Another shade of black

There's also the drama of it. Every third person in the world is a drama queen. And crying victim, especially when you're not really a victim in any real way, feels good. It feels good to cry victim if you're not one. So as a result, black people bit this hook, line and sinker, and we're stuck in it.

So you don't believe that blacks have been victims.

Oh, yeah, we have.

Isn't there just a period that people -- any and all people -- have to come to terms with the fact that they have been victims in order to move on?

No. You say that, and I know exactly what you mean because we're people of our time. It wasn't like that before, though. The idea that we need to air it and need to talk about it and exaggerate it and theatricalize our victimhood -- that's new. That's something that wouldn't have made sense to even a smart American in 1950. We've made a mistake with it and we've ended up distracting a lot of young people. Yes, there's victimhood and I know my racism. I suffer it now and then. But the issue is, how important are those things at the end of the day? Frankly, if it doesn't keep you from getting a job, if it doesn't hurt your daughter, if it doesn't hurt you -- who cares? If you're a strong people, if black is beautiful, if black people have survived, and somebody calls you "nigger," move on.

You write about the one instance where you were called a nigger. Can you talk about that?

The one time anyone's ever called me nigger -- I can't believe that anyone would look at a story like this and think that it hurt them -- involved a guy who lived in an apartment near mine. A low-rent apartment complex just after I was a graduate student. He was fighting with his girlfriend at around two or three in the morning. Loud. I came out of my apartment and asked him to quiet down. He was a drunk and we got into an argument and it ended with him turning around and saying, "Just a fucking nigger anyway." And I shut the door.

I know that I'm supposed to have shut the door and felt tears rolling hotly down my cheeks and thrown myself onto the couch and cried and called a friend. No. To be graphic, he was what we would call formally a working-class gentleman. Informally, he was a cracker. He was white trash. He had baggy, dirty blue jeans hanging off of his flat old butt. He wasn't somebody who I looked up to in any way. And we have an argument. I'm pretty good at arguing and what he ends up with is to call up that word. Frankly, I don't think he was a racist, because before that when he was sober we always had gotten along very well. I don't think he was burning crosses on anyone's lawn. That was his way of having something to say because I'm more articulate than him. And higher in life.

So what is a racist then?

A racist is someone who hates black people because they are black and/or acts against the welfare of black people. That person today is increasingly rare. More to the point, as often as not that person can't have any effect on your life. So what's the big deal? I know that sounds naive, but if you have a basic ego, how much can that matter? We're taught to fall to pieces whenever there's a "racist." Why?

Well, that brings me to the next question: Do you really think that most black people do fall to pieces? Who and what are you talking about?

No, and that's one of the major themes of "Authentically Black." There is a split identity in black culture today, and I see this daily. There's what you're expected to do in public, and there's what you're expected to do in private. The black undergraduate who hears a professor use the word "niggardly" or hears something an administrator says that could be construed as "racist" and runs out of the classroom crying, I firmly believe, is not genuinely hurt. They have a sense that as good, thinking African-Americans it's their job to blow the whistle on racism in public. It's the same kind of theater that your counterculturally oriented white undergraduates pull.

So somebody says "nigger" or somebody draws a picture in some dorm, and a certain 25 black students jump out onto the central plaza and the local media comes and you've always got one or two of them who will cry. They're not cynical; it's not that they're doing it on purpose, but they have a sense that to be intelligent, engaged black people you're supposed to pull this kind of routine. Deep down, most black people know that some of these things will not destroy you, that you can succeed in a world even if it's not perfect. That is the biggest problem today -- the sense that to be authentically black is to cloak the black race in victimhood in public, no matter how well the race is doing. The idea is to keep whites on the hook. In private, this is not the way that black people talk.

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