Columns

Our future is in our past

By BILL MAXWELL
Published December 10, 2006

Our nation's Supreme Court has debated the constitutionality of voluntary programs in Louisville, Ky., and Seattle to maintain integration in these cities' public schools. I am certain that with the court's new conservative majority, these programs will be outlawed.

Should these programs be outlawed? I do not know. And I am too jaded with the issue of race and the reality of race in the United States to care.

What I do know is that on too many mornings, I, like millions of other American-born blacks, wake up hearing that harsh epiphany telling me that I do not belong to this nation, that I am a U.S. citizen by birth only, that I am the permanent outsider.

On TV and in newspapers and magazines, you look at the faces of the Supreme Court justices and the attorneys before them and realize that these strangers, their expressions lawyerly and austere, are talking about you, a black person.

Yes, these strangers are debating your future, your identity.

You suddenly realize that a document, the U.S. Constitution, has more meaning than you, a flesh-and-blood human being.

Slowly and painfully, you apprehend that you do not belong here. No matter how you frame your words, you know that you are a stranger in the land where you were born.

You are separate.

If you are an ordinary old man who, say, wore a military uniform and fought in one of the nation's wars, you become angry when you realize that our privileged Supreme Court justices - with Clarence Thomas feigning legitimacy - are referring to you and your offspring. If you are a big shot and have a public venue, such as that of a journalist, you are free to opine in a newspaper column about the justices' selective myopia.

In either case, you realize that you are a pawn, a dispensable black pawn, in an endless, lunatic debate about who you are, about what you do and do not mean to America.

Then comes the profound sense of disconnectedness and alienation, then unavoidable resentment - the force that defines your existence in the Land of the Free.

Here, I return to a column I wrote in 1997, headlined "In the United States, 'history is against you.' " In that column, I refer to a New York Times Magazine article that invites correspondents from 18 nations to share their views of the United States. The views of South African novelist Nadine Gordimer are notable.

As a white woman born into privilege and as an opponent of apartheid, the world's most brutal race-based government, Gordimer does what few American whites ever do: Without a hint of defensiveness or denial, she tells the raw truth about race.

She writes that while traveling in the United States from the 1950s to the early 1990s, she mixed freely among ordinary and famous American blacks in their homes and in public places. She said that since 1994, however, she has met few American-born blacks because they "do not want to mix with whites, however much potential compatibility is beckoning to be recognized. The old, old answer I think not only survives but seems to have grown in bitterness, for reasons (of economics and opportunity) Americans know best: When you have been so long rejected, your collective consciousness tells you that the open-door, open-arms invitation has come too late. You gain your self-respect by saying 'no.' "

An overwhelmingly large number of young blacks have made saying "no" their identity. The hip-hop nation - its music, its attire, its bling - is the clearest example of saying "no." Hip-hop virtually has rejected all that is white and all that is American.

In many cities, black parents are rejecting forced school integration just as eagerly as whites reject it. They want neighborhood schools. If those schools wind up being black, so be it.

The long rejection and resentment have metastasized into a willing embrace of America's racial separateness.

And, so, we wait for the Supreme Court. No matter what the justices decide, the fact that we are agonizing over race at all in 2006 means one thing: In the United States, our future is our past.

[Last modified December 9, 2006, 20:55:22]