something about the difficulty that faced any black business-the barriers to entry, the lack of finance, the leg up that
your competitors possessed after having kept you out of the game for over three hundred years.
But I suspected that it also reflected the inevitable tension that arose when Minister Farrakhan’s message was reduced
to the mundane realities of buying toothpaste. I tried to imagine POWER’s product manager looking over his sales
projections. He might briefly wonder whether it made sense to distribute the brand in national supermarket chains
where blacks preferred to shop. If he rejected that idea, he might consider whether any black-owned supermarket trying
to compete against the national chains could afford to give shelf space to a product guaranteed to alienate potential
white customers. Would black consumers buy toothpaste through the mail? And what of the likelihood that the
cheapest supplier of whatever it was that went into making toothpaste was a white man?
Questions of competition, decisions forced by a market economy and majoritarian rule; issues of power. It was this
unyielding reality-that whites were not simply phantoms to be expunged from our dreams but were an active and varied
fact of our everyday lives-that finally explained how nationalism could thrive as an emotion and flounder as a program.
So long as nationalism remained a cathartic curse on the white race, it could win the applause of the jobless teenager
listening on the radio or the businessman watching late-night TV. But the descent from such unifying fervor to the
practical choices blacks confronted every day was steep. Compromises were everywhere. The black accountant asked:
How am I going to open an account at the black-owned bank if it charges me extra for checking and won’t even give
me a business loan because it says it can’t afford the risk? The black nurse said: White folks I work with ain’t so bad,
and even if they were, I can’t be quitting my job-who’s gonna pay my rent tomorrow, or feed my children today?
Rafiq had no ready answers to such questions; he was less interested in changing the rules of power than in the color
of those who had it and who therefore enjoyed its spoils. There was never much room at the top of the pyramid, though;
in a contest framed in such terms, the wait for black deliverance would be long indeed. During that wait, funny things
happened. What in the hands of Malcolm had once seemed a call to arms, a declaration that we would no longer
tolerate the intolerable, came to be the very thing Malcolm had sought to root out: one more feeder of fantasy, one
more mask for hypocrisy, one more excuse for inaction. Black politicians less gifted than Harold discovered what white
politicians had known for a very long time: that race-baiting could make up for a host of limitations. Younger leaders,
eager to make a name for themselves, upped the ante, peddling conspiracy theories all over town-the Koreans were
funding the Klan, Jewish doctors were injecting black babies with the AIDS virus. It was a shortcut to fame, if not
always fortune; like sex or violence on TV, black rage always found a ready market.
Nobody I spoke with in the neighborhood seemed to take such talk very seriously. As it was, many had already given
up the hope that politics could actually improve their lives, much less make demands on them; to them, a ballot, if cast
at all, was simply a ticket to a good show. Blacks had no real power to act on the occasional slips into anti-Semitism or
Asian-bashing, people would tell me; and anyway, black folks needed a chance to let off a little steam every once in a
while-man, what do you think those folks say about us behind our backs?
Just talk. Yet what concerned me wasn’t just the damage loose talk caused efforts at coalition building, or the
emotional pain it caused others. It was the distance between our talk and our action, the effect it was having on us as
individuals and as a people. That gap corrupted both language and thought; it made us forgetful and encouraged
fabrication; it eventually eroded our ability to hold either ourselves or each other accountable. And while none of this
barré
(Barré)
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