“The blacks don’t want to admit that there’s black racism,” one white student told me. A black student seemed to confirm this: “There can’t be black racism, it objectively can’t exist. When a man fights back against his oppressor, that’s not racism.”
Out there in the real world, of course, there is as much evidence of black racism as there is of white racism. I’ve met West Indian blacks who look down upon American blacks, light-skinned blacks who can’t abide dark-skinned blacks, southern blacks of the old Creole aristocracy who are uneasy with (or terrified by) the homeboys from the housing projects, and blacks of all classes and pigments who hate whites because they are white. Racism is a grand refusal to see individuals as individuals, each responsible for his or her own actions. No race is immune to the virus.
But at Brown, there are some specific institutions that seem to exacerbate the wounds they are intended to heal. All freshman minority students are invited to come to the campus three days early to take part in the Third World Transition Program (TWTP). The intention of the program is honorable: to help minority students feel comfortable in this new environment, where whites are in the majority. Hearing about it from some minority students, I realized that if I’d ever made it to a place like Brown, I might have been singled out for the same kind of help, as a Catholic among Wasps, as a semihood from Brooklyn among the gentry. I also knew that I would have resisted with full fury any attempt to register me in the Street Punk Transition Program. I’d have held off anybody who draped a fatherly arm over my shoulder to tell me I had been so severely maimed by poverty that I needed special help.
So I found myself agreeing with much of the criticism of the TWTP at Brown. It is race-driven; it assumes that nonwhites are indeed different from other Americans, mere bundles of pathologies, permanent residents in the society of victims, and therefore require special help. “They’re made to feel separate from the first day they arrive,” one alumnus said. “And they stay separate for the next four years.” During those three intense days of TWTP, critics say, friendships are forged within a group that excludes whites. By the time white students arrive on campus, defensive cliques have already been formed, racist slights or insensitivities are expected (perhaps even welcomed as proof of the victim theory), and the opportunity for blacks to know whites more intimately (and vice versa) is postponed during a long process of testing that is sometimes permanent.
The term Third World, as used at Brown, is itself laughable; I can’t believe that even a semiconscious professor would allow such slovenly usage in the classroom. The grouping includes, for example, Japanese and Japanese-American students in an era when Japan is virtually the center of the First World. It also includes those minority students from financially privileged backgrounds who came down the track of prep schools and grew up infinitely more comfortable than most whites. Alas, at Brown, Third World is not used to describe people from developing nations (or from economically deprived sectors of the U.S.); it is a racial concept that includes everyone who is not Caucasian.
That some forms of racism exist at Brown and other campuses is undeniable; they are American institutions, after all, and there is racism in American society at all levels. But after I talked with students, faculty, administrators, and a few alumni, the deeper reasons for the emergence of campus racism remained vague and provisional. In one report, Gregorian suggested some possibilities: “The economic dislocations of the 1980s, a shared sense of ’brotherhood and risk,’ ignorance of the civil rights struggles of the ’60s and ’70s, rampant consumerism, cynicism, narcissism.” The Reagan years.
There are other possibilities. Many of today’s college students were born in the ’60s. The more radical students might have a certain nostalgia for that era, when the goal of every young American wasn’t limited to the service of greed. There could be other factors: the growing stupidity of all Americans, the decay of high schools, a reaction to twenty years of affirmative-action programs that are perceived by some as giving blacks unearned advantages, a spreading reaction to the disorder of the underclass. I don’t have a single explanation for the phenomenon of campus racism, and I don’t think anybody else does, either.
But walking around campus, talking to students, I found my own reactions shifting between anger and envy. In their desire to be what Brown students call P.C. (politically correct), some of these privileged young people seemed to be denying themselves the fullest experience of the social and intellectual feast at which they were guests. Too many black students were postponing (perhaps losing) the chance to learn to function in the country Out There, where blacks make up only 13 percent of the population and where, for good or bad, true power is attained through compromise and connection. Instead of getting to know white people (thus demystifying them, forging alliances with them on the basis of a common experience), the separatists substitute too much ’6os-style oratory about empowerment for hard thought. They waste precious hours on such arcane matters as whether the words black or African American are P.C.
Worse, by insisting upon being special cases, by institutionalizing the claim of victimhood, by using imprecise nomenclature (“white America,” whatever that might be), they become perfect foils for true racists. On campus, those whites who might start with a vague prejudice against blacks find easy reasons to give it a hardened form. White liberals, committed to integration, throw up their hands (often too easily) and give their energies to other matters. News of this is both infuriating and sad. If anything, black students with true pride in themselves and their race should be commanding the destruction of the patronizing, self-limiting concept of a Third World ghetto on campus. That would take some courage. But in an era when all of Orwell’s “smelly little orthodoxies” are being swept away, nobody should waste a single precious hour on being politically correct. There’s too much to do Out There.
That was the basis for my feelings of envy. These young people were the most fortunate of all Americans. While some of them continued arguing the gnarled social issues of the postwar period, their century was being shaped by the great change sweeping across the Soviet Union and Central Europe. The wasteful ideological contests that had mauled my generation were swiftly becoming obscure. That meant these young people were free to enter a new century that might be infinitely better than the dreadful one now coming to its exhausted end. And they could only make that exciting passage with the intellectual tools they acquired at places like Brown. With any luck, in their time even the new idiocies of racism would become a wan memory.
So I envied them that splendid prospect as I did their certainties, and their passion, and yes, the red-brick buildings and those libraries, and all the fine young women coming across the quad in the wintry light with snow melting in their hair.
ESQUIRE,
April 1990
THE NEW RACE HUSTLE
That morning, my wife and I drove across the Brooklyn Bridge, listening to talk radio. We could have been in any of a hundred other cities in America because, on the radio, the Legion of the Invincibly Stupid was already hammering away at the remnants of our common civility. Whites slandered blacks and blacks returned their oratorical volleys, while the host fueled the ugly duel. As we plunged deeper into Brooklyn, news bulletins fed the talkers: The trials of two whites charged with killing a black youth in Bensonhurst moved toward verdicts; a black boycott of two Korean grocery stores continued into its fifth month; a Vietnamese man was in critical condition, his head broken by a black kid who called him a “Korean motherfucker” while beating him senseless with a claw hammer. Ah, the melting pot. O ye gorgeous mosaic.