notes to an old friend...
YOU WERE A MAN WITH A SKIN COLORED BLACK...
AND I WAS A MAN WITH A PELT TINTED WHITE, and once-upon-a-time, we were good friends. All friendships are difficult, but for awhile, ours endured. It somehow didn't matter that I was the son of German-Belgium immigrants and you were the descendant of African slaves; back then, we generally saw the world the same way; were enraged by the same atrocities, amused by the same hypocrisies, celebrated together the often paltry evidence of human kindness or generosity.
Yet, the accident of race was always an unavoidable presence in our friendship; after all, I met you in 1955, which was the year that Emmett Till was killed in Mississippi for the terrible crime of whistling at a white woman. Back then, the two of us were in our first year of college, and as the college years inched by, there was even more awful evidence of man's apparent capacity for stupidity and murder. But for each of us, our racial and cultural differences were a mutual enrichment, uniquely American. And between the two of us there was a wonderful exchange: Hemingway for the blues, Joyce for Charlie Parker, O'Casey for Langston Hughes; both of us claimed Willie Mays. Somehow, we remained optimists. As young men, we had read our Camus and Sartre, we believed that it was possible to love our country and justice, too. That simple faith, with a hint of irony, was at the heart of our friendship.
As America grew older, things began to change between the two of us. Now irony wasn't enough. Nor was bebop or Camus. There was no longer a realistic way to avoid the truth: A shadow had fallen across the land and upon the once bright fields of our friendship. It was obvious that the most powerful country in the world was now being torn apart. There were marches in Mississippi and riots in Chicago. You went off to became a Doctor in my old hometown of Denver, wrote to me that you had become associated with the Black Panthers; and I went off to a Lutheran Seminary in Nebraska to become a minister, then went-off to march with Martin Luther King in Mississippi. We had both begun both to recognize the existence of a permanent Black Underclass, with all of its fierce negative power. Our America was moving even farther away from the basic requirements of a human life: work, family, safety, the law.
It was then that you began to retreat into the defensive clichés of glib racialism. Your argument was a simple one: the Black Underclass was the fault of the White Man. Not some white men. All white men. Including me.
You recited various examples of a surging white racism, the Bernard Goetz and Howard Beach cases in liberal New York, resurgent Klan in the south, continued reports of whites using force to keep blacks from moving in their neighborhoods, white cops to quick to arrest, abuse, or shoot down black suspects, persistent examples of racial steering in middle-class housing, the Al Campanis controversy. Certainly had become real in the United States, only a fool could deny that; as I began to see more and more African-Americans moving from rotting tenements to the penal corridors of public housing to the roach-ridden caves of welfare hotels; and you became more and more enraged. By then, we were estranged.
Whites - liberal or otherwise - were no longer as committed to the cause of black Americans as they once were in the time of the Civil Rights Act of 1965. Around that time, white liberals like me were pushed out of the movement by your Black Power crowd; the lies of black anti-Semitism drove out other whites, and others were convinced that it was time to take a hike. "Black Pride" was now equated with the hatred of whites. Reverse racism had become the norm; which is why, for many Americans, that it may be a long time before whites will cry again the way the did for the little girls who died in the Birmingham bombing, or for Medgar Evers, or Malcolm X, or King. In the best possible world, of course, this ought to have never happened to either the black nor the whites.
I am not very good at repairing holes in the human spirit, but it seems to me that there is an extraordinary amount of work to be done to repair our collapsed relationship, and the time to begin is now. In the end, out of self interest, that is the reason I am writing this, and is the most important thing I could think of doing in order to repair the comradeship I once had with you. In the best of all possible worlds, of course, I would have more answers than questions about the divide that has grown between the two of us, obliterating our once bright affinity for each other. And the reason for all of the above is really quite simple: I miss having you in my life...
AND I WAS A MAN WITH A PELT TINTED WHITE, and once-upon-a-time, we were good friends. All friendships are difficult, but for awhile, ours endured. It somehow didn't matter that I was the son of German-Belgium immigrants and you were the descendant of African slaves; back then, we generally saw the world the same way; were enraged by the same atrocities, amused by the same hypocrisies, celebrated together the often paltry evidence of human kindness or generosity.
Yet, the accident of race was always an unavoidable presence in our friendship; after all, I met you in 1955, which was the year that Emmett Till was killed in Mississippi for the terrible crime of whistling at a white woman. Back then, the two of us were in our first year of college, and as the college years inched by, there was even more awful evidence of man's apparent capacity for stupidity and murder. But for each of us, our racial and cultural differences were a mutual enrichment, uniquely American. And between the two of us there was a wonderful exchange: Hemingway for the blues, Joyce for Charlie Parker, O'Casey for Langston Hughes; both of us claimed Willie Mays. Somehow, we remained optimists. As young men, we had read our Camus and Sartre, we believed that it was possible to love our country and justice, too. That simple faith, with a hint of irony, was at the heart of our friendship.
As America grew older, things began to change between the two of us. Now irony wasn't enough. Nor was bebop or Camus. There was no longer a realistic way to avoid the truth: A shadow had fallen across the land and upon the once bright fields of our friendship. It was obvious that the most powerful country in the world was now being torn apart. There were marches in Mississippi and riots in Chicago. You went off to became a Doctor in my old hometown of Denver, wrote to me that you had become associated with the Black Panthers; and I went off to a Lutheran Seminary in Nebraska to become a minister, then went-off to march with Martin Luther King in Mississippi. We had both begun both to recognize the existence of a permanent Black Underclass, with all of its fierce negative power. Our America was moving even farther away from the basic requirements of a human life: work, family, safety, the law.
It was then that you began to retreat into the defensive clichés of glib racialism. Your argument was a simple one: the Black Underclass was the fault of the White Man. Not some white men. All white men. Including me.
You recited various examples of a surging white racism, the Bernard Goetz and Howard Beach cases in liberal New York, resurgent Klan in the south, continued reports of whites using force to keep blacks from moving in their neighborhoods, white cops to quick to arrest, abuse, or shoot down black suspects, persistent examples of racial steering in middle-class housing, the Al Campanis controversy. Certainly had become real in the United States, only a fool could deny that; as I began to see more and more African-Americans moving from rotting tenements to the penal corridors of public housing to the roach-ridden caves of welfare hotels; and you became more and more enraged. By then, we were estranged.
Whites - liberal or otherwise - were no longer as committed to the cause of black Americans as they once were in the time of the Civil Rights Act of 1965. Around that time, white liberals like me were pushed out of the movement by your Black Power crowd; the lies of black anti-Semitism drove out other whites, and others were convinced that it was time to take a hike. "Black Pride" was now equated with the hatred of whites. Reverse racism had become the norm; which is why, for many Americans, that it may be a long time before whites will cry again the way the did for the little girls who died in the Birmingham bombing, or for Medgar Evers, or Malcolm X, or King. In the best possible world, of course, this ought to have never happened to either the black nor the whites.
I am not very good at repairing holes in the human spirit, but it seems to me that there is an extraordinary amount of work to be done to repair our collapsed relationship, and the time to begin is now. In the end, out of self interest, that is the reason I am writing this, and is the most important thing I could think of doing in order to repair the comradeship I once had with you. In the best of all possible worlds, of course, I would have more answers than questions about the divide that has grown between the two of us, obliterating our once bright affinity for each other. And the reason for all of the above is really quite simple: I miss having you in my life...
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