'Savage wasp
MORDECAI RICHLER
Black Power Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton (Cape 30s) Much as I hate to admit it, it's not the decent people in the middle, rather the white bigots and black power zealots who are confronting the colour problem most honestly. Integration does ultimately depend on 'would you let your daughter marry one,' and anything Jess, how- ever candy-coated, means separate and far from equal development. In his exceedingly generous and patient Chaos or Community, Martin Luther King writes, 'The personal torment of discrimination cannot be measured on a numerical scale, but the grim evidence of its hold on white Americans is revealed in polls that indicate that 88 per cent of them would object if their teen-age child dated a negro. Almost 80 per cent would mind if a close friend or relative married a negro, and 50 per cent would not want a negro for a neighbour.' Well then, my short answer is yes, I would most assuredly let my daughter marry one, which is not to say that I am without prejudice.
If I am somewhat prejudiced against negroes, in so far as I tend to suspect any but my own familiar group, then I feel even more hostile to- wards homosexuals, Germans, or anybody who belongs to the Young Conservatives. It has often been observed that most Jewish jokes are anti-Semitic (or self-deflating): it should also be accepted that more than one Jewish joke is anti-negro. Take this, for instance. Two Jewish communists in New York meet to discuss the evening's assembly. 'Tonight,' one says, 'you bring the schwartze (negro) and I'll bring the guitar.' And there are, I trust, a balancing fund of negro anti-Jewish jokes.
Tension between minority groups is not with- out its oblique flatteries. To negroes—or Afro- Americans, as Stokely Carmichael justifiably insists—Jews are bona fide white men, a status still denied them at a number of country clubs;
whilst, to some Jews, negroes are not so much black as still more goys, unredeemably dreary types whatever the skin pigment. Then, if that most objectionable of minstrels, Al Jolson, was once a caricature that sensitive negroes might honestly abhor, today vengeance is theirs: Sammy Davis Junior, since his conversion to Judaism, is easily the most obnoxious of stage Jews.
Bigots, but WASP liberals especially, impose more than one odious constriction on minority group men. We are not supposed to take pleasure in big flashy cars, eat watermelon on the front stoop, or cheat on our income tax returns. To be imperfect, just like real human beings, is either to let the liberal side down or lend bigots inflammatory evidence. And so negroes are applauded for Sidney Poitier and Floyd Patterson, but not the admirably defiant Cassius Clay. The Anglo-Jewish community is proud of Sir Isaac Wolfson and the late Victor Gollancz, but_not John Bloom, who is more to my taste. From Stepin Fetchit to the hateful Fiddler on the Roof, we are driven to pander- ing to the majority image of ourselves. Or as Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton so astutely complain, in Black Power, obsequiously to accept WASP as best. To make ourselves over, in denial of our own traditions. Negroes taking the names of slave-masters, buying hair- straighteners, or sporting grey flannel suits; Jews anglicising their names or investing in nose-jobs for their daughters.
Furthermore, it is generally seen as unbecom- ing —no, downright ungrateful—for minority group men to be actively prejudiced against the majority. Bigotry is a privilege.
Yesterday's European Jews, today's Ameri- can and southern African negroes are expected to be grateful for progress made so far, which increasingly is not the case. Carmichael and Hamilton conclude their utterly reasonable, well-argued book with a touch of menace. `... One thing stands clear: whatever the con- sequences, there is a growing—a rapidly grow- ing—body of black people determined to "Tee —take care of business. They will not be stopped in their drive-to achieve dignity, to achieve their share of power, indeed to become their own men and women—in this time and this land— by whatever means necessary.'
But their central thesis is unobjectionable. Black power, as they define it, is not reverse racism unleashed, but a recognition, long over- due, by Afro-Americans, that other immigrant groups (Jews, Italians, Irish) bettered their American lot by group action and blatant use of economic power. They also maintain, again reasonably, that so diminished in pride is the Afro-American, in the northern ghettoes as well as the south, that white leadership, how- ever well-intended, only confirms superimposed feelings of racial inferiority. At this time, it is emotionally necessary for Afro-Americans to do almost everything themselves. First, a re- storation of savagely abused pride; then partner- ship. Radical Jews, long sympathetic to the negro cause, should readily understand. If Orde Wingate (who always fancied himself in the role) and not Dayan, had led the Jewish army Into Jerusalem, it would not have done nearly so much to restore Jewish pride (whatever one's Intellectual reservations about Israeli real- Politik).
Martin Luther King's book does not refute Black Power, but complements it. Coming of an older generation, Dr King is at once more tolerant, less impatient. He is also a nobler man than contemporary America deserves. Finally, let me declare a cowardly self-interest. Because I'm white and terrified of negro violence in America, I am grateful for Dr King and hope, though I fear it won't be so, that his influence survives this coming summer. But if I were black and American, humiliated for genera- tions, punished by ten years of false hopes, I like to think I would be out there in the streets with Stokely Carmichael.
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