white munificence. We could tell this country where it was wrong, I would tell myself and any black friends who
would listen, without ceasing to believe in its capacity for change.
In talking to self-professed nationalists like Rafiq, though, I came to see how the blanket indictment of everything
white served a central function in their message of uplift; how, psychologically, at least, one depended on the other. For
when the nationalist spoke of a reawakening of values as the only solution to black poverty, he was expressing an
implicit, if not explicit, criticism to black listeners: that we did not have to live as we did. And while there were those
who could take such an unadorned message and use it to hew out a new life for themselves-those with the stolid
dispositions that Booker T. Washington had once demanded from his followers-in the ears of many blacks such talk
smacked of the explanations that whites had always offered for black poverty: that we continued to suffer from, if not
genetic inferiority, then cultural weakness. It was a message that ignored causality or fault, a message outside history,
without a script or plot that might insist on progression. For a people already stripped of their history, a people often ill
equipped to retrieve that history in any form other than what fluttered across the television screen, the testimony of
what we saw every day seemed only to confirm our worst suspicions about ourselves.
Nationalism provided that history, an unambiguous morality tale that was easily communicated and easily grasped. A
steady attack on the white race, the constant recitation of black people’s brutal experience in this country, served as the
ballast that could prevent the ideas of personal and communal responsibility from tipping into an ocean of despair. Yes,
the nationalist would say, whites are responsible for your sorry state, not any inherent flaws in you. In fact, whites are
so heartless and devious that we can no longer expect anything from them. The self-loathing you feel, what keeps you
drinking or thieving, is planted by them. Rid them from your mind and find your true power liberated. Rise up, ye
mighty race!
This process of displacement, this means of engaging in self-criticism while removing ourselves from the object of
criticism, helped explain the much-admired success of the Nation of Islam in turning around the lives of drug addicts
and criminals. But if it was especially well suited to those at the bottom rungs of American life, it also spoke to all the
continuing doubts of the lawyer who had run hard for the gold ring yet still experienced the awkward silence when
walking into the clubhouse; those young college students who warily measured the distance between them and life on
Chicago’s mean streets, with the danger that distance implied; all the black people who, it turned out, shared with me a
voice that whispered inside them-“You don’t really belong here.”
In a sense, then, Rafiq was right when he insisted that, deep down, all blacks were potential nationalists. The anger
was there, bottled up and often turned inward. And as I thought about Ruby and her blue eyes, the teenagers calling
each other “nigger” and worse, I wondered whether, for now at least, Rafiq wasn’t also right in preferring that that
anger be redirected; whether a black politics that suppressed rage toward whites generally, or one that failed to elevate
race loyalty above all else, was a politics inadequate to the task.
It was a painful thought to consider, as painful now as it had been years ago. It contradicted the morality my mother
had taught me, a morality of subtle distinctions-between individuals of goodwill and those who wished me ill, between
active malice and ignorance or indifference. I had a personal stake in that moral framework; I’d discovered that I
couldn’t escape it if I tried. And yet perhaps it was a framework that blacks in this country could no longer afford;
perhaps it weakened black resolve, encouraged confusion within the ranks. Desperate times called for desperate
barré
(Barré)
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