The Content of Our Character
Wycliff, Don
unity in many cases is due to insufficient pluralism which fails to provide the satisfaction of expressing and living one's faith in conformity with one's culture." This failure, he noted, was...
...It's all madness, this, madness, and don't you be going and getting mixed up in it...
...What the church needs today is not more stifling conformity but greater liberating pluriformity...
...the dining room of the Clarence Hotel is damaged, but no one is injured...
...It's hard to persuade ordinary black people nowadays that having doubts or a different reading of their situation is the same thing as treason...
...a mother, exasperated, questions her daughter in Moore's novel...
...And it is in his discussion of affirmative action that he demonstrates how perceptive he is about the psychological traps involved in the issue of race...
...Perhaps only the Middle East, for many of the same causes-- some even having the same agents, Lloyd George, Alfred Balfour, their double-sided negotiating in the first decades of this century, and timeless imperial greed among them--seems as hopeless of resolution as Northern Ireland...
...He also describes its corrosive effects, including programs and gestures calculated not to promote genuine black development, but to give whites a feeling of innocence and blacks a semblance of power...
...And a risk is involved in exploring it: the risk of discovering the ways in which we contribute to, if not create, the reality in which we live...
...Like Ellison, Steele is a graceful, elegant writer...
...This failure, he noted, was the result of BOOKS those "fears that arise to block inculturation or to diminish it...
...Pottinger is to address a breakfast audience...
...The Northern habit of survival rests in silence...
...The daughter of a Catholic butcher on the Falls road, Moira understands lies of silence...
...that "the barriers to black progress in America today are clearly as much psychological as they are social or economic...
...But Moira goes on a campaign...
...The hotel is an eternity and a second away...
...Dillon, however, decides to tip off the police...
...The minuet of racial politics his brief collection of essays is the finest literary exploration of the mindscape of black America since Ralph E l l i s o n ' s classic novel Invisible Man...
...On his drive through the streets of Belfast that morning, Michael Dillon observes details with the hypersensitivity of the newly condemned: three boys rushing and shouting on their way to school, the equestrian statue showing King William in victory at the Boyne~ the Victorian houses around Queen's University, alight that day with the festivities of graduation...
...Have some sense...
...23 they feel, even if only unconsciously, for the historical disadvantages that were visited upon blacks--and for the illegitimate advantage that they enjoy as a result...
...Steele has an appreciation of complexity and ambivalence, as Ellison did...
...Whatever you say, say nothing: the mother's theme...
...The challenge for blacks now, says Steele, "is to reclaim ourselves from the exaggerations of our own memory and to go forward as the free American citizens that we are...
...Another martyr for the cause...
...In theory, he says, "affirmative action...has all the moral symmetry that fairness requires--the injustice of historical and even contemporary white advantage is offset with black advantage...
...That is what happens to Michael Dillon...
...Hooded in woolen balaclavas, armed, they force Michael and Moira Dillon to get up from bed and wait for dawn in their living room, watched over by first one guard, then another...
...Moira remains behind in the living room, hostage to the plan's success...
...For all their superficial differences, there are powerful and important similarities between the two authors and their works...
...It is reformist and corrective, even repentant and redemptive...
...There is no magic that will make development happen...
...Is it for those 24: Commonweal...
...He parks his car...
...Why does she break the taboo of the tribe...
...Smoke-signals are loud-mouthed compared with us," Heaney says, and fifteen years later, the characters in Moore's Belfast agree...
...She knows in an instant that her husband bartered her life for other lives, just as she knows, without his having said anything, that he will leave her for another woman...
...The psychological realm is murky, frightening, and just plain embarrassing," he writes early on...
...Affirmative action "fosters a confusion of these very different needs," he says...
...Don't worry about the Ulster fry...
...And I would never sneer at these good intentions...
...So, it's better you say nothing," Detective Inspector Harry Randall counsels the estranged couple...
...To those who feel threatened by new or different expressions and celebrations that "might possibly contradict what we [Europeans] have formulated and practiced up to now," Arrupe replied that "real pluralism is the most profound unity...
...For a great many reasons, that has become impossible to do any longer...
...Neither is Moira, for the teenage terrorists had fled from her living room even before the bomb was due to go off...
...preference replaces prejudice, inclusion answers exclusion...
...Just why that is has been demonstrated over the last year or so, as parts of this book appeared as articles in various publications, from the New York Times Magazine to Harper's to the Wilson Quarterly...
...In the past, what has followed that is ridicule and shunning...
...of speech is rained upon by violence or by the threat of it...
...All these things are almost unbearably alive to him on a drive that seems interminable, packed as it is with the observations of a lifetime, packed as it is with a bomb...
...Among the nation's so-called black leadership, Shelby Steele's name now is mentioned in company with those of Thomas Sowell, Glenn Loury, and others who have dared dissent from what Steele calls the "party line" on matters of race and civil rights...
...It is his public questioning of that policy, as much as anything, that accounts for the heartburn that Steele causes his critics...
...In fact, I was reminded of the Ellison work numerous times as I read this book, and not just because of Shelby Steele's occasional references to it...
...Whites seek to be shriven of a guilt that 11 January 1991...
...You'll be dead by lunchtime, Michael Dillon thinks in the isolation of his secret knowledge...
...The South of Ireland doesn't want us and couldn't take care of us if we were handed to them on a plate tomorrow...
...Their plan is to place a bomb in Michael's car, and then have him drive it to the hotel he manages, where an Ian Paisley figure named Dr...
...Overhead, he hears a tour group discussing the benefits of eating up a good breakfast, already paid for, since lunch is both unknown and uncovered...
...We simply have to want more for ourselves, be willing to work for it, and not use our enemy...as an excuse not to pursue it...
...Black students in predominantly white colleges, black professionals in integrated work situations, black homeowners in comfortable, integrated, middle-class neighborhoods--all show in various ways the effects of buried racial fears and seek refuge in what Steele considers dubious and destructive solutions, like affirmative action...
...Weary, she continues, "A united Ireland...
...For the lies that Moore sees raging in Ulster, "lies told over the years to poor Protestant working people about the Catholics, lies to poor Catholic working people about the Protestants, lies from parliaments and pulpits, lies at rallies and funeral orations"--are not only sins of commission, but at their worst, they are lies of silence, the lies that come of saying nothing, and sins of omission as well...
...when they dissent, their act tunately, such power can never be more than a semblance...
...Crystal Gromer hatever you say say nothing," the title of a poem in Seamus Heaney's 1975 volume North, could serve as apt epigraph for Brian Moore's new novel, Lies of Silence, which takes him--perhaps as reluctantly as his main character--back to Belfast, his birthplace...
...and that only blacks themselves can overcome that barrier...
...And it is "the music of innocence and power that we hear in affirmative action that causes us to cling to it and to its distracting emphasis on representation...
...Innocence and power, Steele believes, are the nub of modem race relations...
...Blacks seek power in the only way they have ever successfully wielded it: by flaunting their victimization and inducing guilt in whites...
...They have become like steps in a minuet that Americans dance in their relations across racial lines...
...Martin's, $15.95, 175 pp...
...And most important, he is relentlessly, ruthlessly honest, as Ellison was and as it is so difficult for any black person to be when writing on race...
...Steele describes the minuet beautifully...
...Most guilty are those in Westminister who turn a blind eye to Ulster and its injustices...
...THE CONTENT OF OUR CHARACTER Shelby Steele St...
...Brian Moore's theme, however, is not only about the costs of saying nothing in that slippery grey Ulster Heaney calls a "land of password, handgrip, wink and nod," but also about the costs of getting mixed up in it all the same and finding oneself unable to say nothing...
...But, of course, they only energize what is repressed with more and more negative power, so that we are victimized as much by our own buried fears as by racism...
...So the assassination is to go, without warning...
...Why does she do this...
...He is not a propagandist, as Ellison was not and as almost every other writer on this subject in recent decades has been to some degree...
...UnforA LAND OF PASSWOHD LIES OF SILENCE Brian Moore Doubleday, $18.95, 197 pp...
...Denial, avoidance, and repression intervene to save us from this risk...
...And even that is disappearing now, as whites grow weary of the dance...
...As the hotel manager, Dillon will pass through the security guard and park his car in his accustomed spot, just under the windows where Pottinger is to speak...
...Don Wycliff Steele's view is that racism, while far from eradicated, is not the monster that it once was...
...But the trap, Steele argues, is that these intentions have been translated largely into requirements for racial representation, not racial development...
...On the night he has come home ready to tell his wife that he is leaving her for another woman (just as he is leaving Belfast for London), on the night he has gathered together his courage and his passport, he encounters not visions of his new life, but four frighteningly young terrorists of the IRA...
...Within hours she's on television...
Vol. 118 • January 1991 • No. 1
