SPIELBERG ON THE BLACKS
aroused anguished debate about why so many blacks do so badly
Washington A FEW years ago, the National Press Club of this city decided upon a special testimo- nial dinner for I. F. Stone. They sought to honour one of the great campaigning indi- vidualists of our time, and it would be a rare commentator who said that the recog- nition came a moment too soon. Stone got the invitation, and responded that he would only come if he could bring a guest. He also hinted that there might be a technical difficulty about his own mem- bership of the club. A concerned commit- tee wrote back, assuring him that any guest of his would be welcome, and inquiring 'Teddy has a headache as well.' what conceivable difficulty there might be. Well, said Stone, he had been expelled from the National Press Club in the 1950s. The expulsion resulted from his having brought a black lawyer into the dining room. As far as he was concerned, the expulsion still stood, and neither he nor his guest had (so to speak) darkened the portals since that day. Moist with embar- rassment, the club soon set everything to rights and the resulting celebration went off very well, Mr Stone's guest having become, in the meantime, a distinguished judge.
This slight anecdote contains two mild shocks. It's a shock to recall how recent, and therefore how vivid, is the memory of straight-up, down-home, Jim Crow racial- ism. And it's a shock to think of how quickly it was deposed from more than a century of dominance. Experts argue ab- out the reasons, but the plain fact is that black judges, black stockbrokers, black mayors, black army officers and black journalists no longer arouse much com- ment. True, Ronald Reagan once failed to recognise the only black member of his cabinet. But he did at least ask him, 'And how are things in your city, Mr Mayor?' Earlier presidents might simply have told him which lift button to press, or indicated that their shoes needed a shine. True, also, that certain neighbourhoods and echelons are off-limits. But there is a large and confident black middle class, and scant reason to doubt that it is here to stay. If the American blacks were immigrants, they would be held to be doing very well.
They are, however, not immigrants, and their history is still very much with them. Alice Walker's novel The Colour Purple, and its rather sickly translation to the screen by Steven Spielberg, have opened a chasm of rancour and dispute. Most of this angst is registered among blacks, many of whom are first-generation middle class. The issue between them, simply put, is this. Should we blame the system for the condition of our people? Or is it time to criticise ourselves?
A nasty bouquet of statistics is handed to all those who turn up at the door of this debate. Almost half of all black families are fatherless, which is almost twice the number that were in that condition two decades ago. More than half of all black American babies are born out of wedlock, and one in four is born to a teenager. This teenager, in turn, is seldom anybody's wife.
The next lot of figures depend, for interpretation, upon whether you believe that `In the boyhood of Judas, Jesus was betrayed.' All that can be said for sure is that something awful is happening to the young black underclass. Black males form 5.6 per cent of the population. But they are 34 per cent of all murder victims. And, barring the odd lynching and the odd bigoted policeman, most of their murder- ers are black too. In the ghetto, man is a wolf to man.
This obviously isn't genetic, because it's increasing so alarmingly. And its rela- tionship to discrimination must be obscure, because it has got worse since desegrega- tion (or, at least, since legal desegrega- tion). The emotion generated by The Colour Purple is very different from that evoked by Notes of a Native Son or The Fire Next Time. Different, because Walker speaks of black patriarchy, black incest and black male brutality. The slave-driver and the redneck hardly make an appearance. The narrator, Celie, writes letters to God asking him why, since she is 'a good girl', she is used as a chattel and a vessel even by her own kin, and has come to distrust all men. Not to keep on about it, but all black men.
Three different kinds of reaction to this are on offer. First, and principally from black men, you hear that they have a hard enough time without this. Unemployment, declining educational opportunity, bad housing — and anyway, how many times do you see an attractive black man as role model on the screen? Second, and often from black women and black community leaders, you hear that the imagery of the film matches their own experience and that, what with drugs replacing alcohol, an even gloomier picture could be credibly drawn. Sotto voce from many white peo- ple, you hear the slightly furtive question, `I thought we did away with discrimination years ago. What do these people want now?' Nobody who saw the last election can doubt that this third opinion is pretty strong. The irony is that it is the third lot who reinforce the first lot, and vice versa.
The key player in all this is Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the genial, de- ceptively ugly Irishman from New York. It was his report on the question 21 years ago that first suggested a cycle of dependency, and that identified the disintegration of the black family as a potent foe of equality. (It is now part of conservative myth that the liberals did not want to know about this report at the time. In point of fact, Moynihan's findings were taken very seriously by leading black and civil rights activists.) The thing can be and is put crudely. Place a young and unqualified woman on welfare with one child, and she may starve. But if she has four children, by perhaps as many fathers, her dole from the state will increase more than prop- ortionately, and she will not need a male protector. In the corner shop on my block, I once heard a woman say, obviously not for the first time, 'Honey, I got a cat that sleeps all day and hangs out all night. Why do I need a husband?'
Does welfare, then, encourage black women to raise fatherless boys who then achieve surrogate manhood as violent cri- minals? And is this why the well-off white majority has decided that it has done all that can be expected of it? What are decent people supposed to think when they see the CBS documentary that was shown in January and entitled 'The Vanishing Fami- ly: Crisis in Black America'? Bill Moyers, the reporter, found a black man in Newark named Timothy McSeed, who bragged of his 'strong sperm' while revealing that he had fathered six children on four women, and contributed nothing to their upkeep. Mr McSeed was a gift to the lurid imagina- tion of some whites. He was also the precise negation of everything that the new, ambitious blacks are trying to be- come, and have become. Under the Reagan administration, a new semi-official orthodoxy has been adopted. Its chief exponent is Charles Murray, author of an amazingly influential book called Losing Ground. He argues that the 'A man is presumed innocent until named by Geoffrey Dickens.' welfare policy of the great society actually had the effect of reinforcing poverty. As he put it in a recent exchange with the Reverend Jesse Jackson: During those years we, in effect, changed the rules of the game . . . . If you are not learning in school, it is because the educational system is biased — if you are committing crimes, it is because the environment is poor — if You have a baby that you can't care for, its because your own upbringing was bad. Hav- ing absolved everybody of responsibility, we then said, `You can get along without holding a job. You can get along if you have a baby but have no husband and no income.' And lots of young people took the bait. So the question remains: What, if anything, does the government owe the poor?
What, if anything? It's touching to read, Jesse Jackson's response. He spends half his life addressing schoolchildren, urging them to come off drugs and to avoid unwanted pregnancy. He spends the other half trying to get large companies to increase the amount of business they do in the ghetto. He pushes black youngsters to join the army, to become sportsmen and entrepreneurs. He himself escaped from poverty and discrimination in South Caro- lina, and believes strongly in the role model. Take away his radical rhetoric, and what you have is a black Horatio Alger or Samuel Smiles: I saw a story in USA Today last summer headlined 'More Blacks Graduating from High School, Fewer Going to College'. s young lady from Chicago was quoted in the story, and I decided to meet with her and ber mother. It turned out she had a B+ average, was a member of the National Honour Society — the whole business. I said, 'Well, have yoll taken the tests?' She said he hadn't. `may not?"Well, the counsellor told me that since , couldn't afford to go to college, that stuff was a waste of time.
Jackson has Reagan's talent for the telling anecdote. He got her a place in college. But, as he says, if he hadn't done so: She would have been written off three or four years later — people would have said the family was subsidised, dependent — she didn't go to college, now she's pregnant and the whole cycle begins again. She was pro- grammed into lower ambition. Surprisingly, Murray's response to this and other arguments is to say, 'We need to reintroduce a notion which has a disrePtlt- able recent history in America: the notion of class.' He's right. Most of America S poor and illiterate are white — it's just that, blacks form a disproportionate number 0,1,. the poor and illiterate, and are more visible when it comes to crime. But when the leading blacks talk about the need for mare capital and the leading conservative analysts want to lay more stress on class well, we've come a long way from the Sixties. Live in the black area of Washington, an where y ou can see the handiwork area of many role models and also an area where On a Sunday, you can see th° entire neighbourhood en fete, with spotless families walking in crocodile to church, and mothers proudly comparing husbands and infants. This classic American scene is rare enough in any community. But on weekdays you notice the sullen youths and the single women with more children than they can handle. It's taken Alice Walker's odd, gently sapphic book, where the colour purple is the colour of feminine fulfilment, to focus national energy and attention on what ought to be the country's most conspicuous problem. I don't think I be- lieve in the note of despair and resignation that is struck by Celie towards the end, when she is working as a dressmaker:
By the time I got home I was feeling so bad I couldn't do nothing but sleep. I tried to work on some new pants I'm trying to make for pregnant women, but just the thought of anybody gitting pregnant make me want to cry.
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