Looking Backward at Racism
GEWEN, BARRY
Writers & Writing LOOKNG BACKWARD AT RACISM BY BARRY GEWEN Racism in America is on the rise. Increasingly, one encounters the attitude that "we" have done enough for "them." At parties and in...
...A primary aim of Lincoln's book is to prove otherwise...
...Despite the 1968 race he waged against Shirley Chisholm for a Brooklyn congressional seat, and the time he spent in Richard Nixon's Department of Health, Education and Welfare, everything in his life since 1966, the year he stepped down as director of core, has been a coda...
...Lincoln sees that the black community is already being divided, as a successful minority moves up while the rest are left behind...
...Part of the blame for this backsliding lies with an Administration that has abdicated its moral responsibility...
...It appears to have been a rather jolly affair...
...Shortly before the War, he began conducting early desegregation campaigns in Chicago apartment houses, restaurants and skating rinks, while working with A.J...
...The past decade receives scarcely a mention from him...
...Protest marches were answered with lynch mobs, nonviolence with murder...
...Farmer does not indicate why...
...It benefits the few at the expense of the many...
...was likely to lead a white American "to assume that he or she was the 'their' and to buy a Reagan button...
...The Chicago police cooperated with the demonstrators and the restaurant rapidly capitulated...
...That same year, at Farmer's instigation and with Muste's half-hearted blessing, core was founded as a direct-action civil rights organization dedicated to Gandhian principles of nonviolence...
...And worse, it sustains the illusion that the antiseg-regation battles of the 1960s are an appropriate guide to the problems of the 1980s...
...Within months he was leading freedom rides into the heart of the South to force the desegregation of interstate facilities...
...As long as the issue was segregation, he had the answers to shape history...
...But it helps to create a climate of opinion in which the new racism can flourish...
...Not surprisingly, a recurrent topic of this book is the quality of courage...
...about directions for the future he says next to nothing...
...Lay Bare the Heart is a revealing document of those heady days...
...It sets blacks off from the rest of the population and leaves them demanding "justice" from the very people whose capacity for justice is denied...
...At a moment that demands openness, ventilation, the wagons are being drawn into a circle...
...There were good reasons why Jesse Jackson's 1984 rainbow really contained only one color...
...Repeatedly, he stresses a policy of special privileges for blacks on the basis of their unique history...
...At parties and in casual conversations, when none of "them" are present, the stubborn statistics of social pathology in the black community are trotted out—the high crime rates, the epidemic of illegitimacy, the disappointing test scores...
...Deviation from society's accepted conventions," Farmer writes, "has high incidence among PKs—alcoholism, homosexuality, profligacy, promiscuity, protest action...
...Few are likely to quarrel with this...
...Farmer's candor is refreshing, but his near-total silence on current racial affairs is distressing...
...Since the 1954 Brown decision, he notes, "the black college has become an endangered institution," and many worry that a similar prospect awaits the Black Church...
...He vowed to devote his life to the fight against racism...
...Neither does he satisfactorily explain why Rustin, after having been sent down to Montgomery to help King out with his bus boycott, was hastily recalled as "a possible source of embarrassment...
...But the line between pluralism and ethnic exclusivity is a thin one, and Lincoln does not always keep his balance, stumbling on the issue of affirmative action...
...The steady stream of Dr...
...As a result, Lay Bare the Heart, although an autobiography by a talented individual still caught up in the struggle, is a book that belongs entirely to the past...
...What Farmer believes to have been America's first civil rights sit-in took place in May 1942 at the Jack Spratt Coffee House in the Hyde Park area near the University of Chicago...
...Farmer, after years of treading water, became core's national director in 1961...
...Yet if ever there was a political dead end for the civil rights movement, it is the cause of affirmative action...
...Soon, Farmer found himself an "elder statesman" of the movement, attending meetings with the President of the United States one moment, facing possible death at the hands of redneck sheriffs the next...
...Born in Texas in 1920, he was a member of a troubled elite, a PK (preacher's kid), forced to watch the father he had every reason to respect (the first black PhD in Texas, a Bible scholar fluent in six languages) be continually humiliated by the South' s caste system...
...Against moral giants and genuine heroes, it pitted demagogues and Neanderthals...
...Too often these days, its spokesmen appear unwilling to address or even to see any social evil other than "discrimination...
...As a student at Wiley College in Texas and Howard University's School of Religion in the 1930s, Farmer honed his determination on the teachings of Tolstoy, Thoreau and Gandhi, becoming a pacifist and a socialist...
...The tragedy is that intelligent men like Lincoln do not realize this...
...After core gained national recognition, he staged an unsuccessful coup to take it over...
...Surprisingly, he does not recognize that affirmative action would aggravate this division...
...For him, we are still fighting the battles of the' 60s, when right was wholly on one side...
...It fosters isolation at precisely the moment when a sympathetic majority must be forged...
...Muste's Fellowship of Reconciliation, a Quaker group...
...More recently, New York City's major black politicians, led by Assemblyman Albert Vann, selected a candidate to oppose Mayor EdKochinthe most important electionofl985 strictly on the basis of race...
...c. Eric Lincoln, a scholar with several books on the black experience to his credit, is one who has no doubt that civil rights in the' 80s means more of the same...
...Sly comparisons with later and more successful arrivals like the Chinese and Koreans are drawn...
...As Julius Lester so well put it, the Jackson slogan "Our time has come...
...He candidly confesses his own feelings, including his resentment at Martin Luther King for gaining the spotlight with nonviolent tactics Farmer himself had pioneered years earlier...
...Through the '40s and '50s events moved slowly for the new group, exceedingly slowly, until civil rights exploded onto the scene and everything began happening at once...
...As a top insider, Farmer is able to provide intimate glimpses of key personages, like the fierce Malcolm X laughing at himself, and to delineate the internal strategy disputes among the civil rights elite...
...In 1980, candidate Ronald Reagan obtusely declared that in the years he was growing up," this country didn't even know it had a racial problem...
...In one important instance, however, the heart stays unbared: Bayard Rustin, a kind of Doppel-gSnger to Farmer, remains a shadowy figure throughout...
...Feelgood pronouncements spewing out of the White House seems aimed at pushing the nation back to that miserable age when just about the only people aware of a racial problem were the victims...
...Pursuing economic policies designed to help those at the bottom—full employment, day care, decent housing—is probably the best meaning civil rights can have in the '80s...
...Insidiously, the argument creeps along in a single direction: If blacks have failed to measure up to other groups, then...
...In his own case, the experience turned him toward constructive rebellion...
...The Reagan policy of neglect, it should be emphasized, is not racism as such...
...Farmer, a founder of the Congress of Racial Equality (core) and its head through the years of its greatest triumphs, tells of growing up with segregation...
...Once more intractable problems pushed themselves forward, Farmer faded from the picture...
...By focusing on affirmative action, the movement is in danger of losing its claim to universality, and therefore its moral strength...
...Unfortunately, some of the onus also rests with the civil rights movement...
...Beatings and imprisonment brought the riders public attention, and core's membership mushroomed...
...In Race, Reli-gionand the Continuing American Dilemmahe states: "We cannot avoid the conclusion that few of the changes we hoped for have been truly accomplished, even though the cosmetics of progress are always being paraded before us with cynical reassurance...
...Insisting that the Black Church is as much an ethnic as a religious body, he writes to reaffirm both its centrality within the black community and its special mission in the struggle against racism...
...Too frequently, they proffer solutions constructed out of a mind-set of black-power exclusivity, with no sensitivity for white concerns...
...Indeed, for this reason two new books by reflective men, James Farmer's Lay Bare the Heart: A n Autobiography of the Civil Rights Movement (Arbor House, 370 pp., $16.95) and C. Eric Lincoln's Race, Religion and the Continuing American Dilemma (Hill and Wang, 282 pp., $17.95), ultimately make sad reading...
...But there is a distinct wobble in Lincoln's thinking...
...Lincoln is deaf to the argument that affirmative action dangerously sets group rights over individual rights...
...Whether or not this strategy should be labeled black racism may be open to debate...
...In the battle over segregation, the South had no ethical legs to stand on...
...Lay Bare the Heart is in many ways a stirring volume, taking readers back to the period when civil rights was less a drama than a melodrama, with the good guys all on one side and the bad guys all on the other...
...At the same time that he denies racial advancement, he acknowledges it by pointing to an irony of recent history: As traditional segregation dies out, the existence of separate black institutions is increasingly called into question...
...what cannot be questioned is the stimulus it provides to racism among whites...
...anyone who does not see things his way is either a cynic, a racist, or both...
Vol. 68 • March 1985 • No. 4
