SPECIAL REPORT: Race and Black America : Can African-Americans Be Bigots, Too?

So now we are discovering that some black people can be just as bigoted as everybody else. Welcome to yet another phase of America’s painful, unresolved, confused, macabre dance with race relations.

Of course blacks are as biased as the rest of the population. That revelation may sadden those who hoped that black Americans somehow would be made more tolerant by centuries of persecution. But it also may mean that a perverse sort of equality finally has been achieved. The civil-rights movement of the South in the ‘60s was built around the idea that Negro Americans didn’t want any special privileges; wanted only the freedom to be as educated or unlettered, politically active or apathetic, wealthy or broke as the rest of the nation to which they pledged allegiance. And with that kind of equality goes the freedom to be just as bigoted or tolerant as anybody else.

Many of the aims of that movement have never been achieved, particularly those having to do with employment and economics. We have daily evidence that real equality is still a distant dream in America. Black babies are more likely to die in infancy; black men live shorter lives than whites; there is deep, nasty discrimination in housing, in courtrooms and in the Los Angeles Police Department (and all others). Blacks have never gotten a fair break in employment, and now the President of the United States is running a racist campaign to scuttle legislation that would bring a little equality to the workplace.

So we should not be surprised when we learn that black Americans, who showed amazing patience and willingness to turn the other cheek back at Montgomery and Greensboro and Birmingham and Selma, have become sufficiently disgusted as to engage occasionally in what has been a basic American sport since the days of Columbus.

Bigotry slides as easily off the lips of U.S. Rep. Gus Savage (D-Ill.) as it did from the mouths of some of the South’s more odious white supremacists. The black congressman’s paroxysms often feature bizarre sexual imagery, just like those of white demagogues. The teachings of Leonard Jeffries, chair of African-American studies at New York’s City College, are the obverse of the absurdities peddled back then by racists who argued that blacks were inferior because their brains weighed less than whites’ (and, more recently, by a white teacher at the same school who says that blacks are less intelligent than whites). Jeffries claims that pigment in blacks’ skin makes them superior. Just to cover all the bases, he has accused “rich Jews” of conspiring with the Mafia to destroy black people. Anti-Semitism was a beloved staple of the Southern white racists of the past.

The likes of Savage and Jeffries provide conspicuous examples of bigotry. But what of the other illustrations we see of black disenchantment with the ideal of racial integration? What about demands by black college students at integrated schools that they be given separate dormitories, or reports that some blacks prefer living in residential communities that we once called segregated? Is this evidence of bigotry? Does this mean that black Americans have stopped believing in racial integration?

I’m not a black American. I’m a Southern white male journalist whose outlook on life, race and America was forever shaped by helping to cover the civil-rights movement in the ‘60s. But I suspect that the answer to the big question about whether blacks believe in integration now is yes, no and maybe.

Yes, because almost everybody, when asked, professes belief in the ideal of racial integration. One of our few pitiful examples of progress is that it no longer is fashionable for even racists to say publicly that they oppose integration.

No, because I know no one who believes that the goal is anywhere near at hand. Integration is, in fact, more distant than at any time since the 1960s. The civil-rights movement produced many stunning achievements--chief among them the banishment of terror as the pre-eminent influence over the lives of Southern Negroes--but it did not produce integration. Nor have all of society’s well-meaning initiatives in the years since.

Should black college students be blamed for craving segregated living arrangements when they must face, as many maintain, often vicious daily attacks of bigotry by white classmates? Are blacks who move to all-black communities perhaps displaying healthy reactions to a society in which (as a federally commissioned survey showed a few days ago) 56% of them will face discrimination when they try to rent an apartment, 59% when they seek to buy a house?

Maybe, because there always is hope. The movement of the ‘60s was founded on hope, channeled mostly through the black Southern church, and on the belief that America meant what it said about equality. But that sounds quite old-fashioned now. Hope seems to be a luxury that society has little of these days.

So if there is a new black attitude that reflects the realities of the times, and if one of those realities is that separatism isn’t all that bad, and may even be a healthy defense mechanism, then what does this mean for the chances of blacks in general to enter America’s economic and social mainstream, and for our nation’s debilitating racial division to come to an end?

I think separatism wounds those chances mortally. The well-educated, upwardly mobile blacks who are willing to forget how they got where they are--the Clarence Thomases of our land--will be affected little. They have crawled into a comfortable niche in society, and their conservative white sponsors are delighted to continue sponsoring them (they are, after all, living testimony that whites are not prejudiced). But the blacks at the bottom of the heap, the ones who have been left to rot by everyone in society--by whites, better-off blacks, politicians, bureaucracies, organized religion, medicine, academia--can only suffer even more. White America will be only too pleased to say, “OK, you want separatism; you got it.” And the days of segregation, of unequal separate-but-equal, will be back again.

So we must get out of this mess somehow. And “somehow” can’t include separation. Apartheid, imposed by one side or the other or both, won’t work in America. The reasons are several and obvious:

Through separatism, blacks can only lose. Once we get beyond separate dormitories and housing developments, what structures are the separatists going to build? Dual water fountains? Separate balconies in movie theaters? And with what money? Whites still control the economic system. And white folks, as before, have got more guns and run the prisons.

Besides, separatism is wrong, morally wrong. As our recent history demonstrates, America simply cannot function as a first- or even second-rate nation when it is divided racially. Our nation has slipped from world leadership in so many ways in the past several years. Even as we sit by our televisions and cheer while previously totalitarian dictatorships joyfully proclaim their new freedom, we are letting our own trickle away at the hands of judges with an attitude, race-baiting politicians, a comatose loyal opposition and glassy-eyed bureaucrats.

If we lose that fragile initiative in race relations that we first grasped in the ‘60s, then we--all of us, black and white and brown and yellow together--will become third-rate indeed.