We Need to Do Some Work

By THULANI DAVIS Novelist, playwright, currently teaching at Barnard College

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

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

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

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

Our spiritual and moral traditions have always condemned the persecution of difference. But the young people who run into the well-dressed brothers on the street hawking the Nation of Islam's paper do not know about the intimate cooperative work done by blacks and Jews in the era roughly spanning the life of W.E.B. Du Bois, from the days of immigration from Europe to the days leading up to the march on Washington in 1963. They do not know much about slavery or the Holocaust in Europe. But Minister Farrakhan is there. He says he cares what happens to them, a simple statement rarely made. Most of those who excoriate him are afraid to set foot in the neighborhoods where the Nation's teaching is readily available.

Minister Farrakhan's pat formulations of our troubles sound like the scapegoating diatribes of haters here and elsewhere, because they are soothing ^ drinks drawn from the same well. Anyone who really wants to deal with the impact of Minister Farrakhan had better start standing on the same corners he stands on, going in the same doors.

We are still allowing people who are not in touch with the problems to dictate the terms of the discussion. Most of us have been sitting stymied on the sidelines as families, schools, churches, neighborhoods, libraries, youth clubs, grocery stores, fire stations and hospitals broke apart, were shut down or just disappeared. We need some serious and open discussion on racism, hate speech and bias crimes held at ground level, such as in the nation's public schools. We need to do some work.