Books: America as It Now Exists

LOOK OUT, WHITEY! BLACK POWER'S GON' GET YOUR MAMA by Julius Lester. 152 pages. Dial. $3.95.

BLACK RAGE by William H. Grier and Price M. Cobbs. 213 pages. Basic Books. $5.95.

White America is endlessly accommodating, verbally, in the matter of race. Southern politicians are learning to say "Negro" when they mean "nigger," and Northern liberals are careful now to say "black" when they mean "Negro." (That's because blacks have begun saying "Negro" when they mean "sellout.") Opportunities to use these terms do not occur every day, but whites keep in practice just in case.

When Black-White conversation does occur, it is likely to consist of Black's saying blackly that "America as it now exists must be destroyed," and White's answering, "Yes, but what do you really mean?" Kill Whitey? Or (smiling whitely) merely destruction of the social order? And what then? Black points out with sour pleasure that his "revolution" has 22 million members and that there are few recruiting or dropout problems. White says yes, but so long as blackness and separatism are requirements, the membership can do no more than cause disruption, because it can never grow large enough to complete a revolution ... It is a weird sort of coffee-housing, especially if Black and White happen to be friends; it never seems quite real, nor does it seem completely fake.

Mean Mischief These new books offer some value as footnotes to the argument. Julius Lester is a former field secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. His Look Out, Whitey! is a long harangue that reproduces accurately the black tone of voice at its angriest. It is street-corner oratory aimed at blacks but spoken, as the mean mischief of the title suggests, with sly awareness of the whites standing at the edge of the crowd.

Lester is good at it. He scornfully caricatures the breakup of the civil rights movement. Thus S.N.C.C. had been getting heads busted and shot in Mississippi since 1961, he says, but it was not until whites came into the state three years later that there was any press attention. Then the stories, he claims, went something like this: "Blop-blop is a blue-eyed blonde from Diamond Junction-on-the-Hudson, N.Y. She is a 20-year-old junior at Radcliffe majoring in Oriental metaphysics and its relationship to the quantum theory when the sun is in Sagittarius. This summer she's living with a Negro family in Fatback, Miss., who has never heard of the quantum theory, etc., etc." Fifteen black people were killed in the state that year as a result of S.N.C.C. activity, Lester adds, but the only murdered black mentioned in the press was James Chancy, who was killed with white Civil Rights Workers Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner.