Which Way to the Promised Land? : Part 1

Yet A Stranger: Why Black Americans Still Don't Feel at Home
by Deborah Mathis

Forty years after the Civil Rights movement, divisions between white and black America still remain. Whites feel that "progress" has mostly solved the problem, but blacks know all too well that it has addressed only the surface symptoms of racism. Everyone, however, agrees that the key to breaking down barriers is understanding.

Now, in this eye-opening and provocative book, syndicated columnist Deborah Mathis gives a sweeping, pull-no-punches look at why African-Americans are still set apart spiritually and economically from the rest of the country. Drawing on extensive research, interviews, and real-life experience, she dares to look at:

...Unconscious behavior on the part of many whites that African-Americans know can trigger life-and-death situations-including "The Look" of fear and suspicion directed at black teens in stores and the streets and how it affects young lives

...Unequal treatment by institutions-the teacher "concerned" about the intelligence of an African-American student after a minor error; the car company that demands higher loan payments from a black customer than from an equally qualified white one

...the African-American side of many issues-including "personal responsibility" (its meaning when options are limited for many), "progress" (the perspective when inequality is the goal), the O. J. Simpson verdict (long overdue judicial payback?), affirmative action, "tough on crime" measures, public school funding, and more.

An honest, unforgettable portrait of two Americas struggling to come together across fault lines of mutual misunderstanding, Yet A Stranger gets to the heart of how much farther we all have to go before everyone can feel truly at home.

Chapter 1

I love the old girl despite her nasty ways. I know she needs me. I think she knows it too. Still, she can be so difficult at times. So ornery and ungrateful. Cruel on occasion. Wicked. Inflicting pain and tribulation just for the heck of it, it seems. Yet every time, just as I am about to collapse under her tiresome demands or explode with rage from her abuse, she pulls me to her bosom and rocks me with promises. One moment I am her curse, the next her beloved.

I am determined to get her well even though she can be a most uncooperative patient, refusing to come clean about the seriousness of her ailments; refusing to settle down for the serious therapy she needs. Her mercurial nature repels me today, attracts me tomorrow, but always, always intrigues. Of course I realize her neurosis is dangerous and that I should probably run off. That would show her. But I am a sucker for the good in her, which is a good too good to leave. So here I stay, battered but bewitched. What can I say? She is my country, my home.

Four centuries have lapsed since the first twenty Africans were wrenched from their families, their land, their language, their customs, and altogether their freedom, then shipped across the treacherous Atlantic and delivered into the clutches of English settlers at Jamestown, Virginia. Four hundred years. Enough time, you would think, to have come to terms with such a patently grievous wrong - to have not only abolished the heinous institution of slavery, but to have eradicated every vile thought, every ignorant theory, every wicked impulse that gave rise to and nurtured the practice. Enough time to have taken every measure available and imaginable to repair the breach between black and white and to reconcile us, American to American.

Yet black Americans, descendants of the stolen Africans, still do not have equal footing with white Americans who share with us a nation. This is our home, but we do not enjoy its full range of comforts.

Like strangers, we are less at ease, transacting our daily lives with less true liberty, more trepidation, and in the face of more closed or stubborn doors than others who call America home. We are by no means newcomers, nor are our numbers so slight that the disparities can be excused as oversights. The original twenty have become thirty-five million souls. Most of us - 91 percent - were born and have lived only here.

Still, from time to time and in sundry ways, come signs that our presence is not welcomed. The United States of America may be our home and, as such, it deserves our duty - our productivity, patriotism, and compliance. But it does not always feel like home. Not if home is where you let your hair down and kick your shoes off and help yourself to the bounty. Not if home is where you don't have to tiptoe or look over your shoulder or wonder what they're saying about you or doing behind your back. Not if home is where there are no favorites, only equal kin. Not if home is where the others care about you and wouldn't think of letting you go hungry or homeless or ill-educated or without medical care, without nurturance of, or appreciation for, the gifts you bring and the talents with which you are endowed. Not if home is where it is one for all and all for one. Not if home is where you need not explain yourself as if you are some mystery created for intrigue or dissection - "a chronic patient for the sociological clinic, the sick man of American democracy," as black writer Alain Locke put it in 1925.

There is an absence of hospitality, a distance, a hesitation, a suspiciousness directed at black Americans that is unbecoming of a place called home. Instead there exists the sense of being on shaky ground, the awareness of hostility and confrontation bubbling just beneath the surface. A feeling that at any moment the little dance of tolerance may be abandoned and there you'd have it: a full frontal assault of prejudice, fear, anger, and deadly assumptions even though, these days, the attack may be so subtle and shifty that it is difficult for even the beholder to discern, let alone for its targets to indict. It is, in its modern form, what might be called "passive racism."

In his 1968 treatise, The New Racialism, Harvard professor Daniel Patrick Moynihan - later a U.S. senator from New York - adopted a new terminology for racial prejudice. While acknowledging "a streak of the racist virus in the American bloodstream," Moynihan chose to distinguish the more common strain as "racialism." It was a phenomenon, he said, "a profoundly different position from that of racism, with its logic of genocide and subordination. And it does no service whatever to this polity to identify as racist attitudes that which are merely racialist and which will, usually, on examination, be found to have essentially a social class basis." Moynihan may have been on to something. Not that the distinction dulls the pain.

Three decades later, the National Report Card on Discrimination made another effort at distinguishing between active and passive racism, naming the latter "Have-A-Nice-Day" discrimination. More critical and insightful than Moynihan regarding the perniciousness of this passive strain of race prejudice, the Report Card authors warned of its deceit in fostering "premature claims that we have achieved a color-blind society."

But worse than that, passive racism, racialism, Have-A-Nice-Day discrimination - call it what you will - denies its heritage. It overlooks the connection between itself, which tolerates disparity and injustice, and active racism, which often explodes into invective, intimidation, and violence. As it did on June 14, 1998, in the small town of Jasper, Texas.

That is where they found James Byrd's keys, his dentures, his head, and his torso, each in a separate spot along a three-mile stretch of Huff Creek Road. Byrd's killers, all young white men, had picked up the black man in town and driven him to the outskirts where they beat him, hitched him to the bumper of their pickup truck with a towing chain, and dragged him literally to pieces, apparently for the thrill of it.

Other racial atrocities marked America's approach to her fourth century of black and white cohabitation at the dawn of the third millennium. A Haitian immigrant was beaten and sodomized by a white New York City police officer. In the same city, a black man, standing in the doorway of his apartment building and holding only his wallet, was gunned down by four white cops who fired forty-one bullets, hitting flesh and bone nineteen times. Pipe bombs accompanied by racist threats shook up a historically black university in Florida. In suburban Chicago, a black basketball coach on an after-dinner stroll with two of his four young children was fatally shot by an avowed white separatist itching for a race war.

Copyright © 2002 by Deborah Mathis

About the Author

Deborah Mathis is a nationally syndicated columnist who has appeared on Frontline, Inside Washington, America's Black Forum, and many other discussion programs. The former White House correspondent for Gannett News Service, she recently completed a stint as a Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard University, where she authored a paper on race and the media.