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My Negro Problem-And Ours
- Abstract
If we-and … I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others-do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world.
-James Baldwin
TWO IDEAS puzzled me deeply las a child growing up in Brooklyn during the 1930′s in what today would be called an integrated neighborhood. One of them was that all Jews were rich; the other was that all Negroes were persecuted. These ideas had appeared in print; therefore they must be true. My own experience and the evidence of my senses told me they were not true, but that only confirmed what a day-dreaming boy in the provinces-for the lower-class neighborhoods of New York belong as surely to the provinces as any rural town in North Dakota-discovers very early: his experience is unreal and the evidence of his senses is not to be trusted. Yet even a boy with a head full of fantasies incongruously synthesized out of Hollywood movies and English novels cannot altogether deny the reality of his own experience-especially when there is so much deprivation in that experience. Nor can he altogether gainsay the evidence of his own senses-especially such evidence of the senses as comes from being repeatedly beaten up, robbed, and in general hated, terrorized, and humiliated.
About the Author
Norman Podhoretz has been writing for COMMENTARY for 56 years.
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