I am old enough to remember separate waiting rooms, restrooms, and drinking fountains in the American south: one set for blacks, one for whites. Looking back, one says: "Was there ever a greater, more widespread or persistent delusion than that of racial superiority?" And the answer was and is: "No."
So, though I decry and abominate the computer, the mass media and, indeed, most things that differentiate the 21st century from the 19th, I remind myself that I have lived to see the beginning of the end of American racism — and that is something to have lived to see. I speak not only as an Interested Citizen, not only as an admirer of the African-American race, but as a white man.
For the burden of repression put on white Americans by racism was intolerable. A few expressed their lack of toleration through action for social justice, the majority through lesser or greater endorsements of the system: I find an imbalance in my life; rather than attribute it to my subscription to an absurd and inhuman system of oppression, I will lay it at the door of "the blacks". The spectrum ran from: "You can't get good help" (as in, "Oh, Sarah, how many times have I told you to iron the creases in the sheets transversely?") to lynching. The operative mechanism was the same.
One looked and wondered: "Why did the black race not rise en masse, and slaughter its oppressors?" This is, most certainly, a naive question, and not unlike that of the little girl in Israel, who, on being told of the Holocaust, asked her teacher: "Why didn't we just send our army?"
The question is naive, but it is my own; and, if it is rhetorical, it is provocative. And it is the question of Richard Wright in his Native Son, my vote for the Great American Novel. His hero, Bigger Thomas, a young Chicago black man, kills a few of his white oppressors and burns them in a furnace. The book is a tragedy of race.
I hope you do not misunderstand me. I do not believe violence is cleansing; I believe it is obscene and inhumane. I believe that we all have the propensity for violence, that we all have violent fantasies and that drama, and especially tragedy, has the power to bring these fantasies to light: to release the repressed in a safe — indeed, in a sanctified — setting and, so, restore balance to the individual.
Native Son is not a paean to violence, but a soul-deep cry for reason. It is the antithesis of Ivanhoe, of "Ol' Man River, he jes keeps rolling along". Here, Ol' Man River stops rolling, and the confronted audience must draw its own conclusions. As a Jew, I loathe The Diary of Anne Frank (and I suppose that is how African-Americans must feel about Guess Who's Coming to Dinner).
| "Edmond" playwright David Mamet writes "Misguided, Excessive and True" for the Guardian UK.
posted in articles on July 17, 2003 11:44 PM | t (0)
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I know I'm letting myself in for a heap of trouble here, but my immediate response to Mamet's question, "Was there ever a greater, more widespread or persistent delusion than that of racial superiority?" is not "no," but "yes." The delusion that men are superior to women has been "greater" (if, in using that somewhat imprecise word, Mamet is referring to gross number of people involved over time), more widespread, and persistent.
This is not to say sexism is somehow "worse" than racism, or than any of the other usual suspects. (To speak of better or worse systems of oppression misses the point.) But, using Mamet's own criteria, the answer he gives to his own question is incorrect.
(Why women have not risen en masse to slaughter their oppressors might be an interesting question...)
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