Whites’ Freedom Depends on Blacks’

This essay, in the form of a letter to Anglican Bishop Desmond M. Tutu of South Africa, is excerpted from the The New Statesman magazine of London.

Though I am not a religious--or, more precisely, a churchgoing--man, I, like many black Americans, come out of the church--the black church . . . . I can, therefore, use an image which is part of my inheritance and say that you and I, who have never met on Earth (but who may meet in that kingdom that you are struggling to make real), have already met: in hell. And a more felicitous dwelling place has a very precise meaning for those who meet in hell.

But this is a very particular and peculiar hell. It is not built four square. It is hard to convey the quality of the inhabitants. Every system involves a hierarchy, so perhaps I could suggest a system of this hell by observing that those who meet there manage to meet because they know where they are. The others--the minority in your country, the majority in mine--never meet because they imagine that hell is a place for others. They also imagine that they control this system.

It will be considered offensive--unpatriotic--to compare the South African situation to the American situation, nor will I, in fact, make such a comparison because I do not know enough about your country (I may not know enough about my own).

Yet you must have sometimes been struck, as I have been, by the vehemence of the Western leaders concerning global freedom and democracy--deep concern over Polish freedom, the determination of the U.S. government to bring freedom to South America and the Philippines by any means whatever, and the ineffable gallantry of the British prime minister’s insistence on freedom for the islands off Argentina. But none of this bellicosity is exhibited in the case of South Africa.

I am certainly concerned about the freedom of the Poles in Warsaw, but the Poles, in Chicago, are whites who hate blacks. I am certainly concerned about Ireland, but the Irish, in Boston, are whites who hate “niggers.” I may be ambivalent concerning the physical purposes of the state of Israel, but American Jews are, in the main, indistinguishable from American white Christians, and I would not like to be an Arab in Jerusalem. And Israel is, also, an ally of South Africa--which Western nation, indeed, is not? (And it is worth pointing out that the African National Congress is as homeless as the Palestine Liberation Organization, for the same reasons.)

And, finally, to discuss--I dismiss--”the Russian menace.” I have known very few black communists; black Americans, on the whole, are far less romantic than white Americans. The Russian menace has been invented by the West in order to distract attention from the moral and actual chaos in the West. People one day ahead of death by starvation do not huddle before their camp fires (assuming that they have any fire at all) reading Marx or arguing about dialectical materialism.

My country, which accuses Cuba of exporting “revolution,” is the most notorious exporter of revolution of this century. Neither Havana nor Moscow has the remotest interest in each other--why on Earth should they? What could they have hoped to do for each other? No. It was expected that the United States, “the last best hope of Earth,” a country itself born of a revolution, would be their hope and their friend.

But there are revolutions and revolutions. They are glorified in the past. They are dreaded and, in so far as possible, destroyed in the present.

Now, I do not know if what is happening in South Africa is a revolution (but perhaps each revolution redefines the word), but I do know this: The moral pretensions of the West are being tested and exposed, and the real meaning of the “civilizing mission” revealed.

You are, incontestably, one of the products of this mission, and so was the late Martin Luther King Jr. . . . Yet we do not owe our presence to the Civilized. We are here in spite of the Civilized. And nowhere is this clearer than in South Africa now, and in the reaction of the Civilized to this slaughter. We are not white, we are black, and we exist therefore, in this system, this hierarchy, on another, quite literally unspeakable, level.

No one wishes to admit this, for it would be to admit something else. Africa fed itself, for generations, long before the Civilized arrived. As of that moment, Africa was forced to feed the world. There is not a single diamond mine, as far as I know, in England, nor, as it turns out, enough coal to keep the English warm. My grandfather, perfectly capable of feeding his family and keeping them warm, was forced instead to pick cotton to keep white families warm.

The wealth of England and my country, the wealth of the Western world, in short, is based on slave labor, and the intolerable guilt thus engendered in hearts and minds of the Civilized is the root of what we call racism. From this root spring the legends concerning--proving--the inferiority of black people. One must justify one’s appalling actions . . . . To turn a human being into a money-making beast of burden and, by this action, believe--or make oneself believe--that one is “civilizing” this creature is to have surrendered one’s morality and imperiled one’s sense of reality.

“The problem of the 20th Century,” W.E.B. DuBois wrote in 1903, “is the problem of the color line.” And this problem begins to arrive now in an unanswerable denouement, in Africa, where white men--or perhaps white power--began it.

It is exceedingly hypocritical for the West to pretend that it will not apply sanctions against South Africa because this would hurt black people. This pretension is scarcely worth noting, much less answering. The morality of the West and its economic self-interest are allied, as they always were. Now, as the dungeon in which we were meant to be used forever shakes, one sees how little the free world trusts the possibility of freedom.

But you believe in this possibility--and so do I. Our assassinations and our funerals testify to the absolute truth that the world’s present social and economic arrangements cannot serve the world’s needs, and racism is the cornerstone and principal justification of these arrangements. And I am sure that you believe, with me, this paradox: Black freedom will make white freedom possible. Indeed, our freedom, which we have been forced to buy at so high a price, is the only hope of freedom that they have.

Till we meet, then, sir, and with my deepest respect, Yours in the faith.