New Framework for a Whole Portrait of Black America

Centuries of denigration and denial have made it difficult--often impossible--for whites to see African-Americans as they are. The fog of delusion and anxiety is just too thick, the habit of the averted eye has hardened into reflex.

Thus, the portrait of black America that white America carries in its head is like one of those curious 19th-Century landscapes in which there is no foreground. All the action occurs at a middle distance set against some far and, ultimately, unattainable horizon.

And yet, to step into any black community is to step into the American heartland, a place where respect for the family, hard work and thrift prevail. Even the pathologies that afflict the most distressed segments of the black urban poor are not exotic. They simply are the defects present throughout American culture--excessive materialism, insistent self-gratification, heedless self-assertion--mutated into violent excess.

If white America wants to see black America whole, it needs to begin by looking deeply and honestly into the mirror. Grasp that fact and you have seized one of the taproots of black anger. The unexpected answer to Langston Hughes’ poignant question--”What happens to a dream deferred?”--turns out to be simple: The dreamer just keeps on dreaming.

In Los Angeles, one of the places in which that dream is nourished with particular tenderness is the First African Methodist Episcopal Church. Poised like a graceful metaphor on a hill in the historic Mid-City District, its front doors open to the mean blocks of Adams Boulevard, where furtive men in the rough end of the pharmaceutical trade cluster around corner pay phones. Its north-facing windows look toward downtown’s high-rise prosperity. Taken together, the two views suggest the mediating role the church plays in the city’s black community.

I went there this week to talk to First A.M.E.’s pastor, the Rev. Cecil L. Murray, about this singular moment in African-American history. Blacks fighting under a black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff have played an unprecedented role in securing America’s decisive victory over Iraq. So many of First A.M.E.’s sons and daughters were sent to fight in the Gulf that the church formed its own family support group.

Now those young men and women will return to one of America’s never-ending racial paradoxes: In the same week that President George Bush praised the U.S. military as “the greatest equal opportunity employer around . . . a place of openness and true meritocracy,” his Administration sent to Congress a civil rights bill that essentially would gut the legal concept of equal opportunity. It proposes, among other infamies, that businesses be allowed, as a condition of employment, to compel people to sign away their right to file discrimination suits.

Murray, a 61-year-old Air Force veteran, does not believe a new generation of black servicemen and women will accept such contradictions. They will not, he says, be “treated as chattel.”

“Old men make wars. Young men and women fight them,” he muses. “Now, those young people will ask themselves: What about the war at home? Because the desert makes you a philosopher. This must have been a contemplative time for those young people. You begin to think on ultimates. You begin to think on what is permanent. I don’t believe that when you’ve thought on things permanent you will let Presidents, governors, mayors, nor any powers make you a second class to their political ambitions.”

I asked Murray whether he shared the perception that the disproportionate number of blacks and Latinos in the U.S. military were, in fact, economic draftees--that the Persian Gulf War had been fought, as one liberal columnist put it, by an army of “society’s losers.”

“They’re a community not of losers, but of seekers,” Murray said, pointing out that the volunteer military requires a high school diploma of its enlistees. “Here are young men and women who, having met a wall in the civilian marketplace, don’t sit down to weep. They hit that wall and begin to form a human ladder; they find a way over. A loser does not subject himself or herself to discipline and risk as these young men and women have.”

Why, I asked him, is the African-American community with its history of disappointment and struggle so patriotic?

“It’s because of the invisible quest for a homeland. Historically, Africa has been denied us, so that, like Topsy, we were led to believe we just ‘growed up.’ You look for a homeland, something of permanence, something that loves you. The poet says, ‘All things come home at eventide, blithe birds that weary of their roaming.’

“We black Americans still are roaming. We used to have an old spiritual, ‘Roaming Through an Unfriendly World’--I’m a roaming, I’m a roaming through an unfriendly world. Then, when you find something you can call your own, well, ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ still makes black folks weep--even though it’s the land of the free only for some.”

We talked a while longer of the politics of the civil rights bill, about the “sin” of wasted human resources, about the drugs that are ravaging neighborhoods just a few blocks from the quiet study in which we sat. Murray told me of the young man he had counseled that morning, newly out of prison, freshly free of drugs, lost in suicidal depression. “The storms going on in that young man were put there,” Murray said. “They weren’t born there.”

Finally we parted. I drove down La Salle Avenue, and paused at the corner of Adams Boulevard. A gaunt black man in a leather jacket lurched to the window of my car.

“I can do two rocks,” he said.

A white man in a suit, alone in his car in a black neighborhood in the middle of the day, I realized he thought I had come shopping for crack.

“I’m the wrong man for you,” I said and sped down Adams.

We had looked at each other, he and I. I knew what he thought he saw in me and that he was wrong. But as I drove west toward Crenshaw and the way home, I could not say I had seen him whole, either.