Days of Grace (26 page)

That incident had a major impact on my father. It deepened his pragmatic sense; it made him see the world in a different way. It made him a better provider for his family.

I became aware of Jews in a more complex way on the tennis team at UCLA. Among my closest friends were Allen Fox and Larry Nagler, seniors in my first year. One day, Nagler, my doubles partner, invited me to his house in Los Angeles. Lox and bagels, which I had never eaten before, were served. Suddenly I realized that Nagler, my doubles partner, was Jewish, and that his close friend Allen Fox was also Jewish. It was a revelation to me. I had thought of them simply as white. In those days, to be Jewish in the top ranks of tennis was to encounter a certain amount of prejudice. In 1951, ten years before, when Dick Savitt won Wimbledon, his right to a place on the Davis Cup team was challenged in some circles because he was Jewish.

Once I understood that Nagler and Fox were Jewish, a new dimension opened up among us. I discovered that both assumed that everyone thought of them as Jewish, and that some people therefore did not like them. Their reaction struck me as quite similar to the double consciousness that blacks live with all the time—seeing oneself through one’s own eyes but also constantly through the eyes of the dominant group, in their case Christian whites. Fox, whose undergraduate major was physics, later earned a doctorate in psychology. He was an atheist then, as I remember it; Nagler was religious. We had far-reaching discussions about religion, race, and politics—the kind of debates and discussions that make college life so wonderful and cement relationships. They laid the foundation for my gratifying relationship as an adult with Jews and Jewish American culture.

I began then to understand the complex ways in which Jews see their place in American culture, where they enjoy
a place of privilege because they are white and often gifted but also experience something of the bigotry visited on them historically by Christian peoples. I think that any objective analysis of their relationship to blacks would have to conclude that Jews have done more than any other ethnic or religious group to help us. They have been in the vanguard of the civil-rights struggle not simply out of self-interest in combating bigotry but also because they were being faithful to their belief system. That is why I find it painful to read assertions by people like Leonard Jeffries that “the truth needs to come out” about Jewish-African American relations. Then I discover that Jeffries offers few documents or studies, notes and statistics, or references, only sweeping generalizations based mainly, from what I understand, on his history as an unproductive scholar at City College, an institution that has graduated a number of Nobel Prize winners, most or all of them Jewish.

We in black America are far too addicted to theories of conspiracy, which again indicates our lack of power and confidence. Yes, many motion pictures, produced by individual Jews, cast blacks in menial roles; but was that part of a
conspiracy
to defame blacks? I don’t think so. When people say “Jews,” I ask,
“Which
Jew?” Similarly, I hope that when people say “blacks,” someone asks,
“Which
black?” We cannot reduce the relationship between African Americans and Jews to personalities. Jesse Jackson’s “Hymietown” remark (he used this term to mean New York City in a conversation made public by a black reporter) is a part of
his
biography, not ours collectively. Similarly, I refuse to make too much of the occasion when Jackson flew to Brussels to the International Jewish Congress and delivered a conciliatory speech. That speech is an episode in the story of Jackson and Jews; it is at best a footnote in the saga of black-Jewish relations in the United States.

Whatever wrong that individual Jews may have done to blacks, I find no justification whatsoever for the blanket attack on Jews as a people that a few so-called leaders of our people have launched and encouraged. Most black Americans
understand this point; however well Leonard Jeffries plays in parts of Harlem, among blacks I know in Virginia he and his charges matter not at all. These attacks on Jews are part of the strategy of leadership that has emerged among our demagogues in the decades since 1954. They follow what is apparently the number-one rule: attack your friends and allies, rather than your enemies. Your friends and allies will not resist nearly as much as your enemies, and are more likely to make concessions to you. I have noticed how few of these so-called leaders ever attack outright bigots or the strongholds of bigotry. The venom is reserved for attacking friendly whites—that is, when the main target isn’t other blacks. Some critics will no doubt profess to see irony in my statement, but we as blacks lash out at one another and try to drag one another down even more readily than we lash out at our allies. When black demagogues make scapegoats of Jews, we must resist it for what it is: further evidence of the self-hatred and the intellectual and spiritual confusion that racism breeds.

In important ways, black America is isolated from the rest of America and conflicted within itself. So many of the supposedly progressive decisions taken in the last two generations have backfired. They usually backfire because principles of universality and morality have been set aside in favor of the goal of quick power, usually of a limited kind. Take, for example, the tendency now to redraw voting districts in ingenious, sometimes tortured ways, in order to allow one ethnic minority or another to send one of its own to the state legislature or U.S. Congress. While it is indeed desirable to have all sorts of politicians representing the people, the creation of such “safe” districts for ethnic groups virtually exempts elected officials from the need to concern themselves with consensus or to synthesize a coalition. In New York, we have seen many whites essentially disenfranchised in this way by the allegedly democratic process; and the beneficiaries are usually lily-white interests and the Republican party.

The people of the United States need leadership from the
top and at every level below the top. In 1992, the unwillingness or inability of George Bush to lead the nation in its troubles cost him the presidency. In 1988, unimpressed by his Democratic opponent, Dukakis, I voted for Bush. He seemed a decent, experienced administrator, although I was appalled by the infamous campaign commercial in which a furloughed black felon named Willie Horton was used cynically to frighten white voters into Bush’s camp. But especially after his triumph in the Gulf war against Iraq, when his approval rating in the polls reached 90 percent of Americans, Bush allowed himself to be convinced by callow advisers that he did not need to do anything more to win reelection. “With such an approval rating,” one of them allegedly said, “George Bush can sleepwalk and win reelection.” Thereafter he showed no vision, no aggressive leadership in facing our national problems—economic, racial, or moral. He lost me, and he lost the country.

Believing as I do in the politics of inclusion and in the party of hope rather than the party of memory, I moved fairly early to support Bill Clinton. I contributed money to his campaign, and I wrote him a long letter about the issue of national health care. One evening at home, I received a warm telephone call from him and we chatted for a few minutes and promised to try to see each other. At a fund-raising dinner, I sat next to him for a while and was favorably impressed by his dynamism and his intricate knowledge of health-care issues, on which I consider myself an expert. I was also pleased by his evident ease around people of color; he belongs to the first generation of whites to grow up in this country appreciating something of the full complexity of African American culture. Unlike earlier generations, his generation has known blacks at virtually all levels of society, from high school to college and beyond. I do not look for miracles from President Clinton, but I am confident that he will work to further the cause of justice and opportunity for all. I am depressed a little only by the fact that, for the first time, the president of the United States is younger than I am.

*   *   *

I AM ONLY
too well aware of the extent to which I dwell on the question of morality, and of how much I make it a part of my thinking on race. I hope I am not a hypocrite or a humbug. Have I become more and more concerned with morality and God as I find myself closer to death? Perhaps. But I don’t think my poor health is the reason. I think I am simply being faithful to the way I was brought up, and that I would feel this concern even if I expected to live to be a hundred years old.

I am aware of the distance between me as I live, on the one hand, and the masses of black people as they live, on the other. Money and fame can be insuperable barriers to understanding, even among members of a family. But have I lost the
right
to criticize other blacks, as well as the
ability
to do so with penetration and insight? Again, I hope not. Although the world has changed and I have changed since my boyhood, I have always tried to keep up as best I can with the changes. I have never wanted to live far away from people who look like me and my family; I have always drawn strength from being close to home.

I hope that my fellow African Americans know that my criticism comes from a deep, familial love of us, a wish for us to be happier and more prosperous in the world. I feel this love alive in me despite my criticism of some of our ways and despite my insistence that in my essence I am a human being first and foremost, and not someone to be defined mainly by the color of his skin.

In 1981, I dedicated my book
Off the Court
to “that nameless slave girl off the H.M.S.
Doddington
, and her daughter Lucy, her granddaughter Peggy, her great-granddaughter Peggy, and her great-great-grandson Hammett, all of whom were born, lived, and died as slaves.” She was one of my ancestors. My roots are deep in the black past, all the way through slavery to Africa. I would not wish it otherwise. That is why I feel so keen a sense of hurt when I see black Americans morally and spiritually, as well as economically and politically, adrift in the world.

I wish more of us would understand that our increasing isolation, no matter how much it seems to express pride and self-affirmation, is not the answer to our problems. Rather, the answer is a revival of our ancient commitment to God, who rules over all the peoples of the world and exalts no one over any other, and to the moral and spiritual values for which we were once legendary in America. We must reach out our hand in friendship and dignity both to those who would befriend us and those who would be our enemy. We must believe in the power of education. We must respect just laws. We must love ourselves, our old and our young, our women as well as our men.

I see nothing inconsistent between being proud of oneself and one’s ancestors and, at the same time, seeing oneself as first and foremost a member of the commonwealth of humanity, the commonwealth of all races and creeds. My potential is more than can be expressed within the bounds of my race or ethnic identity. My humanity, in common with all of God’s children, gives the greatest flight to the full range of my possibilities. If I had one last wish, I would ask that all Americans could see themselves that way, past the barbed-wire fences of race and color. We are the weaker for these divisions, and the stronger when we transcend them.

My mother, Mattie Cordell Cunningham Ashe, around 1946, Richmond, Virginia
The Browns’ Studio

With my mother, 1943