In the old McDonald's commercial it was Bird vs MJ. If Larry Bird wins he gets Michael Jordan's sandwich. And if Michael Jordan wins he gets...?
By Ishmael Reed
Being a black man in America is like being a spectator at your own lynching. Everybody gets to make a speech about you but you: white supremacists, feminists, conservatives, liberals, sociologists, psychologists, demographers—all manner of experts, editorial writers and columnists, many of whom seem to live in cozy places like Georgetown or Palo Alto.
Every time you try to tell your story, you're interrupted or called para¬noid. As a black male writer, sometimes you have to be strident to get your point across, to get somebody to pay attention. You feel like the man yelling fire in a crowded theater. You just can"t seem to get the gag off, so you engage in what to society is muffled incoherency.
If people only knew the truth, they wouldn't prejudge you, you think. If they only knew the statistics that puncture the lies that are circulating about black men, they wouldn't get you mixed up with the one percent with whom the media are so thrilled—the bums and deadbeats. Every time you see footage of a drug bust on TV you see black males. Yet the Drug Enforcement Administration has said that a number of ethnic groups, including Orientals and Israelis, are involved in drug trafficking. The news shows don't show the Chinese gangs that now supply 40 percent of the heroin in New York.
As with the persecuted Jews in Germany, somebody is always trying to pin the Star of David on your clothes, but in this country it's very convenient. You wear the Star of David on your skin. Your style disturbs people— Bernhard Goetz says he shot the black teenagers on the subway because he was threatened by their body language. Even the white avant-garde shares this view. Norman Mailer's "white negro" in his infamous essay of that title is an irresponsible psychopath who lives constantly on the edge.
When Susan Brownmiller, in her money-making book on rape, Against Our Will, wrote that to foster his manhood the black man contributes to the "specter of the black man as a rapist," she was indulging in group libel. You know that the majority of convicted rapists in the U.S. are white males. At the university where you work, the student newspaper for several years carried stories about black rapists, but then, thanks to the feminist movement, it was revealed that the most frequent type of rape occurring on campus was date rape—white fraternity guys who were refusing to take no for an answer.
You don't live in a true pogrom, but if you are caught in a neighbor¬hood where you don't belong, you might be placed under surveillance or you might be killed. You've read a number of accounts of professional black men who've been taken for muggers. The Reverend Floyd Flake, a black congressman whose district includes Howard Beach in New York City, went into a store there and had a hard time convincing some whites that not only wasn't he a threat to them, he was actually their federal representative.
In The Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen said that shopkeep¬ers were perfectly justified in denying all young black men entrance to their stores on the basis of the actions of a few. So, when a local merchant complained about the behavior of a particular black customer, you told him that the next time all the black people in the world had a meeting, that black man's conduct would be the first item on the agenda.
Despite this daily slander, most black men hold down jobs, however menial, and many have proved their loyalty to their country. During the first years of the Vietnam war black men were 13 percent of the grunts but took a quarter of the casualties. In today's Vietnam movies you don't see these men or, if you do, they're dope-smoking buffoons.
On a television talk show in San Francisco you spoke of some of the emotional land mines that a black man has to traverse each day. You cannot really communicate what it feels like to look into your rearview mirror and see a cop pull in behind you. It's the little hurts that build up. After the show, black men came up on the street and shook your hand. They stopped their cars on the freeway and yelled over to you. You had hit a nerve.
These are the cartoon images presented of black men: the criminal, the athlete, the clown, the entertainer, the good nigger, the brute. (Harold Ross, the first editor of The New Yorker, seemed to sum it up for the media when he said, "Coons are either funny or dangerous.") These images create ten¬sion, literally. Black men suffer from high blood pressure, they get strokes and cancer more often than whites. If you don't have a sense of humor, you become a scowling time bomb, striking out at people who are dear to you. James Baldwin told of how his father punished his family for the humilia¬tions he received each day at work in the white world. A lot of black men, hating themselves, turn their aggression on one another in the streets.
As a novelist and essayist, you believe that black kids should be ex¬posed, not only to you and your writing, but to black scientists, inventors, engineers, architects, generals. How many children know that 5,000 black men fought in the Revolutionary War, and how many are aware of the black Indian fighters who helped conquer the West, and how many know about the blacks who fought in the Civil War, those immortalized in Robert Lowell's beautiful poem "For the Union Dead"?
How can the United States become a truly great society if it continues to cling, like Linus to his blanket, to the racist idea that black men somehow are at the root of all social problems? You proposed in a magazine article that white men and black men should meet in a national conference to discuss their differences and common interests, but nobody took you up on the sug¬gestion. It's almost as if they don't want the situation to change. You think that Jimmy the Greek shouldn't have been fired by CBS for what he said about the breeding of black athletes. He should have been made to take a year's course in ethnic studies at some university instead. Better still, there could be a College for Racists, maybe along the lines of the "reeducation" camps North Vietnam set up for the defeated generals of the South.
For all of the wounds, for all of your humiliation, it could be worse. You could be a white man. You feel sorry for the good, decent and fair white men in this society. While you might be associated with creepy crack merchants, small-time hustlers and gold-chain thieves, nobody is associating you with perpetrators of genocide, or with the people who created slavery and invented the Bomb. Crowds in world capitals aren't shaking their fists at you and calling you the great Satan, nor are they hanging you in effigy. When you suffer a setback in life, you can always claim that it's because of racism, and most of the time you will probably be right. What's a white man's excuse for failure? You used to joke that, with all of the opportunities that white men have in this society, any one of them who ended up less than President of the United States should be considered a flop.
You don't have that kind of pressure. You hear every day on the news that the public will never elect a black President. Nobody expects you to be a white savior, a James Bond, an Indiana Jones or Superman. Imagine how that kind of pressure feels. Women and all the minorities in this country, not just the blacks, seem to have the same grievances about white males, lumping the good ones in with the bad with such epithets as "power structure." You wonder how white men are able to withstand it. Maybe that's why they're the group with the highest suicide rate. And so as a black man you are beleaguered, but at least you're not Atlas, carrying the world on your shoulders.
