Which Way to the Promised Land? : Part 2

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

(Page 2 of 3)

A black teenager on his way home was killed for sport by two white boys in Indiana. In Los Angeles, three racist "skinheads" kicked and beat a homeless man to death because he was black. Black students and faculty at the University of Maryland were rattled for weeks by a rash of death threats. An African immigrant was gunned down at a bus stop in Denver, chosen randomly by young white men who claimed to be "race warriors." Three white American soldiers stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, shot and killed a black couple walking down the street in order to earn the skinheads' medal for killing blacks - a spider web tattoo. The Los Angeles Police Department discovered a sinister hive in its Ramparts Division wherein officers had framed, beaten, threatened, and even kidnapped and shot scores of suspects, most of them black and brown men.

In every case, expressions of shock and condemnation poured from every corner, irrespective of race. But outside local protests, no real alarms were sounded. There was no sustained outrage, no urgent appeals to dig up the hows and whys of the many race-based tragedies that momentarily shook the New Age. It was generally accepted that the incidents were isolated and anomalous, far different from the epidemic of black lynchings, stake-burnings, and drownings that had bedeviled the early twentieth century. Since widespread racial terrorism no longer presented a constant danger, the nation, though horrified and aggrieved by each awful modern instance, was able to dismiss the tragedies and the perpetrators as aberrations - a nasty but temporary rash on the body politic rather than a serious and festering disease. The more extreme the racist violence, the easier it was for earnestly appalled whites to denounce it without having to acknowledge, or even examine, its relationship to common prejudices ingrained in daily life.

Instead, they drew satisfaction from outward signs and their own good behavior. They did not use the "n" word; they lived near, worked and socialized with black people; they contributed cheerfully to the Black College Fund or the Sickle Cell Anemia Foundation; they were counted among the fans of black entertainers, writers, and athletes; they allowed their children to sleep over at black friends' houses. But these snapshots of interracial harmony are an illusion. Americans' shrugging indifference to continuing, long-lived social disparities tells the real story.

After all, racism has always been about substance, not style. In the 1950s, much of my native Arkansas was charmed by such a man. His name was Jim Johnson. In 1956 he sought the Democratic nomination for governor. Johnson was a man with an engaging smile. Well-read, handy with a pen, and pedantic about history and literature, Johnson fancied himself something of an intellectual and the beau ideal of southern gentlemanliness. But his love of the classics and his social graces could not mask his writhing racism. One of the reasons he wanted to be governor was that he found Orval Faubus too Negro-friendly - the same Orval Faubus who would later defy the U.S. Supreme Court and the president of the United States on school desegregation. During the 1956 campaign, Johnson appealed to fellow bigots by refusing to shake a black person's hand along the campaign trail. He lost the nomination that year, but two years later Johnson wormed his way into the voters' good graces and took a seat on the Arkansas Supreme Court, his racism intact and in tow.

These days, few supremacists can afford to be as direct as Johnson or his mid-century peers. The contemporary crowd is more artful in speech and tactics. Take Charlton Heston, an actor who portrayed some of the greats of history, from Moses to Michelangelo. But in the 1990s, Heston fell in with the National Rifle Association and, in short order, became the gun lobby's president and its most celebrated spokesman.

Speaking to the archconservative Free Congress Foundation in 1997, Heston presented a message distinguishable from what any snaggle-toothed white supremacist might say only because it was delivered with Heston's inimitable dramatic flair.

"The Constitution was handed down to guide us by a bunch of those wise old dead white guys who invented this country," Heston told his audience.

Now, some flinch when I say that. Why? It's true... they were white guys. So were most of the guys who died in Lincoln's name opposing slavery in the 1860s. So why should I be ashamed of white guys? Why is "Hispanic pride" or "black pride" a good thing while "white pride" conjures up shaved heads and white hoods? Why was the Million Man March on Washington celebrated in the media as progress while the Promise Keepers March on Washington was greeted with suspicion and ridicule? I'll tell you why - cultural warfare.

Then, in a nostalgic vein, Heston said good citizens "prefer the America they built, where you could pray without feeling naïve, love without being kinky, sing without profanity, be white without feeling guilty, own a gun without shame and raise your hand without apology." And "Heaven help the God-fearing, law-abiding, Caucasian, middle class Protestant." At that point, Heston called up his civil rights bona fides - a sophisticated version of the "some-of-my-best-friends" tack.

"In 1963, I marched on Washington with Dr. Martin Luther King to uphold the Bill of Rights," Heston thundered. Then he denounced "blacks who raise a militant fist with one hand while they seek preference with the other." But Heston apparently had no problem with white actors who extol racial harmony one moment and stick a knife in it the next.

Whether Heston always had a split personality on race or was converted to bigotry late in life will be his secret. But, had he been an apprentice of modern racism in need of propaganda, he would not have had to rummage through dusty annals to find it. New material is plentiful, filling bookshelves, newsstands, and, most especially, the Internet with its explosion of supremacist web sites. By 2001, the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama, was tracking more than six hundred such sites. Many were organs of real life, flesh-and-blood hate groups, some with chapters in several states.

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.