We Need to Do Some Work

"Which side are you on?" writer Budd Schulberg asked his friend, the writer James Baldwin, 30 years ago. Some black leaders, he noted, specifically Elijah Muhammad, then leader of the Nation of Islam, thought it was "too late for American whites." So where did Baldwin, a "celebrated Negro spokesman," stand? "On Elijah Muhammad's side or what you call my sloppy liberal -- interracial side?"

The question put to Baldwin is, of course, today being put to African- American political and religious leaders, writers and columnists, college instructors and rap artists, and many others who routinely speak before the public. A New York Times columnist has said he's prepared to go to "war," to call all African-American intellectuals on the carpet to prove they are not anti-Semites. And many of us are appalled because most of us, as Baldwin said then, have never been "even vaguely tempted" by Muhammad's racist theories.

The question also attempts to set the terms of the discussion, to base a discussion of racial conflict solely on African-American xenophobia. Like all litmus tests, this one is reductive and promotes self-defense rather than thought and disclosure. Black anti-Semitism, which does exist, along with any specific analysis of historical issues between blacks and Jews, remains a complex area that African Americans do not even feel comfortable to debate in public. Some who might give black views on our separate and unequal assimilation in America and our unequal positions today with regard to opportunity, respect and power are quiet. Many believe that in such a delicate public discussion it is dangerous to risk having words taken out of context, ideas abbreviated into unrecognizable and harmful sound bites. They are fearful that to take up the issue at all is to run the risk of being branded an anti-Semite and a pariah. If the issue is used simply to identify enemies, few will step forward.

The fear of black anti-Semitism is not just a fear of the creeping acceptability of hate that creates holocausts -- a legitimate fear we all should have. But the recent reaction to the demagoguery of Minister Louis Farrakhan is part of a larger, very American fear of black hate. This is a phantom dreamed up by people who knew what slavery ought to have created long before Nat Turner struck out with his heartless blade. Black hate, though, is only a new wrinkle in the increasingly negative portrayal of blacks as a whole. Since the Reagan Administration's rollback of civil rights, African Americans have consistently been brought to the American public as predators -- street thugs and welfare hustlers, inveterate whiners, cynical, pathological. And because the fear is omnipresent, passed on to each group of new immigrants settling in the big cities of America, each of us who is the dark Other constantly has to prove we are not its realization, not carrying Nat's blade.