Mosley expands global perspective

Walter Mosley is best known for his Easy Rawlins mysteries, a series of novels that have, among other things, chronicled the course of race relations in America in the mid-20th century. Yet Mosley has also written science fiction and nonfiction, including “Workin’ on the Chain Gang” (2000), a scathing critique that contended that American corporations, like slavery, keep workers shackled in a system that enriches the few and impoverishes the souls and minds of the many.

Using the prism of the black experience with American slavery, Mosley made a controversial but convincing case in “Chain Gang” that all Americans must begin to take personal responsibility for understanding and critiquing capitalism, by everything from selecting political candidates to demanding better health care for the aged, education for children, and working conditions here and abroad.

In “What Next: A Memoir Toward World Peace,” Mosley again uses the touchstone of the black experience in America to expand his analysis to include a critique of post-Sept. 11 U.S. foreign relations that is both deeply personal (the author lives near ground zero and saw the terror attacks from his window) and informed by the memories of his father, a World War II veteran who has arguably had a seminal effect on much of Mosley’s fiction. Yet while “Chain Gang” was directed toward a more general reading audience, “What Next” speaks more directly to African Americans about their responsibility to understand American foreign policy, “our nation’s sometimes ill-considered stands” on combating terrorism and our rush to war.

Mosley’s discussion of terrorism is timely, given that some of the more frightening after-effects of the Sept. 11 terror attacks have been the population’s realization that there are people in the world who thoroughly hate us and the fear that they will probably harm us again. With such threats looming, we worry if we can ever feel safe at a sporting event, in a restaurant or in our places of worship. Will destroying our enemies make the hate disappear?

African Americans are not immune to these feelings, despite a history, Mosley reminds us, of being terrorized by white Americans, including such recent acts as the destruction of an entire black business community in the Tulsa Riots of 1921, or the church bombings of the 1960s or church arsons of the 1990s.

Yet, despite this history, Mosley argues that African Americans must realize that the current wave of terror is a reminder that their sense of apartness from the mainstream of American politics or foreign policy does not distinguish them in the minds of terrorists from the reviled “ugly Americans” who interfere in their countries’ sovereignty, economic systems and customs.

The realization is not unlike that experienced by Mosley’s father, LeRoy, who felt exempt from the conflict between Nazi and American forces during World War II -- that is, until he was shot at by German soldiers. As the author relates the story, the elder Mosley, who came from the Jim Crow South to the European battlefront, had, up until the first shots were fired, told himself: “It was the Germans and the Americans who were at war.... I didn’t know I was an American.”

But LeRoy Mosley could not escape the fact that he was an American, subject to the hate of German soldiers, any more than present-day African Americans can watch television sitcoms or reality shows to escape the fact that despots like Pol Pot, Osama bin Laden, Manuel Noriega and Saddam Hussein, among others, were financed at some point by the U.S. government. Mosley makes a convincing case that African Americans, as people whom our government represents like any others, are both responsible and accountable, in part, for atrocities perpetrated by these monsters.

It is an accusation most Americans are loath to accept. African Americans, in particular, have used the excuse of America’s racism and lack of political inclusiveness to absolve themselves of responsibility for her actions. But for Mosley, there is no such absolution, no safe haven where African Americans can shirk responsibility for the wrong done in their names. “It is up to me to make sure my dark-skinned brothers and sisters around the world have what I have,” he asserts. “That they are not enslaved, vilified, or raped by my desire to eat cornflakes or take a drive to the shore.”

Boldly advocating his position in a time when dissent can be construed as “unpatriotic,” Mosley yearns for nothing less than placing himself “in spiritual harmony with the rest of the globe.” To achieve this lofty goal, he proposes everything from a set of four “rules of fair treatment” that will make readers ponder how free they really are in a world that knows so much want and despair, to remedies for combating the media’s tendency toward misrepresentation that will recall the idealism of consciousness-raising groups of the 1970s.

The second of Mosley’s books to be published by the small African American-owned Black Classic Press -- a move that hearkens back to the progressive works published by Third World Press founder Haki Madhubuti, a man whom Mosley clearly admires -- “What Next” is a stirring example of author and publisher putting their money (and reputations) where their mouths are. And while he may have intended it to be an “address to African America,” Mosley’s words will resonate with any American who questions our government’s geopolitical motives and methods in these unsettling times.

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What Next

A Memoir Toward World Peace

Walter Mosley

Black Classic Press: 142 pp., $16.95