White Guilt Read Free Page B

cheek, but by1968 this strategy was passé and Dr. King himself was a bit of an anachronism.
    My generation had a new and different mandate. Our job was not to persuade; it was to replace passivism with militancy.
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    A few weeks before my parents arrived for graduation, I had led the black students on my campus into our college president’s office unannounced with our generation’s favorite instrument of confrontation: a list of demands. As I read these demands to the president, with all the militant authority I could muster, I allowed the ashes from my lit cigarette to fall in little gray cylinders onto the president’s plush carpet. This was the effrontery, the insolence, that was expected in our new commitment to militancy. But it had not been preplanned.
    I had unthinkingly lit a cigarette—a Kool, the black brand of the day—just as our march reached the administration building. As we wound our way through the building up to the president’s office, I had looked for ashtrays—the bourgeois in me insisting on propriety—but found none. And as the leader of this march, I could hardly wander off to find one. So I kept moving up the stairs, right past the president’s startled secretary, and into the inner sanctum of his office, lit cigarette in hand.
    And once face-to-face with the president—thirty or so black students crowding into the office behind me—I had an epiphany: I should not worry about putting the cigarette out. It was exactly the gesture I was looking for. Its stinking, roiling smoke and its detritus of ash made the point that we were a new black generation operating under a new historical mandate. No more long-suffering, “go-limp” passivism. The bourgeois MartinLuther King would never deign to smoke at such a moment, if at all, which was exactly why I had to. Our point was that black power would no longer come from being better than whites; it would come from not being better.
    My parents heard about all this from other parents when they arrived. They broached the subject with me in a tone of grave disappointment. My cigarette had given away the high ground, they said, and invalidated the protest. It was all Kingism, the civil rights credo, the beauty and power of passivism. They spoke as if my entire youth had not been an instruction in the manipulation of moral power.
    It was the next morning that I went to their room hoping to say something reasonable about the position my generation was in. But the sight of my mother crying over Bobby Kennedy brought an end to reason, and suddenly I was filled with the same militancy and outrage that had prompted the cigarette ploy in the president’s office. And at the heart of this anger was an empowering feeling of license—the feeling that being black released me from the usual obligation to common decency and decorum. I was perfectly justified in spilling cigarette ashes on a beautiful carpet and in disdaining Bobby Kennedy. I was licensed to live in a spirit of disregard toward my own country.
    Where did this kind of black anger come from?
    Conventional wisdom, as well as black protest writing, suggests that it comes from the wound of oppression and that it is essentially an outrage against injustice. My humiliating rejection at the hands of the YMCA baseball coach, even for the lowly position of batboy, would perfectly illustrate the conventional understanding of how people are psychically wounded and madeangry by oppression. The theory is that each such wound fires more and more anger and alienation in the soul of the oppressed until there is an inevitable explosion. In Richard Wright’s protest novels, Native Son and The Outsider, there is a clear determinism between the wounds inflicted by a racist society and the deadly outbursts of violence in which his black protagonists murder whites. Against the backdrop of wounding oppression, murder is shown to be a futile and pathetic attempt to