Piecework

These are pieces about certain aspects of American society in the last decade of the century. They were written by an American liberal who had come to distrust all dogma, including liberal dogma. For me, liberalism must be tolerant, generous, intelligent, and humane or it is no longer liberal. If social systems created by liberals — the welfare system, for example — no longer function for the good of human beings, it is stupid to defend them simply because they have been entered into some aging liberal catechism. They must be changed, gradually and humanely, and replaced with something better.

It is also foolish for liberals to refuse to recognize uncomfortable truths. They need to look at racism as it exists now, not as it did while Martin Luther King was marching in the streets of the American South. They must identify and condemn white racism and black racism. They must separate the race hustlers from those seriously concerned about growth and progress. They must move beyond habits of complaint and blame to the creation of enduring solutions.

Above all, they must reject grim sectarianism, whether practiced by radical feminists, the Christian Coalition, or Louis Farrakhan. They must be wary of exclusively legalistic solutions to deep societal problems. They must laugh at any insistence that an individual human being can be completely explained by the group to which he or she belongs. Liberals can’t be the thought police or the speech police or the gender police. They can’t go around all day telling strangers to put out their cigarettes. They can’t call the district attorney to solve problems of manners. They have to lighten up. They have to recover the confident, exuberant style of the liberal America that once believed we could have justice and the racetrack too. They have to do it soon. The other guys are at the three-quarter pole and pulling away.

BLACK AND WHITE AT BROWN

PROVIDENCE, R.I.

When I was young and laboring as a sheetmetal worker in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, I sometimes imagined myself as a student on a college campus. This impossible vision of the Great Good Place was constructed from scraps of movies and magazine photographs, and was for me a combination of refuge and treasurehouse. The hard world of tenements and street gangs was replaced in my imagination with buildings made of red brick laced with ivy, and a wide, safe quadrangle where ancient oaks rose majestically to the sky. There was an immense library, offering the secrets of the world. The teachers were like Mr. Chips, at once stern, wise, passionate, and kind. And, of course, there were impossibly beautiful women, long of limb and steady of eye, talking about Fitzgerald or Hemingway, walking beside me on winter evenings with snow melting in their hair.

I never made it. I went to other schools of higher learning: the Navy, Mexico, newspapers. I had absolutely no regrets. But when I walked onto the campus at Brown University recently, that old vision came flooding back. There before me were the buildings, the trees, the open quadrangle that I had ached for as a boy. There were the lights, like molten gold, in the library. There were the fine young women. I wondered how anyone here could be unhappy.

But I knew that at Brown, and on many similar campuses around the nation, the malignant viruses of the outside world had proved impossible to resist. The worst of these was that ancient curse: racism. Last year, the Justice Department reported racial incidents on seventy-seven campuses, from state universities to the most elite academies, ranging from jokes to full-scale brawls. This was an increase of almost 50 percent over the year before, and Brown, the most liberal of the eight Ivy League schools, was not immune. This struck me as a heartbreaking phenomenon. I grew up believing that racism was a consequence of ignorance. But 8o percent of the students at Brown had finished in the top io percent of their high schools. If they were racist, the nation was doomed. I went to take a look.

At the Wriston Quad, everyone I saw was white. At the other campus, called Pembroke (it was once a separate school, for young women), blacks chose to “hang” with blacks. On a visit to a cafeteria, I noticed blacks generally sat with blacks, whites with whites. I heard tales (from whites) of pledges from one of the black fraternities marching around campus in paramilitary style (“They look like the Fruit of Islam, for Christ’s sake”). I heard blacks complain about white “insensitivity,” or outright racism (shouts of “nigger” from white fraternity houses, watermelon jokes). Whites who called themselves liberals complained about black separatism, symbolized by the hermetic clustering of blacks around the college’s Third World Center. One white student said, “It’s self-segregation, and they’ve chosen it, not us.” One black student said, “When the whites see more than two blacks at a time, they think about calling the cops instead of saying hello.”

None of this, of course, was like Mississippi in the ’50s, when the White Citizens Councils owned the night. But it wasn’t trivial, either. Many of the discussions here referred to two distinct series of events: The Incidents and The Attacks. The Incidents took place last spring. In April racist graffiti appeared in the West Andrews residence hall on the Pembroke campus. The message NIGGERS GO HOME was found in an elevator, MEN and WOMEN were crossed out on lavatory doors and replaced by WHITES and NIGGERS. Racist words were also written on the doors of minority students’ rooms and on posters.

Then, on April 28, a flyer appeared on a bathroom mirror, again in West Andrews. It said: “Once upon a time, Brown was a place where a white man could go to class without having to look at little black faces, or little yellow faces or little brown faces, except when he went to take his meals. Things have been going downhill since the kitchen help moved into the classroom. Keep white supremecy [sic] alive! Join the Brown chapter of the KKK today.”

Brown president Vartan Gregorian reacted the next day with righteous fury. He addressed a crowd of 1,500 students on the Green, threatened to expel anyone guilty of spreading racism or homophobia, and said, “There are many outlets for racism and bigotry in this country. Brown will not be one of them, I assure you of that.” By all accounts, it was a tough, persuasive performance. Students later presented Gregorian with that quintessential element of the ’60s, a List of Demands. He answered them the following week, and although his petitioners weren’t completely satisfied, the racist graffiti stopped. The identity of the faceless yahoo was never discovered.

In the fall, The Attacks started. Within a period of three months, twenty-seven students were assaulted in the streets immediately adjacent to the Brown campus. All but four of the victims were white. All of the attackers were young blacks. Seven of the assaults were accompanied by robberies, but the others appeared to be simple cases of underclass black kids arbitrarily beating the crap out of rich white kids. On one level, they were a variation on traditional town-gown conflicts. But the racial factor was impossible to ignore. Gregorian was angered again, called for help from the Providence mayor and police chief, beefed up campus security, but was reluctant publicly to characterize The Attacks as racially motivated. “Until we have clear evidence one way or the other,” he said in a letter to parents, “we are treating them as what, in all cases, they clearly were — assaults or assault and battery.”

But on campus, there was a continuing discussion of the racial context of the violence. Some black students said that the outsiders were aware of The Incidents in the spring and The Attacks were their way of striking back at racism. This interpretation — the Mugger as Freedom Fighter — infuriated other students. Some whites noted that the organized black students were quick to complain about words directed at blacks, but were generally silent when punches were directed at whites.

“The blacks don’t want to admit that there’s black racism,” one white student told me. A black student seemed to confirm this: “There can’t be black racism, it objectively can’t exist. When a man fights back against his oppressor, that’s not racism.”

Out there in the real world, of course, there is as much evidence of black racism as there is of white racism. I’ve met West Indian blacks who look down upon American blacks, light-skinned blacks who can’t abide dark-skinned blacks, southern blacks of the old Creole aristocracy who are uneasy with (or terrified by) the homeboys from the housing projects, and blacks of all classes and pigments who hate whites because they are white. Racism is a grand refusal to see individuals as individuals, each responsible for his or her own actions. No race is immune to the virus.

But at Brown, there are some specific institutions that seem to exacerbate the wounds they are intended to heal. All freshman minority students are invited to come to the campus three days early to take part in the Third World Transition Program (TWTP). The intention of the program is honorable: to help minority students feel comfortable in this new environment, where whites are in the majority. Hearing about it from some minority students, I realized that if I’d ever made it to a place like Brown, I might have been singled out for the same kind of help, as a Catholic among Wasps, as a semihood from Brooklyn among the gentry. I also knew that I would have resisted with full fury any attempt to register me in the Street Punk Transition Program. I’d have held off anybody who draped a fatherly arm over my shoulder to tell me I had been so severely maimed by poverty that I needed special help.

So I found myself agreeing with much of the criticism of the TWTP at Brown. It is race-driven; it assumes that nonwhites are indeed different from other Americans, mere bundles of pathologies, permanent residents in the society of victims, and therefore require special help. “They’re made to feel separate from the first day they arrive,” one alumnus said. “And they stay separate for the next four years.” During those three intense days of TWTP, critics say, friendships are forged within a group that excludes whites. By the time white students arrive on campus, defensive cliques have already been formed, racist slights or insensitivities are expected (perhaps even welcomed as proof of the victim theory), and the opportunity for blacks to know whites more intimately (and vice versa) is postponed during a long process of testing that is sometimes permanent.

The term Third World, as used at Brown, is itself laughable; I can’t believe that even a semiconscious professor would allow such slovenly usage in the classroom. The grouping includes, for example, Japanese and Japanese-American students in an era when Japan is virtually the center of the First World. It also includes those minority students from financially privileged backgrounds who came down the track of prep schools and grew up infinitely more comfortable than most whites. Alas, at Brown, Third World is not used to describe people from developing nations (or from economically deprived sectors of the U.S.); it is a racial concept that includes everyone who is not Caucasian.

That some forms of racism exist at Brown and other campuses is undeniable; they are American institutions, after all, and there is racism in American society at all levels. But after I talked with students, faculty, administrators, and a few alumni, the deeper reasons for the emergence of campus racism remained vague and provisional. In one report, Gregorian suggested some possibilities: “The economic dislocations of the 1980s, a shared sense of ’brotherhood and risk,’ ignorance of the civil rights struggles of the ’60s and ’70s, rampant consumerism, cynicism, narcissism.” The Reagan years.

There are other possibilities. Many of today’s college students were born in the ’60s. The more radical students might have a certain nostalgia for that era, when the goal of every young American wasn’t limited to the service of greed. There could be other factors: the growing stupidity of all Americans, the decay of high schools, a reaction to twenty years of affirmative-action programs that are perceived by some as giving blacks unearned advantages, a spreading reaction to the disorder of the underclass. I don’t have a single explanation for the phenomenon of campus racism, and I don’t think anybody else does, either.

But walking around campus, talking to students, I found my own reactions shifting between anger and envy. In their desire to be what Brown students call P.C. (politically correct), some of these privileged young people seemed to be denying themselves the fullest experience of the social and intellectual feast at which they were guests. Too many black students were postponing (perhaps losing) the chance to learn to function in the country Out There, where blacks make up only 13 percent of the population and where, for good or bad, true power is attained through compromise and connection. Instead of getting to know white people (thus demystifying them, forging alliances with them on the basis of a common experience), the separatists substitute too much ’6os-style oratory about empowerment for hard thought. They waste precious hours on such arcane matters as whether the words black or African American are P.C.

Worse, by insisting upon being special cases, by institutionalizing the claim of victimhood, by using imprecise nomenclature (“white America,” whatever that might be), they become perfect foils for true racists. On campus, those whites who might start with a vague prejudice against blacks find easy reasons to give it a hardened form. White liberals, committed to integration, throw up their hands (often too easily) and give their energies to other matters. News of this is both infuriating and sad. If anything, black students with true pride in themselves and their race should be commanding the destruction of the patronizing, self-limiting concept of a Third World ghetto on campus. That would take some courage. But in an era when all of Orwell’s “smelly little orthodoxies” are being swept away, nobody should waste a single precious hour on being politically correct. There’s too much to do Out There.

That was the basis for my feelings of envy. These young people were the most fortunate of all Americans. While some of them continued arguing the gnarled social issues of the postwar period, their century was being shaped by the great change sweeping across the Soviet Union and Central Europe. The wasteful ideological contests that had mauled my generation were swiftly becoming obscure. That meant these young people were free to enter a new century that might be infinitely better than the dreadful one now coming to its exhausted end. And they could only make that exciting passage with the intellectual tools they acquired at places like Brown. With any luck, in their time even the new idiocies of racism would become a wan memory.

So I envied them that splendid prospect as I did their certainties, and their passion, and yes, the red-brick buildings and those libraries, and all the fine young women coming across the quad in the wintry light with snow melting in their hair.

THE NEW RACE HUSTLE

That morning, my wife and I drove across the Brooklyn Bridge, listening to talk radio. We could have been in any of a hundred other cities in America because, on the radio, the Legion of the Invincibly Stupid was already hammering away at the remnants of our common civility. Whites slandered blacks and blacks returned their oratorical volleys, while the host fueled the ugly duel. As we plunged deeper into Brooklyn, news bulletins fed the talkers: The trials of two whites charged with killing a black youth in Bensonhurst moved toward verdicts; a black boycott of two Korean grocery stores continued into its fifth month; a Vietnamese man was in critical condition, his head broken by a black kid who called him a “Korean motherfucker” while beating him senseless with a claw hammer. Ah, the melting pot. O ye gorgeous mosaic.

We parked beside the second-oldest church in the city, its Dutch stolidity and simple, combed lawns summoning images of a time long gone, and then walked a few blocks to the boycotted Korean store. My wife, Fukiko, was uneasy. She is a Japanese writer; if Vietnamese could be mistaken for Korean, so could Japanese. There have been signs that Asians are increasingly becoming targets of various forms of American resentment. In 1982 two Detroit autoworkers beat to death a Chinese American named Vincent Chin, thinking he was one of those terrible Japanese who had “ruined” the American auto industry. All through the ⁵8os, other patriots burned crosses or tossed bombs at the homes of Vietnamese in Texas, Florida, and California. Cambodians have been attacked in Boston. Last year, in Stockton, California, a man walked into a school yard with a machine gun, murdered five children from Southeast Asia, and wounded many more. If you’re Asian, it can get scary out there.

But on this morning, there was more posturing and rhetoric than danger. About fifteen picketers were in the gutter outside the Red Apple grocery store. They were protesting because one of the Korean shopkeepers had quarreled with a fifty-two-year-old Haitian woman over the price of some plantains and limes and then — the woman claimed — assaulted her. The picketers occasionally chanted slogans (“Koreans out! Shut ’em down!”), screamed at blacks who were breaking the boycott (“Traitor! Traitor!”), glowered for TV cameras, and refused to speak to reporters, including my wife. “They think all reporters are racists,” said a black TV reporter. “Even me.” The racism charge was amusing — in a ghastly way. The black picketers had spent weeks shouting slogans about chopsticks and fortune cookies at their Korean targets; they had called them “yellow monkeys”; one of their major supporters was a race hustler named Sonny Carson, a convicted kidnapper who insisted last year that he wasn’t antisemitic, he was antiwhite. The Legion of the Invincibly Stupid is an equal-opportunity employer.

And yet none of this was surprising. Any student of American history knows that nativist and racist movements have been part of our social fabric since the mid-nineteenth-century heyday of the xenophobic Know-Nothing Party. And when “real” Americans didn’t blame Catholics, Jews, Italians, Greeks, or Irishmen for their own inadequacies, they blamed Asians. First the Chinese, then the Japanese. I thought of all those old hurts, insults, and humiliations as my wife and I talked to the Koreans about their lives. They told stories as old as the immigrant tradition: how they arrived without language, full of hope, first laboring for others in the same immigrant group, finally buying their own businesses, starting families, working. And working. And working.

“I buy a book, with English word,” a man named Kyung Ho Park said, after explaining that his average workday (before the boycott) was fifteen hours long. “No time for school. …”

When I was growing up, Italians, Eastern European Jews, and Greeks told these stories. There were resentments then too from the Legion of the Invincibly Stupid; ethnic quarrels; even more brutal racism than now. But well into the 1950s, cities like New York were still manufacturing centers, and there were jobs for almost anybody who wanted to work, including people like my father, an immigrant with an eighth-grade education. The city’s traditional liberalism was made possible by an economy in which more than 30 percent of the jobs were in manufacturing; that figure has dropped to 10 percent, and the town’s great generous liberal spirit is as frayed and tattered as an old coat.

One result: Immigrants like Kyung Ho Park are working in a city obsessed with fixing blame for its social and economic woes. New York is home to people of immense wealth, and they live well-defended lives in the gaudy canyons of Manhattan. But in spite of the Reagan-era economic boom, New York also contains 840,000 people who live on welfare, more than every man, woman, and child in San Francisco. They don’t often see millionaires in their neighborhoods; they do see immigrants. And in the American tradition, the wrath of some is falling upon the newest arrivals, of whom the Koreans are the most visible. Sadly, the Asian immigrants frequently look upon those customers who are welfare clients with more contempt than pity.

“I work,” one Korean said to me on Church Avenue. “They don’t work. Why do I must feed them?”

That is to say, why must I pay taxes, why must I work long hours at a difficult job, while so many will not do what I do? For years, the children and grandchildren of older immigrants have sung the same blurry refrain: We made it, why don’t they? Now you begin to hear it from the Koreans too. “You don’t like my store,” one angry Korean immigrant said to me, “then go to your own store. But they don’t have store. Too hard. Too much work.”

Such complaints can’t be dismissed glibly as the latest examples of newcomers picking up the American racist virus. On the crudest level (down on the streets), they have a certain validity. In New York, as in other American urban centers, the Third World city within the larger city depends upon the taxes and energies of others for its food, clothing, housing, education, medical care, police, fire, and sanitation services. This year’s budget for New York City is more than $27 billion, and some estimate that fully half of that immense sum is used for servicing the poor. It’s inconceivable to think of this happening in Tokyo or Seoul or Singapore.

The persistence of the virtually permanent welfare-supported underclass is the most disgraceful measure of the decline of America’s once all-powerful manufacturing plants. But most Americans don’t want to talk anymore about root causes; they just see people sitting on the stoop while they go to work. Even the most orthodox liberals now understand that welfare degrades those who receive it and infuriates those who pay for it. So it is no surprise that some poor Americans mutter paranoid theories while others look for scapegoats. More and more these days, our favorite scapegoat is the Asian.

Cheap politicians blame Japan for the nation’s economic decline; they work too hard, they save too much money, they close certain markets. Lee Iacocca growls in commercials that Americans make better cars than they do. Idiots like Donald Trump bellow, “The Japanese are ripping us off!” In movies like Rambo, Asians are mowed down by the hundreds while audiences cheer. And as usual in this country, what we are describing as a race problem is really one of class.

On Church Avenue in Brooklyn, you could feel the seething class bitterness of the black demonstrators. Earlier, they claimed that their anger wasn’t simply about the incident that set off the protest. They told various auditors that Koreans-all Koreans!-were rude to blacks, suspecting them of shoplifting, acting curt with them, refusing to touch their hands when making change. “Fuckin’ people don’t know how to treat people,” one exasperated black man said to me. “They act like every African American is a thief.”

Even some Koreans will admit that this perception has some truth to it. A few will cite cultural differences as the heart of the matter (among Koreans, they say, smiling is discouraged, direct eye contact is considered aggressive, and women are taught not to touch strangers). Others blame bitter experience in underclass neighborhoods, which led them to make racial assumptions. A harder truth is that the success of the Koreans in New York is a form of humiliation for many African Americans. You can see a cartoon version of the relationship (and the problems with manners) in Spike Lee’s sad movie, Do the Right Thing. I hear it on black talk radio and in conversations with black friends. With amazing speed, the Koreans have become Haves, while too many blacks, born here, speaking English, remain Have-Nots.

The Koreans only began coming to the United States in significant numbers after the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act finally ended the racist restrictions against immigrants from Asia. Today more than two hundred thousand Koreans are believed to be living in New York, and they own 9,500 small businesses. The Korean greengrocer has become a widely admired (if stereotypical) figure in the city’s life. And in spite of language problems and immense cultural differences, the newcomers have leapfrogged over the city’s blacks on what used to be called the ladder of economic success.

“Don’t try an’ tell me that Koreans work harder than we do,” a black man named Virgil Hills said to me a few blocks from the boycott site. “They just got advantages we don’t have.” Again, some truth here. Certainly, it’s extremely difficult for American blacks to open their own grocery stores (or other retail businesses), because so many banks redline them, refusing to provide start-up loans. But the real advantages the Koreans have are not those talked about on the street. Back home, almost all of the Koreans were middle class; that is, urban, well educated, goal oriented, imbued with the Confucian ethic. In a 1987 essay on New York’s Koreans, the sociologist Illsoo Kim cited one survey of 560 Korean householders in New York showing that 86 percent were married and living with spouses. Some 67 percent had finished college back home. Another study showed that 40 percent of Koreans who arrived in the mid-1970s had professional or technical backgrounds. American blacks with the same backgrounds have no need to open grocery stores; they have access to higher levels of American society.

But these educated Koreans — blocked from American corporate or professional life by the language barrier — have made great use of their abilities. In the greengrocer business, they have analyzed the American systems of purchase, distribution, and marketing, and made their own improvements. In addition, they get up early and stay late, usually the only formula for success. The Koreans have also expanded the sense of family beyond the essential base. In New York alone, there are twelve Korean banks, six daily newspapers in Korean, several cable channels with Korean programming, and at least three radio stations. There are almost three hundred Protestant churches in the Korean community and a burgeoning number of business groups and “prosperity associations.” This network helps bind Koreans together, allowing them to learn from one another about the sometimes scary new world in which they are living. In a way, of course, this is another version of the old “self-help” philosophy that helped older immigrants become Americans. It had its failings; many immigrants were injured or exploited by their own kind. But that system worked a hell of a lot better than state welfare. Talk to Koreans, and they tell you they would rather starve than go on welfare; that would be a loss of face. They absolutely refuse to enter the dependency culture in which so many of the American poor find themselves trapped. Those blacks who sense a certain contempt from Koreans are probably reading the signals correctly. In the Korean grocery stores, all members of the family work; most often, the business itself was set up by the pooled savings of several family members. In underclass areas, where the Korean grocer is often paid with food stamps, the American family is in disarray or doesn’t exist at all.

As it is to most working people everywhere, pride is important to the Koreans; it also shapes their reactions to trouble. Because they work so hard, they are understandably furious when kids steal from their stands. “I pay for what I eat,” one Korean told me. “They don’t want to pay. Just take.” Since many of the stores are in ghetto or marginal areas, the kids are usually black, and that shapes the way some Koreans see all blacks. In a more perfect world, they would make finer distinctions; unfortunately, they live in this world. They are also frustrated by the lack of interest American police and courts have in such petty crimes. So they often deal with shoplifters themselves. In the past two years, I’ve witnessed three separate incidents of Korean grocers chasing kids through the streets. They didn’t catch them, but when I asked for their reactions, they just shook their heads, full of contained fury. I saw the same look on the Koreans who were objects of the boycott, as they gazed out at the protesters and the TV cameras.

“I don’t understand this kind of problem,” Man Ho Park (brother of Kyung Ho) told my wife that day on Church Avenue. “So much anger. So much time doing nothing. Why not work? Why not use time for, for … improve life?”

Later, driving back slowly from the boycotted stores, we passed many other Korean groceries, wedged among the video shops and record stores and fast-food joints. Black women shopped. Children cried in strollers or gazed at the colorful displays of oranges and mangoes, bananas and grapes, yams and tomatoes. On the corners, knots of young black men talked, laughed, watched passing cars, sipped from beer cans. As we stopped for a light, one of them saw my wife looking out the window. He stared at her for a long moment. The light changed, and then slowly, almost as a matter of duty, he gave her the finger.

A CONFEDERACY OF COMPLAINERS

One rainy morning this past spring, Colin Powell went home at last to Morris High School in the South Bronx. He had been gone for thirty-seven years. But now Powell was one of the most famous generals in recent American history, thanks to the crisp poise and tough intelligence he displayed on television during the seven months of Operation Desert Shield/Storm, and he was proving that, for at least a morning, you can go home again. He stepped briskly from a limousine into a tight cocoon of security men and school officials, wearing his new celebrity lightly. He smiled. He shook hands. He ignored the small crowd of black and Latino men across the street, huddled in front of a methadone clinic. And he didn’t seem to notice the abandoned hulks of gutted buildings down the slope of Boston Road. As a man tempered by Vietnam, he has taught himself to ignore the defeats of the past. He glanced up at the school entrance, shook his head in an ironic way, and went in. I walked across the street to talk to the junkies.

“What the hell he know about bein’ down?” said a man named Roderick. “I seen him on the TV. That man’s whiter than George fuckin’ Bush! Talk so pretty! Man got everything he want, college boy, all that shit.”

Another joined in, then a third and a fourth, and soon the familiar rap was flowing. They’d drawn the wrong hand in life; they were poor and black, or poor and Hispanic, or poor and luckless, and therefore never had a chance in a World They Never Made. Their fathers had run off when they were young, or their mothers, or their girlfriends. They’d been locked up by bad cops, beaten up or flunked out or sneered at by racist schoolteachers, abused by mean Army sergeants or heartless welfare investigators or cruel bosses. Look at us, they said: Look what has been done to us. By Vietnam or racism or capitalism. I stood there for a few minutes, listening to the old familiar litany, and then fled across the street to see Powell talk to some kids.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was impressive. The core of his twenty-minute talk, delivered in a gymnasium with a broken roof, was made of platitudes: Stay in school and get a diploma; don’t take drugs, because that’s stupid. But such bromides were given some renewed power because Powell now spoke with the authority of success. In addition, he was a black man who’d come from Kelly Street, down at the bottom of the broken tundra of the South Bronx, one of the worst slums under the American flag. Certainly Powell had arrived here with luminous cards of identity. But then, after the clichés, he delivered what was probably the morning’s most important message — and its most subtle.

“If you’re black, if you’re Puerto Rican or Hispanic,” he said, “be proud of that. But don’t let it become a problem. Let it become somebody else’s problem.”

Thus spoke a man who clearly has spent his life refusing to become a victim.

To hear Colin Powell that morning was refreshing, even moving, because we live now in a nation that is sick with what I call victimism. Since the collapse of communism and the continuing mistrust of capitalism, victimism might now be the dominant American ideology. Many whites insist that they are innocent victims of vengeful blacks, who are portrayed in their fearful fantasies as marauding bands coming to get their wives, sisters, mamas, or selves. Meanwhile, Hispanics in big cities claim to be the victims of whites and blacks, while I’ve heard blacks claim that AIDS was invented to kill blacks and crack cocaine was invented as part of an antiblack conspiracy set up by the CIA and the Medellin cartel, both of which are pumping it into the ghettos to debase black society.

At the same time, all sorts of people say they are victims of Asians, from the professional Japan-bashers in Washington to those on the street who believe the Korean greengrocer must be engaged in some nefarious plot that will end with a takeover of America. And there are Asians among us who believe they are victims, too; they are angry because someone once called them the Model Minority; they’re mad because some universities are creating quotas to keep out Asians and Asian-Americans; in the Miss Saigon uproar, they were furious because the part of a Eurasian went to a Caucasian.

This peculiar American capacity for anger seems without limit. Millions of women claim to be the victims of men, while men cite alimony laws and stake claims to their own status as victims of feminist hypocrisy (“How can they claim I’m oppressing them,” one divorced friend said, “and then take my money?”). The American day seems to begin with one long and penetrating whine: Look what they are doing to me! And “they” are Catholics or Protestants or Jews, liberals or conservatives, northerners or southerners, eastern bankers or western oilmen, members of the NAACP or the NRA, slaves to the AFL-CIO, with occasional believers in the remaining power of the International Communist Conspiracy or the Trilateral Commission. Life in these semi-United States often seems to be an illustration of Jean-Paul Sartre’s dictum that hell is other people.

In the end, all adherents of victimism have a few things in common. Most of them are miserable. They hate their jobs, their wives, their husbands or kids or dogs, the cities in which they live, the food they eat, the politicians who lead them, the newspapers, Peter Arnett, their mothers and fathers, and almost all foreigners. For a few brief weeks, they were happy hating Saddam Hussein. But then they noticed that people they hated also hated Hussein, so they retreated back into life as gray, throbbing muscles of resentment.

More important, victimism has one overriding slogan, the response to almost all questions about the source of their misery and victimhood: It’s not my fault! Dropped out of high school? Not my fault. Started shooting heroin or smoking crack when others passed up both? Not my fault. Married the wrong people, got caught robbing stores, crashed the car with a load on? Not me, man, not my fault. Victimism implies that nobody is personally responsible for the living of a life. The defeats, disappointments, and failures that were once thought to be part of each human being’s portion on this earth are not only unacceptable now, considered soul-killing, career-bruising, life-threatening, but they are always the fault of somebody else.

I’ve heard the endless complaint on all levels of society. In a ghetto, I see a woman point to a hole in the bathroom wall and demand to know why the landlord won’t fix it. Well, I ask, how’d it get there? It just appeared, she says. Why doesn’t she fix it herself? What? What? Are you crazy? It’s not my fault! This could be explained as the heritage of fifty years of welfare. But I hear the echo out in East Hampton on a summer afternoon, where one of those captains of industry is complaining about the Japanese. We shouldn’t even let their cars in here! Why not? Because the Japanese are unfair. In what way? He mumbles about rice, cigarettes, other items not easily admitted to Japan, and how the Japanese won’t let Americans into the construction business, and how they insist on writing their documents in Japanese, the crafty buggers. I say, What does all that have to do with car sales? The captain of industry glowers: Well, he says, what would you do about our car sales? Make better cars, I suggest. He looks at me, eyes widening. What? Don’t you understand? The Japanese are giving us the shaft! We are falling behind, but hey, fella, get on the team! It’s not our fault!

On the silliest level, victimism disguises itself with the sophomoric rigidities of political correctness. Surely, the demand for PC is one of the more comical developments in American life. We have people eating out of garbage cans while humorless brigades of ignorant kids are combing language, literature, and the corner bar for evidence of expression that will offend, hurt, or enrage somebody. They warp, bend, fold, spindle, and otherwise mutilate words that they find offensive, and in the process throw out all notions of freedom of speech. The slogan of these incipient Stalinists seems to be: I’m offended, therefore I am.

But the sad comedy of victimism usually plays on a wider stage, and in some cases the scripts are straight out of the theater of the absurd. The drug raid on three University of Virginia fraternity houses was partly in response to complaints that the local cops only went after drug dealers and users in the black part of town. In Los Angeles, one accused drug dealer is claiming that his arrest in a sweep of dealers working near public schools was a “separate and unequal” prosecution, targeting minorities. Both charges are loony; imagine the outcry if the police stopped policing minority neighborhoods, leaving the crack dealer to operate under the commandments of laissez-faire capitalism. Victimism insists that the police can never be decent; if they do the job, they are hurting and offending people; if they refuse to do the job, they are contributing to genocide. God bless America; it’s a laugh a minute around here.

But there is a darker, more dangerous aspect to victimism. It can be used as a license. Bernhard Goetz was a statue in the park of Victimist theory. So are all the other nerds who shoot first. All they need is the perception of being victims. In the past few years, we have seen a number of cases in which battered wives have burned, shot, or stabbed their husbands and then been acquitted on the grounds that they were the victims. I have no doubt that many of these women were abused by the idiots they married. Was murder really the only solution? At what point does the claim to victimhood serve as a license to kill?

Watching Colin Powell, I thought about the world in which he was young and how hard he must have worked to make the journey of his life. He graduated from Morris High School in February 1954, a few months before Brown v. Board of Education. He didn’t need the Supreme Court to get him into college; he’d already been admitted to the City College of New York, where you needed a 90 average to get in. But Colin Powell didn’t brag to the assembled students, and though he reminded them that they had greater opportunities than he did, he didn’t whine about the timing of his life. He was another tough guy who didn’t need to show how tough he was as he played the hand he was dealt. So he’d already learned some lessons from his parents about work and struggle. And he must have been free of self-pity, that most corrosive of human emotions. He was shaped by forces now almost forgotten: the immigrant work experience, the Depression, the tradition of hard work.

I’m not sure when — or more important, why — self-pity was elevated into the great all-encompassing American whine. One possible explanation is the presence in our collective imaginations of two gigantic twentieth-century events: the Holocaust and Hiroshima. These were real, with millions of true victims, but they also live in most of us on the level of hallucination and nightmare. They were not problems of manners. They were not offenses of language. Even today, it’s difficult for many people to deal with them. There is a valid argument that no words, no pictures, no movies can ever fully express the horror of the Holocaust or the atom-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But an awed silence can’t satisfy everyone. Some Americans might be adapting the robes of the victim in solidarity with the victims of this century’s horrors; others might don them in annoyance, saying in effect, Yeah, that’s terrible, but / have my own problems. And some might be trying to relieve some tangled feelings of national guilt; for the incineration of so many Japanese civilians, for failing to act to save the European Jews when it was clear that the Holocaust had begun.

I don’t pretend to have the answers to such cosmic questions. But I do know that Americans, who once worshiped in the church of self-reliance, have moved to another house of worship, where they are in the grip of a fever of victimism. Its whining propagandists insist upon respect without accomplishment, while its punitive theory of society is enforced by lawyers. The amount of energy consumed by the furies of victimism is extraordinary. The wasted lives of those who buy its premise add up to a genuine tragedy that is made worse by being a self-inflicted wound. In this state of mind, the nation can never heal itself; it is too busy blaming others to look into its own heart. But all of us, including the most damaged, would be helped by a moratorium on self-pity. We need less Freud and more Marcus Aurelius, less adolescent posturing and more stoic maturity, less weeping and gnashing of teeth and more bawdy horselaughs in the face of adversity.

In all the cities of America, the young are now being introduced to the world through the shaping ideology of victimism. How sad. I wish Colin Powell could talk to all of them, black, white, or Latino, male or female, of every class and religion, and tell them: Be proud, live life in your own skin, and whatever is bothering you, hey, man: Make it someone else’s problem.

LETTER TO A BLACK FRIEND

Though you are black and I am white, we have been friends now for most of our adult lives. All friendships are difficult, but until the last few years, ours endured some of the most terrible strains of the past three decades. Somehow, for all that time, it didn’t matter that I was the son of bone-poor Irish immigrants and you the descendant of African slaves; we usually saw the world the same way, were enraged by the same atrocities, amused by the same hypocrisies, celebrated together the often paltry evidence of human kindness or generosity.

Yes, the accident of race was always an unavoidable presence in our friendship; after all, I met you in 1955, the year that Emmett Till was murdered in Mississippi for the terrible crime of whistling at a white woman. As the years passed, there was even more awful evidence of man’s apparently infinite capacity for stupidity and murder. But for each of us, our racial and cultural differences were a mutual enrichment, uniquely American. The country was an alloy or it was nothing. And between us there was a splendid exchange: Yeats for the blues, Joyce for Charlie Parker, O’Casey for Langston Hughes; both of us claimed Willie Mays. Somehow, we remained optimists. As young men, we had read our Camus, and we believed that it was possible to love our country and justice, too. That simple faith, with its insistence on irony, was at the heart of our friendship.

But America is older now and so are we and something has changed between us. Now irony isn’t enough. Nor is bebop. Nor Camus. There is no longer any sensible way to avoid a bitter truth: in the past few years, a shadow has fallen on the once sunny fields of our friendship.

The heart of the matter is the continued existence and expansion of what has come to be called the Underclass. You know who I mean: that group of about five million black Americans (of a total of thirty million) who are trapped in cycles of welfare dependency, drugs, alcohol, crime, illiteracy, and disease, living in anarchic and murderous isolation in some of the richest cities on the earth. As a reporter, I’ve covered their miseries for more than a quarter of a century. Moving among them, from the rotting tenements to the penal corridors of public housing to the roach-ridden caves of welfare hotels, I’ve seen moral and physical squalor that would enrage even Dickens. I’ve spoken to the damaged children. I’ve heard the endless tales of woe. I’ve seen the guns and the knives and the bodies. And in the last decade, I’ve watched this group of American citizens harden and condense, moving even further away from the basic requirements of a human life: work, family, safety, the law.

For years I chose to ignore the existence of a permanent Underclass, dismissing it as the fevered dream of neoconservatives and apostate liberals; there were too many signs of genuine racial progress in this country, and I was certain that what Langston Hughes called “a dream deferred” could not be deferred forever. I believed that because you had convinced me of it. Now we both recognize the existence of the Underclass, in all its fierce negative power, but you refuse to look at this ferocious subculture for what it is: the single most dangerous fact of ordinary life in the United States.

Instead, you have retreated defensively into the clichés of glib racialism. Your argument is simple: the black Underclass is the fault of the white man. Not some white men. All white men. You cite various examples of a surging white racism: the antibusing violence in liberal Boston, the Bernhard Goetz and Howard Beach cases in liberal New York, a resurgent Klan in some places, continued reports of whites using force to keep blacks from moving into their neighborhoods, white cops too quick to arrest, abuse, or shoot down black suspects, persistent examples of racial steering in middle-class housing, the Al Campanis controversy. Certainly racism continues to be real in the United States; only a fool would deny it.

But I insist on stating that in the course of our lives much has changed. When I was a kid in the Navy, stationed in Pensacola in 1954, the Supreme Court ruled on Brown v. Board of Education and banned segregation in the public schools. At the time, if you possessed the Congressional Medal of Honor and were black, you could not swim at the white beaches of Florida. Throughout the South, you could not sit in just any seat on just any bus; you could not walk through the front door of any American movie house, sit at any counter in just any American restaurant. There were separate washrooms and drinking fountains for blacks and whites. The White Citizens Councils seemed to own the night. In many places blacks were denied the right to vote through poll taxes, gerrymandering, or terrorism. Blacks could not attend “white” public schools, including white state universities that they helped support with taxes. Blacks and whites could not marry each other in many states and could not even fight each other in boxing rings in others. Radio stations segregated black music. Blacks seldom appeared on television and were cast in movies as domestics or feets-get-movin’ buffoons of the Stepin Fetchit variety. When I tell this to my children, they find it hard to believe.

This you must admit: your children and mine have grown up in a different United States. And, for all its flaws, a better one. De jure segregation is a memory (which is not to say that it doesn’t persist in a de facto form in housing and education). For the first time in American history, there is a substantial and expanding black middle class. As I write to you, the leading contender for the Democratic nomination for President is a black man named Jesse Jackson. Bill Cosby stars in and produces the highest-rated entertainment show in the country, Oprah Winfrey hosts the most popular talk show. Bryant Gumbel is at the top of the heap on the Today show. Eddie Murphy is one of the most successful stars in Hollywood feature films, and Michael Jackson, Lionel Richie, Whitney Houston, and Tina Turner sell millions of records to white fans as well as black. From 1977 to 1982 the number of black businesses increased almost 50 percent, from 230,000 to 340,000. They grossed $12.4 billion in 1982. More important, in 1964 there were 280 black elected public officials in the United States; today there are more than five thousand, over 60 percent of them in the South. The mayors of Los Angeles, Atlanta, New Orleans, Newark, Detroit, Washington, Philadelphia, and Chicago are black. Last year the nomination of Robert Bork to the United States Supreme Court was rejected because of the crucial opposition of white southern senators who were afraid of offending their new black constituents. True black power is being achieved.

But this was not accomplished without help. Twenty-five years have passed since James Baldwin shook the nation with The Fire Next Time, twenty-three years since Lyndon Johnson called for a War on Poverty, twenty years since the murder of Martin Luther King. Whatever its motives, white America (if it can be called that) was not indifferent. Billions of tax dollars have been spent by federal, state, and local governments to repair the injuries of racism. You might reply that the sum was a pittance in comparison with the gross national product; certainly far more dollars have been poured down the insatiable maw of the defense racket than were spent to reduce poverty. But the fact remains that those billions were spent. Few countries in the history of this planet have made such an effort for their most damaged citizens; it doesn’t matter if the motives were guilt, fear, or (as you believe) a cynical form of bribery to head off full-scale revolt. What does matter is that the effort was made. And continues.

But we have come to understand one terrible truth: for the black Underclass, life in the United States is infinitely worse. For them, King, Malcolm, and the rest have died in vain.

Yes, there is a white underclass and an expanding Hispanic underclass. But the first is relatively contained; the fall into poverty, homelessness, welfare is generally temporary. Hispanics are a separate category too, for the indexes of their poverty reflect some of the traditional problems of immigrants: the lack of knowledge of the English language, larger family size, a dependence upon agriculture or nonunion industries for jobs.

But most black Americans are not recent arrivals. Blacks speak the American language. Millions of American blacks have long since left behind the bondage of the farm. The old Jim Crow unions are gone (even in the building trades there is a begrudging acceptance of blacks). But in the past decade American cities have witnessed a new phenomenon: newly arrived Koreans, Pakistanis, Cubans, Haitians, Greeks, Vietnamese, Russian Jews, West Indians, even Afghans are moving past American blacks. Japanese-Americans — whose parents were thrown into American concentration camps during World War II — are winning disproportionate shares of college scholarships and moving to the top in many professions. And the black Underclass seems incapable of progress.

Need I recite the sad statistics? I must. I realize that such numbers have as much to do with the dailiness of human lives as a box score has to do with a ball game. But we need to know them. They tell us about our failure — mine and yours.

Almost 30 percent of all black American families are now living below the federal poverty line of $10,989 a year for a family of four (compared with 8 percent of whites). In New York City it is estimated that 60 percent of black youths never finish high school, in a time when even a high school diploma is barely sufficient to function in the job market. The national infant-mortality rate is 50 percent higher among blacks than among whites; eleven thousand black infants died in 1984, and in New York last year, after the advent of crack, infant death increased by 20 percent.

The living face even greater hazards. One third of black New Yorkers between the ages of five and nineteen are victims of homicide, and nationally the leading cause of death for black men between the ages of sixteen and thirty-four is murder. Not smallpox. Not tuberculosis. Not influenza. Not one of the ancient plagues of the earth. Murder.

Last year, AIDS killed more black junkies in New York than it did homosexual men, and nationally blacks now account for 24 percent of all AIDS cases (roughly twice the proportion of blacks in the general population). Blacks account for half of the heterosexual AIDS cases. Half the female AIDS victims are black; two of three infants born with AIDS are black. According to the Centers for Disease Control, a black woman is thirteen times more likely to contract AIDS than a white woman. Of the fifty thousand women in New York City who are infected with the AIDS virus (but as yet free of the symptoms of the disease), 80 percent are black or Hispanic. Doctors expect that eventually all will die. AIDS researcher Beny J. Primm said at last year’s national convention of the Urban League: “My friends are afraid that they will be called racist if they cite these statistics. But I have said it is better to be called a racist now than to be called a conspirator in a conspiracy of genocide five or ten years from now, when many, many blacks will die because of your silence today.” In a speech last year, Dr. Donald R. Hopkins, then deputy director of the CDC, summed it up: “This disease is the fifth horseman of the Apocalypse in our nation’s minority communities.”

But the extraordinary hazards of black life in the Underclass are not limited to murder and AIDS. Blacks have more heart disease than whites, more cancer, more cirrhosis. Fifty percent of older black women are obese (compared with one third of the whites), and blacks have hypertension and strokes at twice the rate of whites. As you might expect, whites live about six years longer than blacks.

The grim numbers go on and on. In the late 1950s, 30 percent of poor black families were headed by women; today it is more than 70 percent. In 1959 only 15 percent of black births were out of wedlock; by 1982 it was 57 percent (five times the white rate). In i960, 42 percent of babies born to black teenagers were illegitimate; by 1983 it was 89 percent. From 1970 to 1984 the number of black families headed by women increased 108 percent (it was 63 percent for whites). Of the 27,178 families with children living in projects run by the Chicago Housing Authority, only 8 percent are headed by a husband and wife.

What goes on here? When you and I were growing up in the slums of New York, this simply didn’t happen very often. If a young man got a young woman pregnant, her father, brothers, or uncles would come knocking on his door. Today, in the urban wilderness of the Underclass, too many young black men apparently think nothing of getting women pregnant and then moving on, leaving the children’s care, feeding, clothing, and housing in the indifferent hands of the paternalistic state. After all the work done by blacks and whites to destroy the stereotype of the shiftless, irresponsible black man, here come these characters.

“There is, even now, a lot of anger within the black community toward the young black man,” said black psychiatrist Alvin F. Poussaint (an adviser to The Cosby Show) in a recent issue of The Black Scholar. “And increasingly, if he continues to deteriorate in his ability to function well, he is going to be rejected by black women. That is happening already. Even low-income black females perceive the black male as a loser, as trouble: dangerous and violent. …”

Poussaint believes that some young black males are compensating for feelings of inferiority in the larger society. “Sometimes, if you feel impotent in terms of society, you react by stressing your sexual role. That’s why many of them will see getting someone pregnant as proof of manhood, rather than having a child and being a responsible father to that child.”

Since 1981, unwed motherhood has replaced marital breakup as the leading cause for welfare eligibility (among blacks and whites), but the true cause might be incomprehensible ignorance. In the past few years, I’ve interviewed black women who can’t remember the full names of the fathers of their children and others who can’t spell their kids’ names. Many of these women seem to learn nothing from the experience of the first illegitimate child. They just have more babies. One result, in the words of the Chicago Tribune, is “mothers in their early teens, grandmothers in their late twenties, and great-grandmothers in their early forties.”

I remember you telling me several times that this was part of the heritage of three centuries of slavery, a theory most frequently offered by black intellectuals and white liberals in response to the 1965 Moynihan Report. In the days before emancipation (say such theorists), black families were purposefully broken apart by the slaveholders, who feared uprisings by men and women who didn’t want their children born into slavery. As a result, there has been a psychological fracture in the black family ever since.

But this secular belief in predestination — insisting that human beings are prisoners of history and not its makers — has been refuted by the stirring history of black Americans themselves, from Frederick Douglass to Martin Luther King Jr. and many millions in between. To insist that only black Americans are permanent prisoners of the past, unable to shape their own lives, is itself a form of racism.

Common sense alone tells us that if it had been true, then the trauma would have affected all blacks; obviously it hasn’t. And the post-slavery history of the black family indicates that this particular consequence of “the peculiar institution” was in fact soon left behind. In his brilliant new book, The Truly Disadvantage^ black sociologist William Julius Wilson shows that in 1940, the last year of the Great Depression, only 17.9 percent of black American families were headed by women, and the reason was usually that the husbands were dead. Today, the percentage is 43 and rising, but widowhood is no longer the cause. The men are in the wind. This has had an obvious economic effect; of black families earning $25,000 a year, only 8 percent are headed by women; of those earning $4,000 and less, 80 percent are headed by women. And that raises the essential question in refuting the theory: How could slavery have a greater corrosive effect on the black family today, almost half a century later, than it had in 1940? The question contains its own answer; it couldn’t.

Alas, we have difficulty even now — in the midst of the catastrophe — discussing such matters. You and I have been asked for a generation to suspend all criticism of the personal behavior of blacks in the Underclass. We would give aid and comfort to racists. Or erode the already uncertain self-image of blacks. To hold blacks responsible for their lives, we have been told (most eloquently by William Ryan), is “blaming the victim.” Before such arguments, liberals fell silent; and the crisis of the Underclass deepened.

At last, the long silence seems to be coming to an end. Both the NAACP and the Urban League have begun to speak about the need to break the trap of welfare dependency. Last year, Michael Lomax, chairman of Atlanta’s Fulton County Commission, publicly discussed the failure of the black establishment to deal with AIDS among blacks. He saw that failure as part of a larger pattern:

“It is a matter of coming to terms, at last, with the fact that there are problems within our community that were not imposed upon us by white society. Intravenous drug use, teenage pregnancy, and sexual promiscuity are behaviors that are pathological in our own community, and we must come to grips with that, to take responsibility.”

That last word is the key. You were responsible for your family, I for mine. But if the typical Underclass family is matriarchal, who is responsible? To blame the system, or Whitey, or history is to embrace a gigantic self-deception.

Coming out of this drastic deterioration of the Underclass black family are multiple pathologies. You know the most obvious one: the staggering rate of violent crime. Black Americans are murdering, raping, assaulting, and robbing each other at alarming rates. Blacks make up about 13 percent of our country’s population, but 50 percent of all those arrested for murder are black, as are 41 percent of the victims. Black women are three times more likely to be victims of rape than are whites. Yes, too many white cops shoot too many black suspects. Yes, there might be an element of racism involved. But in any given year, white cops don’t kill as many blacks as blacks do on some big-city weekends.

Again, we must go back to the numbers. According to a Justice Department survey, 46 percent of the nation’s prison population is black; by 1984, the rate of imprisonment for blacks was six times that for whites. National mayhem rates are bad enough; they are even worse in large inner-city ghettos. In Chicago in the 1970s, eight of every ten murderers were black, as were seven of every ten victims; 98 percent of black killings were committed by other blacks. In 1984, 61 percent of those arrested for robbery were black, as were 41 percent of those charged with aggravated assault.

I remember talking to you one night last year when you were furious with Benjamin Ward, the black police commissioner of New York City. You were angry with Ward because he had described black-on-black crime as “our dirty little secret” to a Columbia University forum sponsored by the New York Association of Black Journalists.

“We provide the victims and we provide the perpetrators,” Ward said. “We should not be ashamed to say that. We should not try to hide it. We have to speak out about it… Most of the crime in this city is by young blacks under thirty. I think the young black male has always been perceived in this city by whites, and by blacks as well, as being a more dangerous person than a white. And I believe that just as many black women in this room tend to cross the street when they see some of those kinds of people coming down the street as whites do. And I believe blacks are victims. But we’re generally the victims of some other black committing crimes against us.”

By most accounts, the audience of students hissed Ward’s remarks; black nationalists seemed to dismiss him as “a white man’s nigger.” Or as another Oreo cookie. But he was not hissed a few nights later when he continued the dijscussion at a meeting of two hundred black ministers in Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, where the Underclass rules the street.

“When you go home tonight,” Ward said, “if your place is burglarized, it probably would have been one of your neighbors… If you stay here late tonight and then go outside, it might be a young black man that will hurt you.” Ward was once the city’s corrections commissioner and said, “It broke my heart [to see so many young blacks in jail]. You go to upstate New York, our state prisons, and that’s what you see — the fruit of our community serving time behind those walls.” Then he added: “I’m sending as many there as I possibly can, seventy thousand perhaps this year for peddling drugs. And I don’t regret it one minute. Because they are committing the genocide against the blacks, they are ripping off the neighborhoods. …”

In Brooklyn, before a black audience, Ward’s remarks were punctuated by a chorus of “amens.” Certainly the statistics supported his words. New York City is 24 percent black, but in 1986, 52.8 percent of all those arrested were black. Blacks accounted for 55.4 percent of the murder and manslaughter arrests (a total of 644), 65.2 percent of the forcible rape arrests (966), 69.3 percent of the robbery arrests (15,944), and 55.7 percent of the arrests for aggravated assault (13,079). After Ward’s statement was made public, state director Hazel Dukes of the NAACP said: “What he is saying is real and must be addressed. It makes you think.”

It certainly does. These numbers don’t tell the full story, of course; they are the statistics of arrests, not convictions. But only a fool would insist that life in big cities is better now than it was thirty years ago. You and I are not old men, but it’s hard to explain to our children that in New York when we were young, it was possible on hot summer evenings to sleep in parks or on rooftops or fire escapes. Exhausted by a hard day’s work, we slept unmolested to the end of subway lines. Like you, I grew up in a poor neighborhood; my front door was never locked, and neither was yours.

Most city people don’t talk about their apprehension anymore. They have simply altered their behavior. In the big cities, blacks and whites live behind iron barricades: locks, bars, gates. When we walk down a street at night, we follow the pattern described by Ward, peering over our shoulders, always alert to danger; if a group of the black young is seen, we cross the street or reverse direction.

What all of us have learned is that the fear of the Underclass is about class, not race. This has much precedent in American history; at various times in our big cities, the middle class often felt threatened by the crime and moral disorder of the Irish, Jewish, and Italian poor. But there are three elements of the current catastrophe that were not present among previous generations: drugs, television, and welfare.

You too have seen the ravages of drugs. Heroin has been with us since the 1950s; in New York alone we have 220,000 heroin addicts — the equivalent of eleven army divisions. We had friends who died of overdoses; together we mourned Charlie Parker and Fats Navarro and Billie Holiday; we saw others virtually decompose before our eyes, their teeth rotting, arms scarred or abscessed by tracks, stealing from their families, hurrying always from one connection to another. Heroin was one of the first plagues we saw together. But other drugs are everywhere now in the ghettos of the Underclass: pot and pills and most of all these days, crack. Every day, thousands of girls turn tricks to get their share of this superpotent, highly addictive, easily smokable form of cocaine; for their supply, teenagers bash old men on the heads. These stupid kids seem to have no grander ambition than to get high. Crack, we are told, gives them illusions of power; heroin smothers their pain. There seems to be no vision that includes working toward power, or confronting personal pain like men and overcoming it. Instead we hear the steady whining complaint about Whitey and the System and the Man.

“Racial issues get a big reaction in the press,” says black congressman Floyd Flake of Queens, New York, “but it’s drugs that is bringing us down.”

Every day we see young people from a proud, tough race, nodding out on sidewalks or in public parks, wandering the streets at all hours, frequently homeless, or joined in the numb Fraternity of the Lost, in shooting galleries, abandoned houses, empty lots. We should not be surprised. These are kids who have been shaped in whole or in part by welfare or television. That is to say, to the habit of passivity and dependence, where nothing requires work. To read a book, to absorb it, to agree with it or quarrel with it: this takes work. But according to a 1986 Nielsen Media Research survey, blacks watch TV 39 percent more than all other American households. That means they are consuming a steady diet of slick crap, charged with violence, crawling with cheap emotions. The cumulative message of TV is that solutions should be easy. After all, if the Equalizer can confront a crime, overcome villains, come up with a solution in less than an hour, why should anyone have to master trigonometry?

Television is also the favored medium of the illiterate. Older generations of poor Americans learned to read in order to entertain themselves; some never got past dime novels, some discovered the glories of the world’s literature and history. The poor no longer must read to be entertained. Television provides entertainment easily and seductively. And while transmitting its grand distractions, the medium inevitably provides models for behavior. In television shows, virtually nobody is ever shown working — except cops. And even in cop shows, the emphasis is on action, not the tedious process of analysis and deduction.

So I’m no longer surprised when black high school students tell me they have never heard of James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Jean Toomer, or Ralph Ellison, to mention only a few extraordinary black writers. They don’t know that Alice Walker wrote The Color Purple. They have never heard of Romaire Bearden or Max Roach or Dizzy Gillespie or Charlie Parker. They don’t even know Aesop’s fables or the Old Testament or the tales of the Greek gods. Go to a jazz club and listen to Wynton Marsalis: the audience is white. Young blacks are listening to the puerile doggerel of rap music. I find many white kids equally ignorant these days, but most of them don’t have to fight their way out of the Underclass. Hundreds of thousands of black American kids are growing up in complete ignorance of the basic elements of Western culture and the culture of black America. Increasingly, they are not even acquiring the tools required to cure the ignorance.

The black high school dropout rate in large cities is approaching 60 percent. Many such kids can’t speak a plain American language, never mind aspire to the eloquent mastery of Martin Luther King or Malcolm X. For a while some tried to make this a virtue; they argued that black English was a separate language of enormous strength and value and should even be codified and used in school. Alas, that was just another elaborate rationalization. Obviously, the American language has been enriched by black English and the argot of music and the street. But it will not lead the way to MIT. In a recent article in Harper’s, Julian Bond remembered: “My little girl brought a note home from school that said, ’J^uua be late too often.’ What kind of teacher wrote that note? Is he teaching my daughter how to read and write? I’m talking about a public school in Atlanta. …”

You and I have met such teachers in New York; they exist all over the country now, passing on their own incomplete skills to the young. And the young are leaving. Wilson cites the appalling situation in the Chicago public schools. Of 25,000 black and Hispanic students who enrolled in the ninth grade in 1980, only 9,500 finished four years later; of these, only 2,000 could read at the twelfth-grade level. In the predominantly black and Latino New York public-school system, 39.7 percent of all sixth graders failed to meet the standard in reading, and 43.7 percent failed mathematics. By the time these kids get to eighth grade, the failure rate is 60 percent. One third of the city’s one million students drop out before graduation (the percentage is much higher among blacks and Hispanics). Those who do graduate are often not much better off. They aren’t ready for the real world of the last decade of the twentieth century, and nobody knows this better than the corporations in the city itself.

The New York Telephone Company reports that only 16 percent of the applicants for entry-level jobs are able to pass simple exams in vocabulary and problem solving. When J.C. Penney and Mobil Oil announced they were moving their corporate offices out of New York, they cited the lack of a quality work force as one of their major reasons. More than half the freshmen entering City University from public schools fail the writing and math courses. Last summer, four New York banks reserved 250 jobs for high school graduates from disadvantaged backgrounds. They were to be given crash courses in job preparation and had to pass some entry-level tests simple enough for a “bright sixth grader.” Only one hundred of these high school graduates could pass the tests, which included such rigorous questions as, “How many quarters are there in seventeen dollars?”

So in a time when the old barriers to blacks have fallen, when the doors of the establishment have at least partially opened, we are seeing that too many young blacks can’t even walk in the door. There was a time when some of us thought that the education problem could be solved by integration; that is no longer possible in most big-city schools because there simply aren’t enough white students to integrate with. In New York, white public-school enrollment declined more than 45 percent from 1968 to 1980; in Chicago it was 60 percent, in Detroit 75 percent. Much of this exodus was the result of white flight, which superficially resembles racism; alas, it’s more complicated than that.

Again, the issue is class. White parents pull their kids from the public schools, placing them in parochial or private schools (or leaving the city for its suburbs) because they want their children to be educated. It’s as simple as that. The black middle class does the same thing for the same reason. They don’t feel they can educate their children in schools that are violent, drug-ridden, seething with anger, or dominated by the anti-intellectual ethos of the Underclass.

You blame the schools and their administrators. So do I, to some extent. There are too many incompetent teachers, too much flab in the curricula, too slovenly a set of standards for students. But in the end, a school can’t educate a human being; an education is not something “given” to somebody like a suit of clothes. You cannot absorb learning passively, as if it were the check arriving every two weeks in the mailbox. You must work at an education, generally for your entire life; like anything worth having, you must earn it. You must take it. Humble origins are no excuse for surrender. The mother of Camus was illiterate; he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

So I’ve come to believe that if there is to be a solution to the self-perpetuating Underclass, it must come from blacks, specifically from the black middle class. Blacks might have no other choice.

Whites — liberal or otherwise — have not been emotionally committed to the cause of black Americans since the triumph of the civil rights revolution, which culminated in the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Around the same time, white liberals were pushed out of the movement by the Black Power crowd; the ignorant lies of black anti-Semitism drove out other whites, depositing some in the chilly precincts of neoconservatism; the preposterous visions of black separatism convinced others that it was time to take a walk. To equate “black pride” with the hatred of whites was reverse racism; it was dumber politics.

So whites will pay taxes, which in turn will support welfare and rotten schools and second-rate hospitals; whites will see to it that the police and the firemen and the sanitation men do their work in the ghettos. But it might be a long time before whites will cry again the way they did for Emmett Till or the little girls who died in the Birmingham bombing. Or for Medgar Evers. Or Malcolm. Or King.

So salvation (if it’s possible) will be up to the black middle class — for several reasons. One simple reason is that the departure of the black middle class from the ghetto helped intensify and concentrate the Underclass. In one sense, that exodus was itself the most obvious symbol of the triumph of the civil rights movement. For more than a decade, middle-class and working-class blacks have been heading downtown (or uptown, or out of town, depending upon the city), renting better apartments, buying houses or condos, seeking out better and safer schools for their kids, less melodramatic lives for themselves. According to a study by Reynolds Farley and Walter Allen, some 13 percent of black families now have incomes over $25,000; 44 percent of that group own their own homes; 8 percent are headed by a college graduate (compared with 19 percent of whites), 17 percent hold managerial or professional jobs. Middle-class blacks have not yet achieved parity with whites, but in a very important way, they are part of a splendid success story.

But they have left behind the growing catastrophe. You know this to be true. In the bad old days, when you were young, the ghettos were populated by a broad range of black Americans. There were black doctors and lawyers, clergymen, and musicians to be seen — and emulated — by the young. You know that Harlem was never paradise (to mention the most famous black ghetto); it always had its share of unemployment, alcoholism, drug addiction, broken marriages, and welfare. But when you and I were young, the middle class was still there, serving as what William Julius Wilson calls “a social buffer.”

The young saw every day that there was great diversity in black life, socially and economically, and plenty of reason for pride. As writer Nicholas Lemann has pointed out, there were healthy role models for the young: people who worked, didn’t commit crimes, use drugs, or aim only to get high on a Saturday night, thousands who were not reduced to welfare (except as temporary relief) and thought of it as a shameful condition. These people didn’t wait for the landlord to sweep the stoop or change a light bulb; they didn’t have to be dragged in protest to school or a library; they didn’t sneer at “dead-end” jobs. Such families wouldn’t give racists the satisfaction of seeing them in degraded conditions. They were too proud for that. And too proud to depend upon the kindness of strangers. A true man was someone who housed, clothed, and fed his family. There was no other definition.

And because such people lived in the ghetto, everybody gained. This was the ironic by-product of the racism that created the ghetto in the first place. You remember how you got your first jobs: someone heard they were hiring at American Can, or there was a slot open at the A & P, or the bottling plant needed help. The news came from people you knew on the streets or who lived in the same building, men and women who were working themselves and knew of other jobs. The barbershop was a communications center, or the candy store, or the corner bar, or the church. In addition, there were black people in the ghettos who could inspire the young. This kid stayed in school and studied hard because he wanted to be like that lawyer. We will never know how many kids in Harlem were inspired to play music by the regal sight of Duke Ellington walking on Lenox Avenue or Art Tatum getting out of a new car in front of Minton’s. We can’t count the number who wanted to speak like Adam Clayton Powell. Or be as hip as Miles Davis or as elegant as Sugar Ray Robinson.

Well, the middle class left the ghetto and that, of course, was their right, perhaps even their obligation. But for the kid in the Underclass, today’s role models are a harder sort: crack dealers, pimps, stickup men. In spite of a tentative move toward gentrification in places such as Harlem, bad guys are the only visible symbols of black success. There is no stigma to welfare. Even prison holds no terrors; it functions as part of a puberty rite, the institution where the bad blades and homeboys receive their higher educations on their way to early graves.

You ask the immemorial question: What is to be done?

There are no simple answers. We are seeing the culmination of fifty years of American history, the consequences of some social policies that succeeded and many that failed. The Underclass has been a long time forming, since about the time that the great black migration to the North began during and after World War II. This was caused by the mechanization that changed the economy of the South; where once a hundred black men toiled in a cotton field, now there was one machine and ten men and all the others were heading north. But when they arrived in places like New York and Chicago, they soon discovered that there might be jobs at Young & Rubicam, but not any were for men and women who’d spent their lives chopping cotton. By the late 1950s, the jobs that supported my father and other European immigrants began to vanish, too, jobs in small factories, jobs that didn’t require much formal education. Soon welfare became the dismal alternative to all those glittering visions of renewal. Soon despair was general.

I would like to see the black middle class return in great waves to the urban ghettos to attack the roots of that despair and to work at the restoration of genuine pride and lost dignity. I am speaking here of you and your friends, of course, along with all those younger than you, the bright young men and women with their M.B.A.’s and BMWs. Obviously, I don’t mean that you must move your family back to the ghetto. Or that your friends should do the same. That simply isn’t going to happen in the immediate future. But in important ways, such a drastic commitment isn’t necessary. After all, back in the 1950s, it wasn’t necessary for the freedom riders to live permanently in the South, either. But just as the sit-ins and freedom rides were directed from the North against the institutions of the segregated South, this campaign would come from the outside, from the suburbs, from downtown, and yes, from the South.

It would help to consider the Underclass as a Third World country within the borders of a First World nation. Members of the black middle class are now citizens of that First World country. But if Bob Geldof can help Ethiopia, you and other suburban and downtown blacks can surely help those who’ve been left behind in the Third World. To begin with, you could mount the most widespread private literacy campaign in the history of this country, drawing on the experiences of Cuba and Nicaragua, utilizing all the skills you have gained in the wider world of business, communications, journalism, marketing. You could force Eddie Murphy to make some TV commercials about the importance of reading, thus redeeming himself for once bragging to Barbara Walters that he never reads (given the nature of the catastrophe in the black Underclass, this was surely the most disgusting single public statement by a black man in the past decade). You could publicly destroy a hundred or so TV sets to symbolize the need for the Underclass to remove itself from the hypnotic glow of the tube and begin functioning again as active participants in life instead of as a passive audience.

You could teach black teenagers about birth control — clearly, graphically, intelligently — and then supply birth-control devices to everyone. You could make clear to young black men that they aren’t men at all if they abandon their women and children. You could instruct young women that when they make the momentous decision to have a child, they must be prepared to support it for the rest of their days and not leave that awesome task to the state. You could demand through lawsuits, demonstrations, sheer moral force, and the use of the media that the police round up the crack dealers and smack peddlers. These vicious bastards should then be tried and jailed, instead of being sent back to the streets where they smirk at the impotence of the law and wink at the unwary young. This would require cooperation with the police and an end to the incessant knee-jerk portrayal of the police as the enemy.

But your main target should be the welfare system. This seems to an outsider the single most degrading and corrupting fact of life in the Underclass, and the goal should be its virtual destruction. Human beings must work. It is as necessary to life as food and drink, sex and rest. You would have to stop the nonsense about “dead-end” jobs. There are no “dead-end” jobs for people who want to make something of their lives. When I was a kid I worked as a messenger, a delivery boy, a bank teller, a lowly assistant in an advertising agency’s art department, a sheet-metal worker in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. I didn’t make a career of any of those jobs, but they taught me how to work. That is, they taught me how to get up in the morning when I wanted to sleep another few hours. They taught me how to perform tasks that didn’t personally interest me. They taught me how to understand the needs of other people and their expectations of me. I say this as a man of the Left, knowing that the dogmatists will accuse me of collaborating with the neocons and other dogmatists of the Right. I can only answer that social justice must be based on work, not welfare. To demand the expansion of the welfare system, instead of its elimination, is to consign the Underclass to permanent darkness.

Where would the jobs come from? Obviously, many of them at the beginning would have to come from the government. There is an extraordinary amount of work to be done in the United States, repairing the collapsing physical infrastructure of streets, bridges, highways. This is work that does not require a high school education. In every major city, in those places where the Underclass resides, there are hundreds of abandoned buildings, structurally sound but gutted by fire; they could be reclaimed through the use of sweat equity, converted into condominiums for a resurgent black and Hispanic working class. The current generation might never be able to enter the high-tech world of the modern service industries, but they can work, men and women alike, with the sweat of their backs and the power of their hands to make certain that their children will be able to function in the twenty-first century. The money now being wasted on welfare could be used for the creation of jobs; if that is called “workfare,” so be it. You must start somewhere.

The time to begin is now. Waiting will only worsen the disaster. You cannot, for example, wait for a day-care system to be created; somehow my mother raised seven kids and worked all her days; my father lost a leg in his twenties and kept on working. They didn’t have day-care centers. They didn’t take welfare, either. Too busy for self-pity. They had no more advantages than anyone else (my mother arrived as an immigrant the day the stock market crashed in 1929), unless you insist that being white was some immense privilege. If it was, it did them no good. All they knew was that in America, they would have to work.

In the best of all possible worlds, of course, the federal government would help fund this immense project, including the building of day-care centers. To say that the richest nation on earth can’t afford this is ludicrous. As just one example, they could scrap the idiotic Star Wars program and use that trillion dollars (over ten years) to guarantee full employment, even at the risk of fueling inflation. Jobs are everything. A job for one man could take four people off the dole. Jobs would take more pistols out of the hands of young men than another hundred thousand police. Any sensible citizen knows that the Underclass is a greater threat to our national security than the Russians. The Russians aren’t killing people on the streets of our cities. They aren’t spreading AIDS. They aren’t presiding over the deaths of American infants.

But the War on Poverty taught us that bureaucrats are not very good at repairing holes in the human spirit. That is why the most important part of this must be up to you and to the rest of the black middle class. In the end, out of self-interest, white America will pay the price for domestic tranquillity. But there is very little now that whites can do in a direct way for the maimed and hurting citizens of the Underclass. For two decades, you have called them brother or sister. You have said they are family. If you believe these sentiments, you must go to them now. They need you more than they need white pity. Or white social workers. Or white cops. They need someone to love them. Soon. If you do not go, neither will anyone else. And then they will surely be doomed. So, in a different way, will all of us.

THE NEW VICTORIANS

Here they come, with their steel faces and inflamed eyes, their fearful visions and apocalyptic solutions: the New Victorians. The Cold War is over and Americans are desperate for a new enemy. The New Victorians have found one and, as usual, it is other Americans.

Look there, in a museum, there are photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe. Of naked men! Of sex! And in magazines and movies and video stores, nothing but smut and filth and degradation! The New Victorians tremble at the terrifying sight of the naked female breast, the curly enticements of pubic hair, the heart-stopping reality of the human penis. Disgusting. Degrading. Moral collapse! And if the republic is to be saved, the enemy must be cast into eternal darkness. Or at least returned to the wonderful iron hypocrisies of the 19th century.

The collective public face of the New Victorians is made up of the usual suspects: Senator Jesse Helms, Pat Buchanan, the television Bible-whackers. But in the past few years, these yahoo crusaders have increasingly found themselves marching with unfamiliar allies. For there, at the front of the parade, loudly pounding the drums, is a small group of self-styled radical feminists. Sexual crusades indeed make strange bedfellows.

The unlikely Lenin of the feminist wing of the New Victorians is a 46-year-old lawyer named Catharine MacKinnon. She is a tenured professor of law at the University of Michigan, but that is a blurry job description. Basically, MacKinnon is a professional feminist. That is to say that, like a priest, a theologian or a romantic revolutionary, she is exclusively dedicated to the service of a creed. MacKinnon’s feminist vision is not limited to the inarguable liberal formulas of equal pay for equal work, complete legal and political equality and full opportunity to compete with men. Like Lenin, she doesn’t want mere reform. She wants to overthrow the entire system of what she sees as male supremacy. During the past decade, when the country shifted to the right and millions of American women rejected the harder ideologies of feminism, MacKinnon labored on with revolutionary zeal.

That zeal was shaped by the social and sexual upheavals of the Sixties and Seventies. MacKinnon was born in Minnesota, where her father was a federal judge, a major player in the state’s Republican Party. Like her mother and grandmother, Catharine MacKinnon attended Smith College. In the Seventies she went to Yale Law School, worked with the Black Panthers and rallied against the Vietnam war. But when many of her classmates moved on to the real world and its dense textures of work and family, she stayed on in New Haven and found both a focus and an engine for her life in an almost religious embrace of the women’s movement. MacKinnon’s basic formulation was simple: “Sexuality is to feminism what work is to Marxism: that which is most one’s own, yet most taken away.”

At Yale, MacKinnon created the first course in the women’s studies program but was never given tenure. For a decade she served as an itinerant lecturer or visiting professor at the best American law schools, including Yale, Chicago, Stanford and Harvard, delivering sermons on the problems of women and the law. As a legal theorist, she is credited with defining sexual harassment and was frequently cited during Justice Clarence Thomas’ confirmation hearings. As a public speaker, dripping with scorn and cold passion, she was always in demand. The elusive guarantee of tenure was finally granted at Michigan in 1989.

But for all MacKinnon’s passion and occasional brilliance, even some feminists and legal scholars who applaud her work on sexual harassment find the rest of her vision indefensible. She dismisses them all, firm in her belief that she has discovered the truth. In a series of manifestos and lawsuits, MacKinnon has defined the legal agenda of the New Victorians. Their common enemy is that vague concept: pornography. MacKinnon’s basic legal theory is that pornography is a form of sex discrimination. She says that it’s made by men for men, but it is harmful only to women. Therefore, women should have the right to sue those who produce it and sell it. Pornography, in MacKinnon’s view, is a civil rights issue.

Andrea Dworkin (author of Intercourse and Pornography: Men Possessing Women) functions as Trotsky to MacKinnon’s Lenin, providing rhetorical fire to her analytical ice. Dworkin came to speak before one of MacKinnon’s classes at the University of Minnesota in 1983 and the women have been friends and allies ever since. Here’s an example of Dworkin’s style: “Know thyself, if you are lucky enough to have a self that hasn’t been destroyed by rape in its many forms; and then know the bastard on top of you.”

Together, MacKinnon and Dworkin have had some limited successes. Hooking up at various times with such odd fellows as anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly, local opponents of the Equal Rights Amendment or various mountebanks from the religious right, they drafted antiporn ordinances for Indianapolis; Bellingham, Washington; Cambridge, Massachusetts; and Minneapolis and supported them with articles, interviews and public hearings. These proposed laws were either defeated by the voters, vetoed by local politicians or ruled unconstitutional by the courts. But the New Victorians did not surrender.

Last February, Canada’s Supreme Court ruled that MacKinnon’s basic theory on pornography was correct. It upheld a law suppressing “obscene” material that “subordinates” women, stating that “materials portraying women as a class as objects for sexual exploitation and abuse have a negative impact on the individual’s sense of self-worth and acceptance.” Yes, the court admitted, this decision limits freedom of expression. But there was a superseding need to halt “the proliferation of materials which seriously offend the values fundamental to our society.”

This obviously was a major victory for the New Victorians and for MacKinnon herself; she had worked with a Toronto women’s group on the drafting of a brief that supported the Canadian bill. The Canadian court’s decision also provided a legal model for what the New Victorians want to see done in the United States. They are now trying to pass similar legislation in Massachusetts.

MacKinnon told The New York Times: “It’s for the woman whose husband comes home with a video, ties her to the bed, makes her watch and then forces her to do what they did in the video. It’s a civil rights law. It’s not censorship. It just makes pornographers responsible for the injuries they cause.”

That is the heart of this grim little crusade. They want pornographers to disappear under the threat of civil lawsuits. But Massachusetts obviously is a limited target, the focus of parochial attention. They have grander plans for us all. Like the wonderful people who brought us Prohibition (and the Mob), MacKinnon and her allies among the New Victorians want to impose their vision and their rules on the entire country. The likes of Orrin Hatch, Arlen Specter and Alan Simpson moved Senate Bill 1521 out of committee, thus urging their colleagues in the Senate to make the furious, fear-driven visions of MacKinnon and Dworkin the law of the land.

The bill is officially called the Pornography Victims’ Compensation Act, and it would allow victims of sex crimes to sue producers and distributors of sexual material if the victims can prove the material incited the crimes. The legislation has been nicknamed the Bundy Bill, after mass killer Ted Bundy, who claimed on the eve of his execution that pornography made him do it. If it passes and is upheld in the current right-wing Supreme Court, Bundy’s final victim will surely be the First Amendment.

MacKinnon believes that in America the law is the essential tool of social change. In a narrow sense, this is certainly true. The civil rights of blacks, for example, were more radically altered by Brown vs. Board of Education than by many years of prayer, argument and human suffering. But she goes on to insist that the law is not neutral but male, conceived by men to serve the interests of male power. Today, MacKinnon insists, the law serves the interests of male supremacy. And to change the present power arrangements in the United States, the law must be used against itself.

“Our law is designed to … help make sex equality real,” MacKinnon has written. “Pornography is a practice of discrimination on the basis of sex, on one level because of its role in creating and maintaining sex as a basis for discrimination. It harms many women one at a time and helps keep all women in an inferior status by defining our subordination as our sexuality and equating that with gender.”

Surely, that assigns far more power to pornography than it could ever have. But even if you agree with its claims, the question is whether more laws are needed. MacKinnon knows that if a woman is coerced into making a porno film, the people who abused her are subject to a variety of charges, including kidnapping, assault, imprisonment and invasion of privacy. But MacKinnon and Dworkin insist the present laws are not enough. In a discussion of Minneapolis’ proposed antiporn ordinance, they said of pornographic acts: “No existing laws are effective against them. If they were, pornography would not flourish as it does, and its victims would not be victimized through it as they are.” In other words, because the present laws don’t work, add another law. Maybe that will work.

The world as MacKinnon sees it is now “a pornographic place” and, as a result, women are being held down, tied up and destroyed. “Men treat women as who they see women as being,” MacKinnon writes. “Pornography constructs who that is. Men’s power over women means that the way men see women defines who women can be. Pornography is that way. … It is not a distortion, reflection, projection, expression, fantasy, representation or symbol, either. It is a sexual reality.”

Of course, common sense tells us otherwise. The vast majority of men simply don’t use pornography to “construct” women, because the vast majority of men don’t ever see much pornography. And the vast majority of men don’t spend their days and nights dreaming of inflicting cruelties on women and then carrying them out. If they did, Americans would be up to their rib cages in blood. There are violent men and there is violent pornography (estimated by one study at about five percent of the total produced in the United States). But MacKinnon isn’t attacking only the violence she says suffuses the “pornotopia”; she is after pornography itself, as she and her allies define it.

The word that names that concept, as Walter Kendrick points out in his 1987 history of the subject, The Secret Museum, can be traced back to the Greek pornographoi (“whore-painter”), apparently coined by the second-century writer Athenaeus and promptly forgotten. The word was revived, appropriately, during the Victorian era, and by 1975 the American Heritage Dictionary was defining it as “written, graphic, or other forms of communication intended to excite lascivious feelings.”

The inequality of women and men in this poor world goes back at least to the late Neolithic Period, long before the creation of pornography or its naming. But MacKinnon and the radical feminists insist that such inequality was “constructed” by pornography. And obviously, the current usage of the word was too mild to serve their purposes. They needed to make it more specific. In Pornography and Civil Rights, a 1988 pamphlet that MacKinnon wrote with Dworkin, it is defined as follows:

Pornography is the graphic, sexually explicit subordination of women through pictures and/or words that also include one or more of the following: (i) women are presented dehumanized as sexual objects, things or commodities; or (ii) women are presented as sexual objects who enjoy pain or humiliation; or (iii) women are presented as sexual objects who experience sexual pleasure in being raped; or (iv) women are presented as sexual objects tied up or cut up or mutilated or bruised or physically hurt; or (v) women are presented in postures or positions of sexual submission, servility or display; or (vi) women’s body parts — including but not limited to vaginas, breasts or buttocks — are exhibited such that women are reduced to those parts; or (vii) women are presented as whores by nature; or (viii) women are presented being penetrated by objects or animals; or (ix) women are presented in scenarios of degradation, injury, torture, shown as filthy or inferior, bleeding, bruised or hurt in a context that makes these conditions sexual.

The use of men, children or transsexuals in the place of women in [the acts cited in the paragraph] above is also pornography.

Obviously, in spite of the specifics, this is a great vague glob of a definition. MacKinnon would most certainly ban Playboy, which she says reduces women to mere objects for the use of men. But her definition of pornography limned in Pornography and Civil Rights could cover everything from the latest Madonna video to the novels of Henry Miller, Al Capp’s Moonbeam McSwine and Gustave Flaubert’s Salammbo, acres of surrealist paintings, the Koran and James Cagney hitting Mae Clarke with that grapefruit. We would see the last of Black Bun Busters, but we could also lose Don Giovanni. The great flaw in the antiporn agitation is that it’s based on a mystery: the elusive nature of sexuality.

MacKinnon and Dworkin assume that descriptions of sexual cruelty incite men. They write: “Basically, for pornography to work sexually with its major market, which is heterosexual men, it must excite the penis.” And “to accomplish its end, it must show sex and subordinate a woman at the same time.”

And they follow with an immense leap of logic: “Subordination includes objectification, hierarchy, forced submission and violence.”

None of this elaboration solves the basic mystery of sexual excitement. Across the centuries, men have been excited by everything from high heels and nuns’ habits to veiled faces and the aroma of rose petals. Some find erotic inspiration in Rubens, others in Giacometti; in the complex mesh of sexuality, there are no rules. Some men may get excited at written or visual images of women being subordinated, others may see those images as appalling and many would be indifferent to them.

But to think that banning pornography will bring about the political goal of eliminating human inequalities or hierarchies is absurd. The world has always been composed of hierarchies: the strong over the weak, the smart above the dumb, the talented above the ordinary. MacKinnon may not like the existence of those hierarchies (nor the liberal project of protecting the weak, the dumb and the ordinary), but they are unlikely to be changed by a municipal ordinance banning Three-Way Girls. Some feminists would tell you that just being a wife is a condition of subordination. There have been hundreds of novels written by literature professors that relate sexual affairs between male teachers and female students; are such works automatically pornographic? The boss-worker equation has been examined in hundreds of thousands of novels, short stories, movies and cartoons. Does that mean that their relationships include “objectification, hierarchy, forced submission and violence”? And if, heaven forbid, they have sex, are they actors in pornography?

MacKinnon and Dworkin allow no room for such questions. Pornography, as they define it, is everywhere around them, the defining presence in American society. They write:

Pornographers’ consumers make decisions every day over women’s employment and educational opportunities. They decide how women will be hired, advanced, what we are worth being paid, what our grades are, whether to give us credit, whether to publish our work.…They raise and teach our children and man our police forces and speak from our pulpits and write our news and our songs and our laws, telling us what women are and what girls can be. Pornography is their Dr. Spock, their Bible, their Constitution.

If that torrid vision were true, you would be forced to lose all hope for the nation; there would be almost nobody left who is not part of the pornographic lodge. But common sense tells us that the assertion is not true. It is an almost clinically paranoid view of reality (try substituting “communists” or “Jews” for “pornographer’s consumers”). Perhaps more important, it is based on a profound ignorance of men.

Like most men I know, I haven’t seen or read much hard-core pornography. I gave up after 90 pages of The 120 Days of Sodom, the alleged masterpiece by the Marquis de Sade. I found the anonymous Victorian chronicle My Secret Life as repetitive in its sexual scorekeeping as a sports autobiography. Deep Throat and The Devil in Miss Jones held my attention more than the average Doris Day movie ever did, but I thought Eric Rohmer’s Claire’s Knee was far more erotic. That’s me. One person.

But in a lifetime as a man, growing up in a Brooklyn slum, as a sailor in the Navy, as a student in Mexico, as a reporter who moved among cops and criminals, schoolteachers and preachers, musicians and athletes, drunks and bartenders, I have never heard anyone celebrate pornography as defined by MacKinnon and Dworkin. Men talk about sex, of course; though the men who talk the most are usually getting the least. And they talk about women, too; but not so often as women think they do. Most S&M books (and acts) are dismissed by most men as freak shows. Even by the bad guys. Every criminal I’ve known (there are many) has told me that in prison the rapist is the most loathed of all prisoners, except, perhaps, those jailed for abusing children. Pornography simply wasn’t central to their lives and usually wasn’t even marginal.

I’m hardly an innocent about the realities of sexual violence. As a reporter for more than three decades, I’ve seen more brutalized bodies of men and women than most people. But their degradation certainly does nothing at all for my penis. I don’t think there is any such animal as a “typical” man. But most men I’ve known are like me: They have no interest in this junk.

My own lack of interest in the hard-core is based on another critique: The people are not people, they are abstractions. In all pornography, men and women are reduced to their genitals.

Oddly enough, that is precisely the way MacKinnon, Dworkin and most of the New Victorians see human beings: as abstractions. They speak of generalized women who are given names and faces only when they are victims. And over and over again, MacKinnon speaks about men as if they all behaved in the same way and were sexually excited by the same imagery. But which men are they talking about? Read this chilly prose and you are asked to believe that Seamus Heaney and Michael Jordan, Sean Connery and François Mitterrand, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Arnold Schwarzenegger, along with auto mechanics, bread-truck drivers, carpenters and guitar players, are all fully covered by the same word, respond to the same stimuli and are equally dedicated to the subordination of women. That is absurd.

But this sectarian narrowness does help define their vision of human life in this world. That vision is descended from a basic Victorian assumption: All men are beasts and all women are innocents. Women fall into vice or degradation only at the hands of cruel, unscrupulous, power-obsessed men. They have no free will and never choose their own loss of grace. Men only see women the way they are presented in pornography and use pornography as a kind of male instruction manual to maintain all forms of supremacy. Women are never brutal, corrupt or evil and they never truly choose to make porno films, dance topless, pose for centerfolds, work as secretaries or, worst of all, get married. Original sin was the fault of men. Eve was framed.

These women claim to know what billions of other women were never smart enough, or enlightened enough, to understand: Sexual intercourse is the essential act of male domination, created by a sinister male cabal to hurt and humiliate all women and thus maintain power over them forever. As Maureen Mullarkey has written in The Nation: “In the Dworkin-MacKinnon pornotopia, there are only the fuckers and the fuckees. The sooner the fuckers’ books are burned, the better.” She doesn’t exaggerate. According to Dworkin, all women are “force-fucked,” either directly through the crime of rape or by the male power of mass media, by male economic power or by the male version of the law.

It doesn’t matter to the New Victorians that the vast majority of women, even many proud feminists, don’t see the world the way they do. With the same amazing knowledge of the entire human race that allows her to speak so glibly about men, MacKinnon dismisses their viewpoints as well.

At a 1987 conference organized by Women Against Pornography, MacKinnon was blunt about the pro-sex feminists who had formed the Feminists Against Censorship Taskforce. That group included such women as Betty Friedan, Adrienne Rich and Rita Mae Brown. “The labor movement had its scabs, the slavery movement had its Uncle Toms,” MacKinnon said, “and we have FACT.” In another enlightening speech she simply dismissed her feminist opponents as “house niggers who sided with the masters.”

Today, absolutely certain of their rectitude, totally free of doubt, equipped with an understanding of human beings that has eluded all previous generations, MacKinnon, Dworkin and their allies have been shaping a Victorian solution to their Victorian nightmares. That solution is, pardon the expression, paternalistic. As MacKinnon writes: “Some of the same reasons children are granted some specific legal avenues for redress …also hold true for the social position of women compared to men.” Since women are, in the MacKinnon view, essentially children, they must be shielded from harm, corruption and filthy thoughts. The savage impulses of the male must be caged. And women must be alerted to the true nature of the beast.

“If we live in a world that pornography creates through the power of men in a male-dominated situation,” MacKinnon writes, “the issue is not what the harm of pornography is but how that harm is to become visible.”

That’s it: Simply make harm visible and we shall live happily ever after. Common sense and wide experience count for nothing. They know that men are loathsome and are clear about how to tame them. Once tamed, they can be subverted, their powers over women will vanish and the grand Utopia of complete equality will arrive for all. That bleak vision of human nature has its own escalating logic, just as Lenin’s sentimental abstraction of the proletariat led inevitably to the gulag. In her bizarre 257-page book Intercourse, Dworkin repeats the theory that MacKinnon and other academic feminists accept as proven: Gender is a mere “social construct,” enforced, in Dworkin’s elegant phrase, by “vagina-specific fucking.”

Once more, the Victorian sense of sexual horror permeates the discussion. If men are the source of all savagery to women, then sexual intercourse with men is itself a savage act. Women who claim to enjoy heterosexual lovemaking are, says Dworkin, “collaborators, more base in their collaboration than other collaborators have ever been, experiencing pleasure in their own inferiority, calling intercourse freedom.”

Forget whips, chains and handcuffs. All heterosexual intercourse is disgusting, an act of physical and psychic invasion. As Dworkin writes: “The woman in intercourse is a space inhabited, a literal territory occupied literally: occupied even if there has been no resistance, no force; even if the occupied person said yes please, yes hurry, yes more.”

Obviously, this is a total denial of any biologically driven sexual need. To follow the logic to its inevitable conclusion, the only pure feminists, the only noncollaborators with the enemy, would be celibates or lesbians. Alas, billions of human beings, male and female, from Tibet to Miami, don’t see the world — or the nature of sexuality — that way. They keep on doing what men and women have been doing since before history or the invention of religion. To the New Victorians this must be infuriating. And so they will attempt an act of hubris that even the old Victorians, in their imperial arrogance, did not try. They will correct human nature.

As Americans, MacKinnon, Dworkin and their allies have one major roadblock to their crusade: the Constitution. In their attack on “First Amendment absolutism,” the New Victorians want to discard a basic tenet of our lives: It doesn’t matter what we say, it is what we do that matters. That is a mere sentimentality, beloved of the hated liberals and the American Civil Liberties Union. Feminism first, says MacKinnon, the legal theorist, the law second. Or put another way: “The bottom line of the First Amendment is that porn stays. Our bottom line is that porn goes. We’re going to win in the long term.”

For the past few decades there has been a growth in the making and distribution of pornography. The reasons are complicated: the liberalizing of obscenity laws, the development of cheap offset printing and desktop publishing, the triumph of the VCR, the fear of women among some males that was caused by the ferocious oratory of the early days of the feminist movement itself and, lately, the fear of AIDS.

But there is no proof that pornography — even as defined by MacKinnon and Dworkin — causes all human beings to act upon the bodies of women. As MacKinnon herself points out, pornography is essentially an aid to masturbation. And as Gore Vidal once wrote, masturbation is “normal” sex, in the sense that it is surely the most frequent practice among all the world’s billions. Certainly the old Victorian belief that masturbation itself is a loathsome evil, a mortal sin, underlies much of the public rhetoric about pornography. But there is one effect that it may have that the New Victorians can’t admit. Rather than inspire men to loathsome acts, pornography may actually prevent them. For every rapist who is discovered to have pornography at home, there may be a thousand men who are content to look at the pictures, read the text, whack off and go to sleep. Nobody can prove this, but MacKinnon can’t prove that pornography creates monsters, either.

At the various public hearings she and Dworkin have staged, MacKinnon has brought fcfrth a number of women to relate tales of horror. Some were forced into the making of pornography, others were forced by lovers or husbands into imitating the sex acts described by pornography. Those stories were painful and heartbreaking, and their narrators were clearly damaged by their experiences. But it is unlikely that any future hearings will present balancing testimony from a man who says that he lives a perfectly respectable life, except when he gets off a few times a week in private with a copy of Water Sports Fetish. As far as I know, even Geraldo hasn’t done a show on the joys of masturbation and its amazing social values.

The Meese Commission on Pornography, called into existence by the antiporn forces of the Reagan administration, asserted in 1986 its belief that pornography causes sex crimes. But the fine print in its 1960-page report showed that it couldn’t prove it. Six of the 11 commissioners were committed to the antiporn position before studying the evidence and they still could not make a convincing case. They heard from many experts, including MacKinnon. But even an examination of those incidents where pornography was found in the homes of rapists couldn’t prove the longed-for assumption.

The reason wasn’t elusive. It is a classic error in logic — heightened into an ideological certainty by the New Victorians — to confuse correlation with causality. A survey may discover that 97 percent of heroin addicts consumed white bread in grade school, but that would not prove that white bread caused heroin addiction. Pornography, as defined by MacKinnon and Dworkin, may inspire a small percentage of men to experiment with more elaborate forms of their own preexisting sexual deviances. But it is just as likely that if they had never seen the material, they would have committed sexual crimes anyway. Alcohol is probably involved in more sex crimes than pornography is, and there have been many cases where religious or social repression led to the explosion, particularly among the young.

But one legal and social principle that the Bundy Bill and other New Victorian legislation casts aside is one of the most cherished conservative beliefs: personal responsibility. In a court of law, you can’t go free by saying that your upbringing made you do it, or your environment, your mother, father or friends. Still, many try to make that case. Whining has become one of the most widespread characteristics of Americans, even among criminals. In my experience, the classic excuse of the amateur American murderer has been “God made me do it.” Guys shoot up post offices or obliterate entire families and claim that God was in the getaway car giving orders. Charles Manson said he was inspired by the Book of Revelations. John Hinckley said he knew he had to shoot President Reagan after reading The Catcher in the Rye, and though J. D. Salinger is God only to a small number of fans, the reasoning is the same. When Ted Bundy said that pornography made him do it, the New Victorians cheered. But he was still only copping a plea. He did it. Nobody else. Murderers are responsible for their murders. And in every country on earth, rapists do the raping, not some collective called men.

The legal theory that endorses pornography-made-me-do-it, if accepted, would have no limits. Someone could claim that his family was destroyed as the result of published feminist theories attacking the family, and that feminist writers and their publishers must pay for the damage. Environmentalists could be sued for articles and speeches that place the spotted owl above the jobs of loggers.

And it could go beyond such possibilities. Violence permeates American society, and most of its victims are male. If the producers of Debbie Does Dallas can be held responsible for the crimes of someone who watched the video, why can’t the same be done to the producers of Terminator 2 or Halloween 5 or The Wild Bunch? You could go after the Road Runner cartoons, too, or Hamlet or the opera Carmen, In order to cleanse the American imagination, you would need to eliminate the works of Hemingway and Faulkner, along with hundreds of thousands of other novels and theoretical works that could make violence socially acceptable, thereby causing murder and mayhem. You would end up abolishing boxing, hockey and football. You would be forced to censor all war reporting, perhaps even the discussion of war, on the grounds that Nightline is the theory and war is the practice.

Obviously, this is pushing the argument to the frontiers of the absurd. But there is an absurd assumption behind the suppressionist argument: that men are a kind of collective tabula rasa on which the pornographers make their indelible marks. An innocent lad from Shropshire picks up a copy of one of the books that MacKinnon cites — say, Enemas and Golden Showers — and goes rushing out into the night, enema bag in one hand, cock in the other. That might have made a glorious scene in a John Belushi movie, but common sense tells us that it doesn’t happen very often in what we laughingly call real life.

One minor problem with this theory of human behavior concerns MacKinnon and Dworkin. They’ve obviously pored over more pornography than the ordinary man sees in a lifetime. “Look closely sometime,” MacKinnon writes, “for the skinned knees, the bruises, the welts from the whippings, the scratches, the gashes.” If human beings are so weak and pornography so powerful, why aren’t MacKinnon and Dworkin playing the Krafft-Ebing Music Hall with the rest of the perverts? There are two possible answers. The first is that MacKinnon and Dworkin (and other researchers for the New Victorians) are morally superior to all men and most women and are thus beyond contamination. The second is more likely: The material is so vile that it is a psychological turnoff to all human beings except those with a preexisting condition. Those people do exist. They have been shaped by many variables, none of which are excuses for what they do. But from the experience of the Victorian era, we know that if such people can’t find their preferred reading at adult bookstores, they will not give up their sexual fantasies. The fantasies will simply fester in the dark. And they will use what such people use in countries where pornography is now banned — their imaginations.

In such countries — say, Saudi Arabia, Ireland or Iran — the equality of women hasn’t been established by banning pornography, but I’m certain that the sexual impulse, and the instinct to dominate, remains alive. Those instincts are part of human nature, and in spite of centuries of effort by archbishops and commissars and even a few philosophers, they are not truly alterable by the power of the state. The sexual impulse, including sexual fantasy, is not subject to the force of reason. Recent history teaches us that most tyrannies have a puritanical nature. The sexual restrictions of Stalin’s Soviet Union, Hitler’s Germany and Mao’s China would have gladdened the hearts of those Americans who fear sexual images and literature. Their iron-fisted puritanism wasn’t motivated by a need to erase sexual inequality. They wanted to smother the personal chaos that can accompany sexual freedom and subordinate it to the granite face of the state. Every tyrant knows that if he can control human sexuality, he can control life. In the end, every tyrant fails.

MacKinnon, Dworkin and their allies in the American right insist that they speak for freedom, for the liberation of women from the demeaning or disgusting images of pornography that motivate the male ruling class. They would not be the first human beings who limited freedom while proclaiming allegiance to its virtues. All of these Utopians would benefit from a study of the first Victorian era. There was a legal ban on pornography, but women had no rights at all (they were later won by a coalition of brave suffragist women and liberal men). Pornography certainly existed, but it was rarefied, expensive and available only to rich “gentlemen.” Official London adhered to the supermoral antisexual codes, but in real London syphilis and gonorrhea were rampant. Some 80,000 women were engaged in prostitution, virgins were sold to the highest bidders and the most infamous character of the era rose from the festering sexual underground and called himself Jack the Ripper. What reasonable man or woman would go back to that future?

In a way, the work of MacKinnon and Dworkin is some of the saddest writing I’ve ever read. It’s narrow and sectarian, often vicious and totalitarian in its insistence on submission by other feminists. But it is also thoroughly without joy or wonder. In this bleak house, nothing else matters except the cruelties of sex and power. Not laughter. Not love. Not the simple luminous pleasure of a summer afternoon. There is no room in this dark vision for Fred Astaire or Buster Keaton, for Lucille Ball or Maria Callas, for Betty Comden or Willie Mays. There is no fantasy or magic, no awe in the presence of human beauty, no desire for spiritual or carnal union. Nobody closes the door for a night of joyous, heart-busting, time-bending, mind-obliterating full-out human fucking. Nobody goes to the racetrack, either. Nobody dances at the midnight hour. Nobody plays the blues. In this airless, sunless world, we don’t encounter the glorious moment when a child learns to walk or to read. We hear nothing of decent husbands and loving fathers, of families that have triumphed over poverty, or mothers who have lived hard lives with their intelligence, heart, sensuality and pride intact. Such people exist, in the millions, but they are not in this fiercely correct world of rules and anathemas. Above all, in the sad and bitter world of Catharine MacKinnon, there is no wide tolerant understanding of a species capable of forgiving our endless gift for human folly. There are only the lacerated and the harmed and the odor of the charnel house. I don’t envy their dreams. And I hope I’m never forced to live in their fearful new world.

ENDGAME