Cover
story The
color line: The third rail of American culture
By TOM ROBERTS
Someone recently described a
workshop where a mixed black and white audience was asked the question:
Who here would rather be treated as an African-American than as a white
in U.S. society?
No hands went up.
Point made. Or is it?
Evidence abounds that the color line has been crossed time and
again in high-profile circumstances. African-Americans -- basketball great
Michael Jordan, high-powered attorney Vernon Jordan, National Security Adviser
Condaleezza Rice, Secretary of State Colin Powell -- have been embraced as
sports heroes and political figures, or have been given enormous
responsibilities in the affairs of state and the conduct of war. Decades after
his assassination, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.s life is celebrated in
a federal holiday (this year on Jan. 21). Many Americans get a day off.
Fr. Warren J. Savage sees little consolation for African-Americans
in such high-profile success. Says Savage, National Black Catholic
Evangelization Forum president, I see another side of racism, a darker
side of racism I dont think we are addressing -- the whole notion of
classism, he said. We now have in our culture distinctive classes
of people, either very poor or very rich, and those on either end of that
spectrum, he said, can be black, white, brown, any color.
Savage has tough questions for whites and even tougher ones for
African-Americans. He asks the latter: Is what youre aspiring to
beneficial to all African-Americans or to just yourself? With this
outgrowth of racism, he said, comes the specter of victims
now becoming the oppressors within their own group.
The farther one gets from the spotlight of celebrity, as the age
of slavery and the 1960s Civil Rights era recede into history, the more
difficult it is to assess where racism is and to figure the way out.
There is no argument in mainstream circles: Racism exists. A
television commentator, in an offhand remark, recently referred to racism as
the third rail in American culture. That is, within its own limits,
an apt analogy.
If racism today usually doesnt have the kind of high profile
that it did during the Civil Rights era of the 1960s, like the benign-looking
third rail, the one that carries the current along the electric tracks, racist
outbreaks can still deliver deadly shocks to the body politic.
Which side of the color line one is on determines the severity of
the shock from racial profiling, from the inordinate number of black men in
prison, from the unconscionable numbers of blacks in poverty, illiteracy,
substandard housing and joblessness.
Some shocks are openly vicious: the gruesome reality of a black
man dragged to his death chained to the back of a pickup truck, the rioting and
suppression in Cincinnati after a black man was shot and killed by a white
policeman, the beating of a Rodney King.
Most white Americans remain numb to how deeply attitudes of white
supremacy have taken hold in the culture, contends Precious Blood Fr. Clarence
Williams of Detroit in the accompanying story. In his words, its a long
road to racial sobriety -- by which he means working to overcome racist
attitudes and behavior.
Not long ago, as Jesuit Fr. Joseph Brown paced in front of the
audience at a Call to Action meeting in Chicago, the hymn Wade in the
Water played in the background:
Wade in the water Wade in the water, children, Wade in
the water, Gods gonna trouble the water
Said Brown, who teaches Black American Studies at Southern
Illinois University, When my study of history caught up with my study of
life, I realized that I lived in two cultures. Much like [the black writer
W.E.B.] Du Bois, who in 1903 in The Souls of Black Folk spoke of
two cultures separated by a veil of color. The color line,
said Brown, if not as sharply defined, still separates two cultures, and the
separation extends into and throughout the church.
Brown often travels around the country doing workshops for largely
white audiences. He asks those congregations if they have the black Catholic
hymnal Lead Me, Guide Me.
And he often hears the response, Oh, no. We dont have
any black members.
He pauses for effect. And you never will.
Unless theres the courage to wade in the water.
Tom Roberts is NCR editor.
National Catholic Reporter, January 18,
2002
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