The price of the ticket, p.55
The Price of the Ticket, page 55
But this is not true for the Negro, and not even the most successful or fatuous Negro can really feel this way. His journey will have cost him too much, and the price will be revealed in his estrangement—unless he is very rare and lucky—from other colored people, and in his continuing isolation from whites. Furthermore, for every Negro boy who achieves such a taxi ride, hundreds, at least, will have perished around him, and not because they lacked the boldness to dream, but because the Republic despises their dreams.
Perhaps one must be in such a situation in order really to understand what it is. But if one is a Negro in Watts or Harlem, and knows why one is there, and knows that one has been sentenced to remain there for life, one can’t but look on the American state and the American people as one’s oppressors. For that, after all, is exactly what they are. They have corralled you where you are for their ease and their profit, and are doing all in their power to prevent you from finding out enough about yourself to be able to rejoice in the only life you have.
One does not wish to believe that the American Negro can feel this way, but that is because the Christian world has been misled by its own rhetoric and narcoticized by its own power.
For many generations the natives of the Belgian Congo, for example, endured the most unspeakable atrocities at the hands of the Belgians, at the hands of Europe. Their suffering occurred in silence. This suffering was not indignantly reported in the western press, as the suffering of white men would have been. The suffering of this native was considered necessary, alas, for European, Christian dominance. And, since the world at large knew virtually nothing concerning the suffering of this native, when he rose he was not hailed as a hero fighting for his land, but condemned as a savage, hungry for white flesh. The Christian world considered Belgium to be a civilized country; but there was not only no reason for the Congolese to feel that way about Belgium; there was no possibility that they could.
What will the Christian world, which is so uneasily silent now, say on that day which is coming when the black native of South Africa begins to massacre the masters who have massacred him so long? It is true that two wrongs don’t make a right, as we love to point out to the people we have wronged. But one wrong doesn’t make a right, either. People who have been wronged will attempt to right the wrong; they would not be people if they didn’t. They can rarely afford to be scrupulous about the means they will use. They will use such means as come to hand. Neither, in the main, will they distinguish one oppressor from another, nor see through to the root principle of their oppression.
In the American context, the most ironical thing about Negro anti-Semitism is that the Negro is really condemning the Jew for having become an American white man—for having become, in effect, a Christian. The Jew profits from his status in America, and he must expect Negroes to distrust him for it. The Jew does not realize that the credential he offers, the fact that he has been despised and slaughtered, does not increase the Negro’s understanding. It increases the Negro’s rage.
For it is not here, and not now, that the Jew is being slaughtered, and he is never despised, here, as the Negro is, because he is an American. The Jewish travail occurred across the sea and America rescued him from the house of bondage. But America is the house of bondage for the Negro, and no country can rescue him. What happens to the Negro here happens to him because he is an American.
When an African is mistreated here, for example, he has recourse to his embassy. The American Negro who is, let us say, falsely arrested, will find it nearly impossible to bring his case to court. And this means that because he is a native of this country—“one of our niggers”—he has, effectively, no recourse and no place to go, either within the country or without. He is a pariah in his own country and a stranger in the world. This is what it means to have one’s history and one’s ties to one’s ancestral homeland totally destroyed.
This is not what happened to the Jew and, therefore, he has allies in the world. That is one of the reasons no one has ever seriously suggested that the Jew be nonviolent. There was no need for him to be nonviolent. On the contrary, the Jewish battle for Israel was saluted as the most tremendous heroism. How can the Negro fail to suspect that the Jew is really saying that the Negro deserves his situation because he has not been heroic enough? It is doubtful that the Jews could have won their battle had the western powers been opposed to them. But such allies as the Negroes may have are themselves struggling for their freedom against tenacious and tremendous western opposition.
This leaves the American Negro, who technically represents the western nations, in a cruelly ambiguous position. In this situation, it is not the American Jew who can either instruct him or console him. On the contrary, the American Jew knows just enough about this situation to be unwilling to imagine it again.
Finally, what the American Negro interprets the Jew as saying is that one must take the historical, the impersonal point of view concerning one’s life and concerning the lives of one’s kinsmen and children. “We suffered, too,” one is told, “but we came through, and so will you. In time.”
In whose time? One has only one life. One may become reconciled to the ruin of one’s own life, but to become reconciled to the ruin of one’s children’s lives is not reconciliation. It is the sickness unto death. And one knows that such counselors are not present on these shores by following this advice. They arrived here out of the same effort the American Negro is making: they wanted to live, and not tomorrow, but today. Now, since the Jew is living here, like all the other white men living here, he wants the Negro to wait. And the Jew sometimes—often—does this in the name of his Jewishness, which is a terrible mistake. He has absolutely no relevance in this context as a Jew. His only relevance is that he is white and values his color and uses it.
He is singled out by Negroes not because he acts differently from other white men, but because he doesn’t. His major distinction is given him by that history of Christendom, which has so successfully victimized both Negroes and Jews. And he is playing in Harlem the role assigned him by Christians long ago: he is doing their dirty work.
No more than the good white people of the South, who are really responsible for the bombings and lynchings, are ever present at these events, do the people who really own Harlem ever appear at the door to collect the rent. One risks libel by trying to spell this out too precisely, but Harlem is really owned by a curious coalition which includes some churches, some universities, some Christians, some Jews, and some Negroes. The capital of New York, which is not a Jewish state, is Albany, and the Moses they sent us, whatever his ancestry, certainly failed to get the captive children free.
A genuinely candid confrontation between American Negroes and American Jews would certainly prove of inestimable value. But the aspirations of the country are wretchedly middle-class and the middle class can never afford candor.
What is really at question is the American way of life. What is really at question is whether Americans already have an identity or are still sufficiently flexible to achieve one. This is a painfully complicated question, for what now appears to be the American identity is really a bewildering and sometimes demoralizing blend of nostalgia and opportunism. For example, the Irish who march on St. Patrick’s Day, do not, after all, have any desire to go back to Ireland. They do not intend to go back to live there, though they may dream of going back there to die. Their lives, in the meanwhile, are here, but they cling, at the same time, to those credentials forged in the Old World, credentials which cannot be duplicated here, credentials which the American Negro does not have. These credentials are the abandoned history of Europe—the abandoned and romanticized history of Europe. The Russian Jews here have no desire to return to Russia either, and they have not departed in great clouds for Israel. But they have the authority of knowing it is there. The Americans are no longer Europeans, but they are still living, at least as they imagine, on that capital.
That capital also belongs, however, to the slaves who created it for Europe and who created it here; and in that sense, the Jew must see that he is part of the history of Europe, and will always be so considered by the descendant of the slave. Always, that is, unless he himself is willing to prove that this judgment is inadequate and unjust. This is precisely what is demanded of all the other white men in this country, and the Jew will not find it easier than anybody else to be hated. I learned this from Christians, and I ceased to practice what the Christians practiced.
The crisis taking place in the world, and in the minds and hearts of black people everywhere, is not produced by the Star of David, but by the old, rugged Roman cross on which Christendom’s most celebrated Jew was murdered. And not by Jews.
WHITE RACISM OR WORLD COMMUNITY?
SINCE I AM NOT A THEOLOGIAN IN ANY WAY WHATEVER, I PROBABLY ought to tell you what my credentials are. I never expected to be standing in such a place, because I left the pulpit twenty-seven years ago. That says a good deal, I suppose, about my relationship to the Christian Church. And in a curious way that is part of my credentials. I also address you in the name of my father, who was a Baptist minister, who gave his life to the Christian faith, with some very curious and stunning and painful results. I address you as one of those people who have always been outside it, even though one tried to work in it. I address you as one of the creatures, one of God’s creatures, whom the Christian Church has most betrayed. And I want to make it clear to you that though I may have to say some rather difficult things here this afternoon, I want to make it understood that in the heart of the absolutely necessary accusation there is contained a plea. The plea was articulated by Jesus Christ himself, who said, “Insofar as you have done it unto the least of these, you have done it unto the least of these, you have done it all unto me.”
Now it would seem to me that the nature of the confrontation, the actual historical confrontation between the nonwhite peoples of the world and the white peoples of the world, between the Christian Church and those people outside the Christian Church who are unable to conceive themselves as being equally the sons of God, the nature of that confrontation is involved with the nature of the experience which a black person represents vis-à-vis the Cross of Christ, and vis-à-vis that enormous structure which is called the Church. Because I was born in a Christian culture, I never considered myself to be totally a free human being. In my own mind, and in fact, I was told by Christians what I could do and what I could become and what my life was worth. Now, this means that one’s concept of human freedom is in a sense frozen or strangled at the root. This has to do, of course, with the fact that though he was born in Nazareth under a very hot sun, and though we know that he spent his life beneath that sun, the Christ I was presented with was presented to me with blue eyes and blond hair, and all the virtues to which I, as a black man, was expected to aspire had, by definition, to be white. This may seem a very simple thing and from some points of view it might even seem to be a desirable thing. But in fact what it did was make me very early, make us, the blacks, very early distrust our own experience and refuse, in effect, to articulate that experience to the Christians who were our oppressors. That was a great loss for me, as a black man. I want to suggest that it was also a great loss for you, as white people. For example, in the church I grew up in, we sang a song that that man who was hung on a Roman cross between two thieves would have understood better than most church prelates. We sang—and we knew what we meant when we sang it—“I’ve been rebuked and I’ve been scolded.” We won our Christianity, our faith, at the point of a gun, not because of the example afforded by white Christians, but in spite of it. It was very difficult to become a Christian if you were a black man on a slave ship, and the slave ship was called “The Good Ship Jesus.” These crimes, for one must call them crimes, against the human being have brought the church and the entire western world to the dangerous place we find ourselves in today. Because if it is true that your testimony as Christians has proven invalid; if it is true that my importance in the Christian world was not as a living soul, dear to the sight of God, but as a means of making money, and representatively more sinister than that too representing some terrifying divorce between the flesh and the spirit; if that is true (and it would be very difficult to deny the truth of this) then at this moment in the world’s history it becomes necessary for me, for my own survival, not to listen to what you say but to watch very carefully what you do, not to read your pronouncements but to go back to the source and to check it for myself. And if that is so, then it may very well mean that the revolution which was begun two thousand years ago by a disreputable Hebrew criminal may now have to be begun again by people equally disreputable and equally improbable. It’s got to be admitted that if you are born under the circumstances in which most black people in the West are born, that means really black people over the entire world, when you look around you, having attained something resembling adulthood, it is perfectly true that you see that the destruction of the Christian Church as it is presently constituted may not only be desirable but necessary.
If you have grown to be, let us say, thirty years old in a Christian nation and you understand what has happened to you and your brothers, your mother, your father, your sisters and the ways in which you are menaced, not precisely by the wickedness of Christians, but by the wickedness of white people; most people are not wicked, most people are terribly lazy, most people are terribly afraid of acting on what they know. I think everyone knows that no child is a criminal, I think everyone knows that all children are sacred, and yet the Christian world, until today, victimizes all black children and destroys them because they are not white. This is done in many ways. One of the most important ways in which it is done is the way in which the history of black people, which means then the history of the Christian world, is taught. Christians, in order to justify the means by which they rose to power, have had to convince themselves, and have had to try to convince me, that when Africa was “discovered,” as Christians so quaintly put it, and when I was discovered and brought away to be used like an animal, we have had to agree, the Christian Church had to conspire with itself to say that I preferred slavery to my own condition and that I really liked the role I played in western culture. Until at last the Christian Church has got to pretend that black South African miners are pleased to go into the mines and bring out the diamonds and the wealth, all the wealth which belongs to Africa, to dig it up for nothing and give it to Europe. We all know, no matter what we say, no matter how we may justify it or hide from this fact, every human being knows, something in him knows, and this is what Christ was talking about; no one wants to be a slave. Black people have had to adjust to incredible vicissitudes and involve in fantastic identity against incredible odds. But those songs we sang, and sing, and our dances and the way we talk to each other, betray a terrifying pain, a pain so great that most western people, most white westerners, are simply baffled by it and paralyzed by it, because they do not dare imagine what it would be like to be a black father, and what a black father would have to tell a black son in order for the black son to live at all.
Now, this is not called morality, this is not called faith, this has nothing to do with Christ. It has to do with power, and part of the dilemma of the Christian Church is the fact that it opted, in fact, for power and betrayed its own first principles which were a responsibility to every living soul, the assumption of which the Christian Church’s basis, as I understand it, is that all men are the sons of God and that all men are free in the eyes of God and are victims of the commandment given to the Christian Church, “Love one another as I have loved you.” And if that is so, the Church is in great danger not merely because the black people say it is but because people are always in great danger when they know what they should do, and refuse to act on that knowledge. To try to make it as clear as I can; we hear a great deal these days of a young black man called Stokely Carmichael, we gather from the public press that Stokely’s a very radical, black fanatic racist. Not long ago we heard much the same thing about the late Malcolm X, and neither was the late Martin Luther King, Jr., the most popular man in the country.
But everyone overlooks the fact that Stokely Carmichael began his life as a Christian and for many, many years, unnoticed by the world’s press, was marching up and down highways in my country, in the Deep South, spent many, many years being beaten over the head and thrown in jail, singing “We shall overcome,” and meaning it and believing it, doing day by day and hour by hour precisely what the Christian Church is supposed to do, to walk from door to door, to feed the hungry, to speak to those who are oppressed, to try to open the gates of prisons for all those who are imprisoned. And a day came, inevitably, when this young man grew weary of petitioning a heedless population and said in effect, what all revolutionaries have always said, I petitioned you and petitioned you, and you can petition for a long, long time, but the moment comes when the petitioner is no longer a petitioner but has become a beggar. And at that moment one concludes, you will not do it, you cannot do it, it is not in you to do it, and therefore I must do it. When Stokely talks about black power, he is simply translating into the black idiom what the English said hundreds of years ago and have always proclaimed as their guiding principle, black power translated means the self-determination of people. It means that, nothing more and nothing less. But it is astounding, and it says a great deal about Christendom, that whereas black power, the conjunction of the word “black” with the word “power,” frightens everybody, no one in Christendom appears seriously to be frightened by the operation and the nature of white power. Stokely may make terrifying speeches (though they are not terrifying to me, I must say) and Stokely may be, though I don’t believe it, a racist in reverse, but in fact he’s not nearly as dangerous as the people who now rule South Africa, he’s not nearly as dangerous as many of the people who govern my own poor country. He’s only insisting that he is present only once on this earth as a man, not as a creation of the Christian conscience, not as a fantasy in the Christian mind, not as an object of missionary charity, not as something to be manipulated or defined by others, but as a man himself, on this earth, under the sky; on the same lonely journey we all must make, alone. He (I am using him as an example) by insisting on the sacredness of his soul, by demanding his soul’s salvation, is closer to the Hebrew prophet than, let us say arbitrarily, another eminent Christian, the governor of Alabama. And in the same way it is perfectly possible twenty years from now that the Christian Church, if indeed it lasts that long, will be appalled by some of the things some of the sons of the late Martin Luther King, Jr., may have to say. After all, speaking now again as a creation of the Christian Church, as a black creation of the Christian Church, I watched what the Christian Church did to my father, who was in the pulpit all the years of his life, I watched the kind of poverty, the kind of hopeless poverty, which was not an act of God, but an act of the state, against which he and his children struggled, I watched above all, and this is what is crucial, the ways in which white power can destroy black minds, and what black people are now fighting against, precisely that. We watched too many of us being destroyed for too long and destroyed where it really matters, not only in chain gangs, and in prisons and on needles, not only do I know, and every black person knows, hundreds of people, thousands of people, perishing in the streets of my nation as we stand here, perishing, for whom there is no hope, perishing in the jails of my country, and not only my country. For one reason, and one reason only, because they are black and because the structure into which they were born, the Christian structure, had determined and foreordained that destruction, to maintain its power. Now, of course, this, from the point of view of anyone who takes the preaching of the man from Galilee seriously, is very close to being the sin against the Holy Ghost, for which you will remember there is no forgiveness.
