Seeing a Color-Blind Future by Patricia J. Williams

Author:Patricia J. Williams [Williams, Patricia J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466896055
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

4

THE WAR BETWEEN THE WORLDS

A friend is wearily discussing her marital woes. Of her husband she says: “He’s the sort of person who’ll have a conversation with me, but in his head. It’ll turn into a huge imaginary fight in which I wound, offend, or disappoint him repeatedly. At some random point he’ll reenter real life in order to track me down in the laundry room so that he can set me straight.”

On some level, talking about race is a lot like having a conversation with an abusive spouse. The igniting spark may be small but the stakes great, the blaze of emotion rendering each impossible to please, the fight not really about whatever the fight is about. A war between the real and the imagined, the remembered and the fantasized, the likely and the outrageous.

“You’re stupid!” Through the radiator pipes of my hotel room comes the voice of an anonymous, quarreling neighbor. I sit in my suite, reading a cross-section of popular newspapers and magazines. A best-selling book claims to have proved anew that blacks and poor people are more stupid than everyone else … Or, as they put it, “genetically inferior” to the rest of humanity …

“Who gave you the right to say anything!” comes the voice again. I bury myself in my reading: Middle-class Negroes talk too much. Those in poverty are illiterate loudmouths. Real black people struggle silently, mute in the noble choice of their lumpen libertarianism.

“I pay the bills around here.” Whites pay all the taxes, blacks do all the spending. White people are sacrificial; black people are greedy and grasping.

“You can just get out and be homeless if you’re so unhappy.” Blacks who find it so hard being around whites should just move back to the ghetto so they can focus their attentions more handily upon some real problems.

“You’re a tramp!” Today’s black civil rights activists are pimps, cheap pretenders to a moral vision, interested only in the mountains of gain and glory to be made by selling out the legacy of that great conservative statesman Martin Luther King, whose most famous lost quotation was, “Why Don’t We Go Get a Real Job.”

“You’re sick!” Black culture is endlessly pathological; whites are therefore rational in their racism.

“You’re a crybaby! Stop whining!” says the voice in the wall. Says an editorial: Blacks are professional victims, always complaining, always ungrateful.

There’s the sound of a slap and a yelp.

“You deserved that!” Blacks get more than they deserve.

“So sue me!” growls the voice. Discrimination suits that result in judicial awards of damages are “corporate muggings” and “racial shakedowns.”

I wonder whether to call the police.

* * *

Woody Allen, filmmaker and narcissist extraordinaire, once came up with the syllogism to end all syllogisms: God is good. I am good. Therefore I am God. That form of logical thought, employed to preposterous ends, characterizes much of contemporary debate about racial science, to say nothing of a host of easy social and political equations in which some are, shall we say, more than

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