Social Science Fiction in Harlem

...It is all but impossible to imagine a U.S...

...It simply does not follow, for instance, that being white enables a Southern sheriff, even a fairly literate one, to explain the atonality of Charles Ives, the imagery of Wallace Stevens, or the love life of Marilyn Monroe...

...Nothing could be more obvious...

...social critics seem to be every bit as innocent as those newsmen and opinion-surveyors who never catch on to the fact that, on the whole, the man-in-the-street they are interviewing knows only what he already has read in newspapers, heard on the radio, seen on television...

...Even when he knows more, the chances are he will stress only what he thinks will advance his own special cause or make him appear especially informed...

...Since Kenneth Clark insists that Harlem is a ghetto and is convinced that the behavior of its inmates, as he sometimes calls them, is self-destructive, one would assume that his remedial program would be designed to break down the walls of the ghetto and get Negroes out of it as soon as possible...

...But if the HARYOU program is incredible, its managers are absolutely inconceivable...

...As a matter of fact Manchild, following the pattern of too many books written for white people by Negroes, is so full of the fashionable assumptions of the social sciences that little of what its young author has to say about what it is like to be one very special Harlem Negro named Claude Brown really represents his own insights...

...At any rate, everybody on the payroll is so busy fat-catting it with all that "white" money and mouthing Clark's glib clichés about the ghetto that nobody seems to have any awareness of what is most obvious: They are all actually engaged in creating a ghetto where none ever existed before...

...It is a moral-outcry metaphor that says in effect, "Look what the power structure is doing to Negroes, you are treating us like they did the Jews...

...Many U.S...

...there has not been anything like it since the good old days of the WPA...

...Nevertheless, a White Negro like Norman Mailer, a part-time Negro like Nat Hentoff, a non-Negro like Norman Podhoretz, and a non-Jewish New York know-it-all like Tom Wolfe, the trick typist from Virginia by way of Yale-all are engaged in promoting Manchild as the raw truth and excusing its shortcomings as if it did not require as much writing skill to communicate the raw truth as the refined, granulated, or confectionalized truth...

...Nor does it follow that the best diagnostician at Bellevue is the doctor who has personally suffered the most serious diseases...

...and in this, of course, he is not unlike the average U.S...

...Negro, that he is not a descendant of U.S...

...Personal experience, one hastens to concede, is an indispensable element in all writing...

...slaves, that he has had very little personal experience with segregation as such and even less first-hand contact with the South beyond Washington, D.C.-in short, that anyway you look at it (be you white or black) his U.S...

...No serious student of life in the United States can afford to allow political oversimplifications, especially those of the pseudo-revolutionary liberals and Marxists, to obscure the basic fact that the socalled Negro community is, culturally speaking, essentially the same as the so-called White community...

...He is, of course, delighted at how famous it is making him and astonished at all the easy money...

...They are either the most hopelessly naive people in the world or the most cynical, and there is a strong possibility that they are both...

...Nor are they likely to accept Clark's astonishing contention that segregation is turning Negro men away from sex: White Southerners know very well that slavery itself, back-breaking work and all, did not do that...

...And certainly nobody actually believes that Mary McCarthy, as unsentimental as she is in so many ways, reveals what it is really like to be a U.S...

...The main difference between what goes on in the Negro community and what goes on in the white community is in the degree of refinement-and sometimes the refinement is found in the Negro community...

...The overwhelming majority of Harlem residents, like most other native-born U.S...

...In this, it must be said, Brown shows infinitelv more foresight than another, much older miss-media certified Negro Negrologist, who seems to have gotten his library-laboratory-classroom theories hopelessly confused with the everyday political tacts of life in Hartem and is still sheading tears for the newspapers and television cameras because he did not know that millions of dollars of the taxpayers' money would involve him in the "dirty game" of politics...

...It tells us absolutely nothing about Willie the Lion Smith, Sugar Ray Robinson, Adam Clayton Powell, Constance Baker Motley, the barman at Smalls Paradise, the society editor of the Amsterdam News, or countless others...

...It does not and never has applied to segregated areas where U.S...

...Clark, it appears, thinks it means self-hatred and self-destruction, and recently he even described last summer's Los Angeles riots-which were triggered by police atrocities-as self-hatred become self-destruction...

...Negro, no matter how substandard his formal educational background, telling anybody white or black that any one book reveals what it is really like to be white...

...Both have the same calendar, religious observances, language, food, and, among other things, the same educational, economic and political objectives as U.S...

...Only to the extent that a Claude Brown, a James Baldwin, a James Joyce, or a Norman Mailer has a rich awareness of a great many things besides his personal experience is he capable, as a writer, of revealing very much about himself that one cannot learn just as easily from his case history...

...white woman or even a Vassar girl...

...For a number of years, too, he has been playing a very silly yet quite earnest game of social one-upmanship, in which he points out that he is not a nativeborn U.S...

...Perhaps it is inevitable for liberal U.S...

...college student...

...And for that, many people are very grateful indeed...

...nor do the memoirs of, say, Tennessee Williams reveal what it is really like to be a white Southerner...

...whites...

...white people...

...Today, for example, a book like Claude Brown's Manchild in the Promised Land is recommended all around as a profound, knowledgeable, comprehensive account of life in Harlem because its author is a Negro who grew up there and had a rough time doing so...

...Brown himself, to his credit, seems to have a much clearer conception of the practical significance of his first and somewhat less than brilliant book than do most of his downtown boosters and admirers...

...in interracial sexual relations...

...Negroes, or how flimsy and questionable your statistics, or how wild your conjectures so long as they reflect degradation...

...But then this whole business of somebody revealing what it is really like to be a Negro has long since gotten out of hand anyway...

...life...

...Similarly, it does not follow that the oldest and blackest American Negro around is the most reliable source of information about Africa, slavery, Reconstruction politics, the pathological effects of oppression, civil rights strategies, the blues, or the symbolic function of the stud horse principle (and the quest for the earthdark womb...

...Kenneth B. Clark is a brownskin Panamanian with a PhD not in Negrology but in Child Psychology, and for a number of years he has operated a psychological clinic for children at the 110th Street edge of Harlem...

...This sort of grab-bag theory may be taken seriously in the North, but Southern white people will never regard such actions on the part of Negroes as self-destructive...

...Worse still, a fantastic number of sociologists and psychologists are sucked in by their own conjectures and jargon: When a U.S...

...The would-be writer's complexion, street address or police record can never compensate for the absence of any of these...

...In addition, he is the author of Dark Ghetto, another one of those books which are said (by white reviewers and newspaper reporters) to reveal what it really means to be, horror of horrors, nonwhite...

...One would take it for granted that every aspect of such a program would be oriented toward giving Negro youth a sense of closer identification with the mainstream of U.S...

...But what one is able to make of it in a book depends also on several other indispensable elements: sensibility, imagination, perspective, linguistic precision, eloquence, depth and keenness of insights...

...Indeed, one of the most significant things this book demonstrates is how difficult it is to be a serious writer when you have been interviewed, advised, rehabilitated and structured by social workers and other do-gooders year after year...

...And anybody who thinks this statement is too strong should try giving positive reasons for, say, Willie Mays, Ralph Bunche, Ralph Ellison, Leontyne Price, and see if most social scientists do not insist on negative ones...

...The program itself, though, is simply not to be believed...

...He also hopes, quite frankly, that all the publicity will add up to the kind of popularity that can be converted into political power and has already stated his intention to go to law school and later enter Harlem politics...

...Negroes live...

...But then neither was Clark's operating monograph...

...Thus reporters often fail to recognize their own halfdashed news items when they are fed back to them by some Negro standing on Lenox Avenue or sitting in a hamburger joint in Watts...

...Negro, whether his name be Martin Luther King Jr., James Farmer, Whitney Young, Slum Dweller 45 or Narcotics Case 46, begins talking in terms of the ghetto, culturally deprived minorities, disadvantaged youth, middle-class norms, upward mobility, self rejection, alienation, etc., you are listening to a very pretentious, and probably confused American displaying a stylish vocabulary-and very little else...

...Jews to confuse Harlem with a ghetto...

...It does no such thing...

...Yet this seems to be precisely the sort of thing which no longer goes without saying...

...Negroes, and has even produced a rehabilitation program based on his own personal remedies...

...Negroes, are partwhite Anglo-Saxon Protestants and Southern at that, with all the racial as well as cultural ramifications that this implies...

...Like the so-called Moynihan Report ("The Negro family: The Case for National Action"), it demonstrates once again that other Americans, including most of the social scientists, do not mind what unfounded conclusions you draw about U.S...

...Negroes, any more than being a white citizen has ever qualified one as an expert on U.S...

...And since HARYOU has always had the blessings and advice of...

...But Kenneth Clark's instant analyses and fundoriented conclusions notwithstanding, the term ghetto does not apply to Harlem, if indeed it applies to any segregated housing area in the United States except perhaps this or that Chinatown...

...Even more, an astonishing number of book reviewers and social critics have been insisting that Manchild reveals what it is really like to be a Negro...

...Neither does it follow that if somebody lives or works in the garment district, he has authentic inside information on the labor problems of the needle trades...

...Youth in the Ghetto, A Study in the Consequences of Powerlessness and a Blueprint for Change," is a monument to social science nonsense and non-sensibility...

...As for HARYOU, the uplift program Clark helped to frighten and flatter the "white power structure" into financing, it has brought millions of dollars into Harlem...

...Brown, one feels, whatever his other faults, has never been as sophomoric as that...

...And it is easy to see why so many civil rights spokesmen use the term...

...experience has been quite different from that of the other U.S...

...Of course, Clark always applies the wretched effects he describes to other Negroes, never to himself...

...Nowadays, he also appears everywhere with all kinds of scientific inside information about the wretchedness of U.S...

...Sigmund Freud's autobiography does not reveal what it is really like to be a Jew...

...Understandably, they are still emotionally involved with Europe, the pogroms, the concentration camps...