The Wicked Son by David Mamet

Author:David Mamet
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780805242744
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2008-10-23T16:00:00+00:00

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Racism

Voters:

The Jews loom large only because we are on our knees.

RISE UP!

Fifty thousand reap the benefit of the hopeless labor wrung out of thirty million French—their trembling slaves.

It is not a question of religion—THE JEW is of a different race—the enemy of our own.

JUDAISM: Voilà the Enemy!

In standing for election I give you the opportunity to protest, with me, against the Jewish Tyranny.

Do so—it is a question of Honor.

—From a French broadside, A. WILLETTE, standing for election to the legislature, 1889

Having experienced racism as a racist makes its appearance and operation much clearer. I grew up in a time of separate drinking fountains.

The lie of black inferiority was so pervasive that, to the white child, it must have been true. So that, in opposition to reason, morality, observation, experience, and common sense, I considered blacks somehow inferior.

In what did this supposed inferiority consist?

I knew, my young self, that they were human beings, that they were no different intellectually, or physically, than the spectrum of nonblacks. But yet they must be inferior, or I, or else the world and I, must necessarily have been involved in a vicious, sick delusion.

But yet I, who considered myself intelligent, and acceptably humane and moral, thought blacks, in some magical way, were inferior to whites. The rhetoric of “Can’t you see…?” would avail nothing and, in fact, reinforced, to my depraved mind, the delusion.

For the rhetoric came, to my mind, from supplicants, which is to say, inferiors.

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