The Memory of Enemies

...Thus, at the 1989 NAACP convention the several problems that face black America— from affirmative action to teen pregnancies— were listed on the agenda, but primarily as subjective correlatives, as evidence of society's indifference to blacks, as yet more proof of our continuing victimization and therefore our innocence...

...332 • DISSENT...

...Inversion tries to transform the quality that made us most vulnerable into an identity of invulnerability...

...If she was anything less than gracious to me as the lone black in line, I knew my defenses would come alive...

...And when the memory of the enemy is as vast and powerful as it is for black Americans, there is an abundance of mistrust available for this purpose...

...Decisions that attack preferences are made to correlate with decisions that deny black rights...

...To fail in this distinction is to remain at war with a far greater enemy than the one we actually live with...

...Subjective correlatives serve inversion by blame-placing, by casting blacks as victims and the society as their oppressor...

...Asians, Jews, West Indians, and others have found their avenues for development in the aspirations of their individuals who have approached American society with initiative, energy, and pragmatism...

...It doesn't really matter that southern accents in southern airports make me remember...

...In this deterministic context the power to be found in the individual is lost amidst the exhortations for more societal change...

...Certainly the point must be made here that the civil rights movement, which won many victories against discrimination, made the road easier for the individuals within these groups...

...Out of this cycle of memory comes the "real black," who sees society as an oppressive withholder of black opportunities...

...The enemy-memory works by correlation, by connecting events in the present to emotionally powerful memories of the enemy...

...Inversion draws us back into a preoccupation with our collective identity at the very moment when we most stand to gain from the initiative of individuals who are unburdened by too much collective obligation...

...The memory of any enemy is always a pull into the past, into a preparedness against what has already happened...

...To carry off inversion we must become self-conscious about the meaning of our race...

...In her scheme the more opportunity one admitted to, let alone took advantage of, the less "black" one was...

...I think the recent demand on college campuses and in the workplace for more "racial sensitivity" is, among other things, a demand that whites become more sensitive to the myriad correlatives that put blacks in touch with painful emotions...

...Tragically, the most relentless visual correlative may be white skin itself, especially for blacks with little experience in the larger society...

...Here the memory of pernicious racism is being brought forward to redefine a current problem, to transform it into a correlative for what is remembered so that it cannot be seen for what it is...

...330 • DISSENT The Memory of Enemies It was clearly impossible for blacks to avoid inversion just as it was impossible for us to avoid our enemy...

...But as far as we know, there are no real good ole' boys in his forest...

...It is only to say that our oppression has left us with a dangerously powerful memory of itself that can pull us into warlike defensiveness at a time when there is more opportunity for development than ever before...

...They are intrusive visitations through which the objective world causes us to feel our emotional history in a way that makes us insecure in the present, and so robs us of power...

...But just as he settles in one night to at last enjoy his solitude, he hears from the surrounding forest the infamous cry of the southern "redneck," "YAAAHOO...

...We must see the enemy for the mad bee that he is rather than the raging lion he used to be...

...Though the elimination of discrimination clearly facilitates our development, the two goals are entirely different and require entirely different strategies...

...Such claims are exaggerations because racism simply does not fully explain these problems...

...The great evil of America's oppression of blacks was the use of the collective quality of color to limit us as individuals no matter what our talents or energies—individual autonomy stifled by oppressive collectivism...

...Tragically, there is a real antiblack sentiment in American life, but it is no longer as powerful as we remember it to be...

...White enrollment increased slightly under this same shift...

...When inversion drives us to make our racial collectivity positive rather than negative, it may reach for new dignity, but it also reinforces our bondage to this collectivism at the expense of individual autonomy...

...With inversion we need a knowledge of our former oppressor's worst view of us in order to carry out the work of self-definition—a process that requires us to remember the enemy at his "worst" in order to know ourselves at our "best...

...Those groups that have somehow maintained this distinction (for historical and cultural reasons too complex to explore here) have thrived in America despite racism, anti-Semitism, and outright discrimination...

...Because subjective correlatives always make events into racial issues—by recasting them as examples of black victimization—they are used to justify the pursuit of power...

...Inversion is a reunion with the enemy in which we once again define ourselves as his victim...

...The black comedian Richard Pryor does a funny bit on this...

...It was the intrusion of the enemy-memory that led me into an exaggerated and wasteful defensiveness with the saleswoman...

...Because of this accent and my northern lack of familiarity with it, I was not encountering the woman as much as my own memory of an extremely powerful and dreaded enemy—the Old South...

...They are fabrications of racial mistrust in which current events are infused with the memory of a more powerful racism than exists today...

...Even among middle-class blacks who function well in the mainstream, when the time comes to declare one's identity, to announce one's blackness, there is invariably a denial of black opportunity...

...This is the distinction that allows the group to assign responsibility for development to the individual...

...By exaggerating our enemy in order to define ourselves, we put ourselves in the ironic position of having to deny clearly visible opportunities in order to "be black" and claim a strong black identity...

...Any generalization about blacks correlates with the practice of generalizing about us that led to our oppression...

...On the front of collective action against bigotry no group has made a greater contribution than black Americans...

...White insensitivity in this area is a form of power, an unearned and unfair power, that feels to blacks like another manifestation of their victimization...

...She sold me the newspaper, put three quarters change into my hand, and gave me the same abbreviated, management-encouraged smile she had given everyone else before me...

...About Mayor Marion Barry's arrest on drug charges, Benjamin Hooks of the NAACP said, "I don't think there's any question there's some racism involved . . .," despite the fact that countless other black mayors have not been hounded by such charges...

...Coolly I circled her with mistrust, ready for what I remembered...

...In her view there were virtually no opportunities for blacks to enter the mainstream of American life, which she saw as fundamentally racist...

...But, although civil rights bills can be won this way, only the individual can achieve in school, master a salable skill, open a business, become an accountant or an engineer...

...Most Americans simply do not accept the correlation...

...In order to SUMMER • 1990 • 331 The Memory of Enemies invert, to make blackness positive, we must know the negative views whites have of us...

...Even today, changing planes in a southern airport, the sound of a white southern accent slips right past what I know about the "New South" and finds my memory of the Old South...

...I recently spoke with a black woman who described herself as a cultural nationalist...

...I think this has something to do with the fact that so many middle-income black students decline to be admitted to colleges that woo them with preferential admissions policies...

...Still, I think we have one thing left to learn—to discipline our memory of the enemy so that we can distinguish between that memory and the actual "enemy activity" that we may still encounter...

...In American life there are objective correlatives everywhere that evoke the painful thicket of emotions—vulnerability, self-doubt, helplessness, terror, and rage—that comes from having lived for centuries under the dominion of an enemy race...

...The former requires group solidarity, collective action, and a positive group identity while the latter demands individual initiative, challenging personal aspirations, focused hard work, and a strong individual identity...

...And just as nations deplete themselves rather than develop in wartime, we can't really advance under the burden of an enemy swollen into a Goliath by memory...

...But when there is a vast lake of such memory—and I can think of no group with a more powerful collective memory of its enemy than black Americans—the irresistible pull into the past can render opportunities in the present all but invisible...

...Whites do not have to spend precious time fashioning an identity out of simply being white...

...But most of all they always show black problems as resulting from an oppression that can be resisted only by collective action...

...Every sharp spring breeze becomes a correlative for the enemy of frostbite, so that he is still actually living in winter even as flowers bloom all around him...

...Blackness becomes a source of pride rather than shame, strength rather than weakness...

...Even if we assume that government is not doing all it can to combat drug use in the inner city, it takes a long stretch to conclude that this is evidence of 328 • DISSENT The Memory of Enemies a white conspiracy to kill off blacks...

...we must redefine that meaning, invest it with an ideology and a politics, claim an essence for it, and look to it, as much as to ourselves, as a means to betterment...

...Despite our collective oppression, opportunities for development can finally be exploited only by individuals...

...I don't suggest that the backward pull of memory fully accounts for a statistic this dramatic...

...On one level the push for racial sensitivity is an attempt to offset the power whites have by birthright to compromise blacks with racial anxiety by ignoring the correlatives to that anxiety...

...I believe that one of the greatest problems black Americans currently face—one of the greatest barriers to our development in society— is that our memory of oppression has such power, magnitude, depth, and nuance that it constantly drains our best resources into more defense than is strictly necessary...

...Of course, this correlation is only suggested through the symbolism of protest marches and a rhetoric of black victimization, but its effect is to diminish the credibility of black leadership...

...The look is backward rather than forward, outward rather than inward, so that the possibilities for development—education, economic initiative, job training, and so on—are only seen out of the corner of the backward-looking eye...

...But the distortions of correlation are not the only problems that come to blacks from our enemy-memory...

...These little battles with memory can also be deflating...

...It was the savvy, musical sound of this woman's accent—an utterly random event—that evoked in me an aggregate of troublesome racial emotions...

...And once "collectivized," collective action seems to be the only remedy for our problems...

...Their unconscious strategy is to transform the problems of black America into subjective correlatives...

...Our memory makes us like the man who wears a heavy winter coat in springtime because he was frostbitten in winter...

...Common wisdom sometimes tells us that it is good to have enemies...

...One of them is a certain unseeing casualness toward opportunity that itself has many sources, one being a powerful collective memory that can skew the vision of blacks away from the self-interested exploitation of opportunity and into a reenactment of past victimization that confirms our exaggerated sense of the enemy but also undermines our advancement...

...If the memory of the enemy leads to inversion (helped along by subjective correlatives), it is also true that inversion requires us to remember the enemy...

...All of this, I believe, has something to do with why the civil rights leadership has lost credibility in American society since the days of Martin Luther King, Jr...

...Whether we are struggling against shame or for pride, we are still spilling scarce energy into the pursuit of collective esteem at the expense of individual development...

...I think there are many factors at work in a statistic like this...

...Blacks grow up in America surrounded by correlatives to their collective pain...

...This memory is a weight because it pulls the oppression forward out of history and into the present so that the former victim may see his world as much through the memory of his oppression as through his experience in the present...

...The accent was a correlative to those emotions by virtue of association alone...

...To get away from the pressures and the racism he found on the mainland, he buys a house deep in the forest on a remote Hawaiian island...

...Too much under the sway of their memory of the enemy, this more recent group of leaders has not always made the distinction between hyperbolic correlatives for black oppression and actual oppressive events...

...When problems like black teenage pregnancies, the drug epidemic, poor educational performance, and so on are recast as correlatives for black oppression, the primary responsibility for solving them automatically falls on the larger society...

...I was willing to manufacture a little drama of one-upmanship, play it out, and then no doubt brood over it as though something was really at stake...

...I think one of the heaviest weights that oppression leaves on the shoulders of its former victims is simply the memory of itself...

...A recent and striking example is the claim by many blacks that the drug epidemic in black neighborhoods across the country is the result of a white conspiracy to commit genocide against black people...

...But I believe this process also works in reverse, in a way that tries to restore power...

...It is inversion that, by submerging us too deeply in collectivism, obscures the distinction mentioned above between the elimination of discrimination (societal change) and racial development...

...Different goals, different strategies...

...Whether a stigmatized minority group develops successfully or slips into inertia has, I believe, much to do with whether the group allows its impulse toward inversion to muddy the distinction between societal change and group development...

...I think memory and the mistrust born of it are the sources of this hyperbole...

...The white southern accent I heard in the airport is an example of an objective correlative—an objective event that by association evokes a particular emotion or set of emotions...

...To point to opportunity is to stand outside this circle, to be less black...

...Their racial collectivism, to the extent that they feel it, creates no imbalance between the collective and the individual...

...But the quarrel I have with such wisdom is that it does not speak to the issue of degree...

...The price blacks pay for placing too much of the blame for our problems on society is to be helpless before those problems...

...No doubt they have something to do with the historic wounds of oppression, but what the charge of racism does not explain is the giving in to these wounds more than ever before, during a twenty-five-year decline in racism and discrimination...

...This is a necessary and inevitable process by which any oppressed group regathers dignity and esteem from the experience of denigration...

...The national civil rights leadership relentlessly pressures the government for more and better social programs yet does not put equal pressure on blacks to achieve as individuals—one result being that we are often not developed enough to take advantage of the concessions they win, such as affirmative action...

...And, conversely, what we call preparedness is often really a readiness to remember the enemy, an openness to his memory-triggering buzz...

...The power of memory and inversion had virtually called this woman back to slavery and left her no option but collective action since individual possibility was all but invisible to her...

...I think this memory has also led to one of our most serious mistakes in thinking: often to confuse the actual developSUMMER • 1990 • 329 The Memory of Enemies ment of our race with the elimination of racial discrimination, somehow to see these two very different goals as synonymous...

...Inversion perpetuates the fundamental imbalance of racial oppression itself by giving the collective quality of race far too much importance in the lives of individual black Americans...

...I could condemn this woman, or at least be willing to condemn her and even her region, not because of her racial beliefs, which I didn't know, but because her accent had suddenly made her accountable to my voluminous and vivid memory of a racist South...

...Without this distinction, our leaders seem always to be crying wolf...

...There is no magic that will make development happen...

...Between defense and development, guns and butter, the enemy-memory perpetuates a costly imbalance in the distribution of energies, thoughts, and actions...

...Our greatest problem today is insufficient development—this more than white racism...

...When the NAACP marched against the recent group of Supreme Court decisions that severely limited preferential treatment programs, it transformed this cluster of decisions into a correlative for black oppression, even though at least one decision reaffirmed for whites the same constitutional right to sue for representation that blacks demanded during the civil rights movement...

...In the American language itself there are countless words and expressions that function as correlatives— "you people," "bootstraps," "reverse discrimination," "colored people" (interestingly, "people of color" is not a correlative), "black militant," "credit to his race," "one of my best friends . . . ," "I never knew a black until college . . . the Army . . ." —any phrase or tone that condescends, damns with faint praise, or stereotypes either positively or negatively...

...it is another thing to be inundated and sat upon by an enemy and to live in this condition over the course of centuries...

...That is, the enemy-memory becomes a force in its own right and actually creates correlatives for itself in the world—correlatives that reinforce its often exaggerated sense of the enemy's power so as to justify black demands for power...

...And, of course, this degree of racial preoccupation prepares the ground for intense factionalism within the race...

...It is an objective event that by correlation pulls forward a historical terror through space and time...

...This was the chilling cry that often SUMMER • 1990 327 The Memory of Enemies preceded an escapade of mindless violence against blacks, the sort of good-ole'-boy violence that could mean anything from harassment to lynching...

...In this sense, inversion not only makes the black identity itself too much a response to white racism but it also makes our identity dependent on that racism...

...Not only do subjective correlatives cause us to reenact the past, but they rarely bring us the power we seek through them because they are too much based on exaggeration...

...Even when blacks avoid factions, they must be ready to defend that choice to others and to themselves...

...Then we must free our individuals from the tyranny of a wartime collectivism in which they must think of themselves as victims in order to identify with their race...

...One of the many advantages whites enjoy in America is a relative freedom from the draining obligation of racial inversion...

...It asks that we duplicate our oppression so that our remembered sense of it might be validated...

...Nor is it to suggest that we should forget our oppression, assuming this was even possible...

...We think only fools don't remember their enemies, because remembering is preparedness...

...This, of course, is yet another blessing of history and of power, of never having lived in the midst of an overwhelming enemy race...

...Some of this is necessary...

...This is the denial that brings one securely back inside the circle of blackness, that quite literally lets one feel black...

...But I believe the powerful memory blacks have of racism and discrimination can rally us to the fight against these things at the expense of our development as a people...

...In this process mistrust is the transforming agent that encircles an "event" and redefines it as a correlative to the enemy's continuing intention to oppress blacks...

...The magnitude of such an enemy makes the common wisdom almost fatuous...

...We can learn even from our enemies," said Ovid...

...It is a blessing won at the expense of blacks, whose subjugation brought whites a sort of automatic racial inversion—a sense of superiority that freed them from the struggle for simple racial dignity...

...But, at the sight of this mistrustful black man, his eyes verging on disdain, might she not fall under the spell of her own enemy-memory and see before her an arrogant, hostile black against whom she must put up her own chilliness as a defense...

...She was an extreme case, but also an extreme version of the paradigm that touches many blacks...

...The exaggeration of black victimization is always the first indication that a current event is being transformed by mistrust into a subjective correlative that sanctions the pursuit of racial power...

...Thus, between 1976 and 1989 middle-income blacks have endured a drop in college enrollment of between 53 and 36 percent while white enrollment increased 3.6 percent...

...Black leaders can solve their "credibility gap" only by distinguishing between real oppression and those correlatives that exaggerate it in the interest of narrow racial power...

...No doubt black Americans have learned much from such an enemy, but at a price that has been absurdly punitive...

...Inversion once was a survival impulse, and yet today when the oppression of blacks has greatly diminished, I believe this impulse causes our most serious strategic mistake: to put the responsibility for our racial development more in the hands of the collective than in the hands of the individuals who compose it...

...She was, as we say, the blackest of the black, yet this purified identity was achieved by an absolute denial of mainstream black opportunity...

...Yet I think the extremely intense memory of our enemy (along with racial vulnerability and the continuing presence of racism in America) has so absorbed us that we have overlooked the developmental power to be found in the aspirations of our individuals...

...They do not self-consciously have to imbue whiteness with an ideology, look to whiteness for some special essence, or divide up into factions and wrestle over what it means to be white...

...Recently, in line to buy a newspaper at such an airport, I found myself carefully watching the white saleswoman whose accent was particularly thick...

...Probably this is true, since two other things are certainly true: we will have enemies whether they are good for us or not, and we will have a bond with them whether we wish to or not...

...I think this is one of the reasons why blacks have fallen farther behind whites on many socioeconomic measures in the last twenty years even as actual discrimination has declined...

...The enemy-memory distracts us from development by miring us in a very natural process of inversion in which we invert from negative to positive the very point of difference—our blackness—that the enemy used to justify our oppression...

...Within each faction is a racial orthodoxy that must be endlessly debated and defended and that rallies the faction against other factions while imposing a censorship of thought on its own members...

...Who has the best twist on blackness, the Black Muslims or the civil rights establishment, the cultural nationalists or the black Baptists, Malcolm X or Martin Luther King, Jr...

...If she put my change on the counter rather than in my hand, I'd have all the evidence I needed to close the case against her and the New South to boot...

...Later I might recount it to my friends and thereby give this battle with memory even more solidity...

...What makes this a weight is that the rememberer will gird himself against a larger and more formidable enemy than the one he is actually encountering...

...Correlatives created by racial mistrust are subjective rather than objective since they do not come from the outer world but rather are imposed on it...

...We have to simply want more for ourselves, be willing to work for it, and not use our enemy —old or new—as an excuse not to pursue it...

...I thought I might take the offensive and let her glimpse the slightest disdain in the cut of my eyes...

...If this metaphor is too charitable, then we can pick another one, but in any case we must diminish his size and scope in our minds to his actual proportions...

...Inversion also hurts our development in another way...

...There are more black males of college age in prison than in college even as universities across the country struggle to recruit more black students...

...And how many others down here were like her, imposters in this public-relations bromide of a New South...

...And in 326 • DISSENT The Memory of Enemies this working is its real heaviness, since scarce resources are lost in unnecessary defense...

...I would think she must be of the Old South at heart, no more than a carpetbagger in the new one...

...Therefore, it was also impossible for us to avoid the burden of collectivism and the preoccupation with race that goes with it...

...If this is nothing less than a flight from opportunity, it is also a flight into a remembered victimization, a position we are used to, and one that makes memory into reality...

...The current black leadership has injured its credibility by its tendency to make so many black problems into correlatives for black oppression...

...And who is the most black, who the least...

...And for black students who are admitted, the national dropout rate is near 70 percent...

...Also, once the black drug epidemic becomes a subjective correlative for black oppression, then it stands as a racial injustice and so entitles blacks, in the name of redress, to pursue power in relation to whites...

...The epidemic of black teen pregnancies, the weakened black family, the decline in the number of black college students, and so on are too often cast as correlatives of historic racism...

...And then there is an entire iconography of visual correlatives covering everything from Confederate flags and pickup trucks with gun racks to black cast-iron lawn jockeys, "fleshcolored" Bandaids that are actually pink, separate black and white advertisements for the same product, and so on...

...But inversion—fueled by the visceral memory of the enemy—is also a trap...

...The shout is by someone who does not know the meaning it carries for Pryor...

...Worse, they cut us off from the present and its many opportunities by encouraging the sort of vision in which we look at the present only to confirm the past...

...What's important is that I can travel...

...The enemy-memory clamors to be made real, demands that we work at its realization...

...It is an exaggeration that has the look of a power move...

...Victimization is a form of innocence, and innocence always entitles us to pursue power...

...I think the literary term "objective correlative" best describes the process by which our memory of the enemy pulls the past into the present...

...And in a sense it is, because white insensitivity in whatever form (and sometimes nothing can be more insensitive than a pained sensitivity that calls attention to itself) carries the power to diminish blacks even when unintended...

...It is one thing to simply have an enemy...

...The elimination of discrimination will always be largely a collective endeavor while racial development will always be the effect that results from individuals within the race bettering their own lives...

...A flood of emotional images accompanied the memory, constituted it, and I saw right through the woman as if into a screen of memory...

...It correlates with and evokes the sort of terror that blacks lived with for centuries in the South, a terror that Pryor milks for great comic effect...

...In this way inversion, born of the memory of our enemy, also demands that we remember him more, thus completing a self-perpetuating cycle of obsessive and painful memory...

...None of these decisions deprived blacks of their constitutional rights, so to characterize them as antiblack is to recast them, through memory and mistrust, into symbols of the kind of oppression that blacks knew in the days of Plessy v. Ferguson when the principle of "separate but equal" was established...

...Fortunately I caught myself and did not show this woman any disdain...

...The challenge now is to reclaim ourselves from the exaggerations of our own memory and to go forward as the free American citizens that we are...

...But neither does it make sense to blame so profound a drop entirely on the shift in financial aid from grants to loans that occurred in the 1980s...

...Black college students often take a leading role in demanding change on their campuses yet as a group have the lowest grade-point average and the highest dropout rate of any student group in America— collective action over individual initiative...

...None of this is to say that the real enemy has entirely disappeared...

...But objective correlatives are only one part of the process by which the enemy-memory operates...

...And here is where the distinction between societal change and racial development is lost, where the individual is subsumed by the collective...

...This imbalance is evident today in many areas of black life...

...And here the point must be made that discrimination does continue to exist and we need credible leadership to resist it...

...Not only does the enemymemory pull us backward, it also indirectly encourages us to remain victims so as to confirm the power of the enemy we remember and believe in...

...E. B. White It is only human to give our enemies a distinct territory in our memory, which is why we hear the buzz of summer's first mosquito with alarm...