suspicious people, as were our grandparents and their grandparents. This has been so with us even back to those people most of call foreparents. Now, if we think otherwise, we would probably all be white or dead!" one of Gwaltney's subjects declares.

Overcoming that suspicion will take more than gestures; indeed, the knowledge that many whites pat themselves on the back for being good liberals without being willing to give up any of the privileges of race or class infuriates many of those interviewed by Gwaltney. And it won't be simply a matter of handing out money, as many good liberals once assumed. "Any fool knows that if you are on your ass, what you need is lots of money and a way to make some money" one man tells Gwaltney. But instead, welfare created a dependence that couldn't be broken, that manufactured nothing but shame. "When they help their own, they give them money and say 'Here you are my man. Go for yourself.' But with us they just figured a way so their young boys could try for some black pussy and so their snotty bitches can look big in front of a whole line of black women. If I had said to you, 'Here, dog, have one of these ham sandwiches and some of this sweet bread,' you would have known right away I was white. . ."

Nebulous as the idea is, real change will demand a change in white attitudes that will inexorably lead to a change in actions. More than likely, that shift won't come, for it will mean something much harder than paying more taxes, or relinquishing first place in the line for civil service jobs. It will mean accepting the notion that Black Americans really do have grievances, and that those grievances are the work of white Americans. It will mean admitting guilt, and that means getting past the stiffening of the spine in resentment--as the CCA, or The Crimson, did--when accused.

And that won't happen. The small concessions that have already been made have assuaged much white guilt, though they've assuaged little Black misery. The neo-conservative reaction is fashionable; all manner of educated people parrot the idea that affirmative action equals reverse discrimination. All manner of educated people say "I'm sick of their act," as if Black anger, and the demands for its redress, are simply a tactic. And since, with some justification, that anger is undifferentiated, it often alienates the whites most likely to start some change, most likely to change themselves.

Allowing this country to remain two countries will prove much easier than squarely addressing Black America and its just demands. Easier to say "we've given them the right to vote, we've given them jobs, what more do they want?" than to find out what more they want and deserve to give it to them. Easier because "giving it to them" isn't going to mean passing a bill in Congress, it's going to mean changing the way the United States works. The continued separation, the way white Americans have always thought, will come at a price--continued bitterness, continued hatred, an unhealing, festering, open wound. But it's a price white America has paid since its birth, and one it will likely continue to pay. Gwaltney quotes Harriet Jones, a 10-year-old: "I think white people would wreck everything if they thought the only way they could save the country was to be as nice to us as we have been to them." She's probably right.