Race:
How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About the American Obsession
By Studs Terkel
The New Press, 403 pages, $24.95
If last words mean anything-and in a book of this kind, a collection of interviews, they must, because the way things are ordered is the only way the ”author” can express an opinion-then Studs Terkel is ”guardedly optimistic” about the future of race relations in the United States.
Terkel gives the last word to Lloyd King, a 31-year-old musician who is the offspring of an interracial marriage, was raised in the Chicago area and has known his share of prejudice and discrimination.
”I have faith we can mature,” says King at the end of his interview.
”Stranger things have happened. Maybe America, maybe the world is in its adolescence. Maybe we`re driving home from the prom, drunk, and nobody knows whether we`re going to survive or not. Maybe we`ll survive and maybe we`ll be a pretty smart old person, well-adjusted and mellow.
”I am guardedly optimistic-definitely guardedly. If everything is going to hell, it would be hard for me to get up in the morning. But I can`t honestly say, `Sure, things will get better.` We might not make it home from the prom.”
Not the most graceful image, to be sure. But it`s a serviceable one. And as for the prognosis, it does not seem unjustified on the basis of the evidence contained in these interviews. Of course, it would take only one summer of urban riots or another Howard Beach incident to tilt the assessment toward pessimism. But for the moment, and looking at the long term, guarded optimism seems a reasonable attitude.
Terkel is by now a past master of this sort of book, the compilation of interviews with people both ordinary and extraordinary to illuminate some aspect of the national character or some social condition. He has his biases- toward labor unionists and a class conflict perspective, to name just two. He doesn`t confess them but they are easy to detect.
In this book, he has another bias as well: toward Chicagoans. This one he does confess and defend. ”Of all our cities, it is America`s metaphor,” he says. Even if that metaphor is perfect, however, it is impossible to know how representative of the American whole are the several dozen subjects whose views are contained in the book.
There is another qualification that also must be entered. Today, optimism about race is decidedly more sober and less idealistic than the kind that prevailed during the glory days of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. All of us-blacks, whites and others-have lowered our expectations considerably. There`s something profoundly sad about that development, even if it probably was inevitable. I think it was Vince Lombardi, the great Green Bay Packers coach, who said, ”Fatigue makes cowards of us all.”
The sense of fatigue with the race problem-the racial ”obsession,” as Terkel puts it-comes through early on in the comments of several subjects. But none of those comments are more poignant than those of Diane Romano.
Like several of those in this book, she was included in an earlier Terkel work, ”Division Street: America,” which was published in 1967. Terkel begins the passage devoted to her here with a brief excerpt from a 1965 conversation in which Romano, then 35, talks of her ”sympathy with Negroes” and her determination, even amid the racial intolerance of her Near West Side neighborhood, to raise her six children ”to see these people are no different from any other people. . . .”
It was a different Diane Romano that Terkel found in 1990. ”I don`t know,” she said, ”if I`ve become a colder, harder person within myself. . . . . I think I`m a changed person. I realize one of the big reasons is that I see only the bad. I do have wonderful occasions to see the good. I`ve got friends. I hate to say black friends because they`re just friends. . . . But for the ten black people that I know who are very sweet and very good, a pleasure for anybody to know, I`ve got a hundred that are just the opposite. Maybe that`s what`s weighing on me so much.”
Romano is hardly unusual in her conflicted feelings, her moral confusion, her regret at not having lived up to the ideals she professed in her youth. Those sentiments are repeated, in one form or another, by many of the white subjects in the book.
Among the blacks there are similar feelings, but the concern is less with the state of race relations than with the state of their race. That may come as a surprise to some whites, who frequently seem to feel that blacks spend most of their time obsessing about them.
The themes that recurred most often among Terkel`s black subjects were worry about the loss of a spirit of community among African-Americans generally, concern over the education and upbringing of black children and, most often and most anxiously, despair over the dreadful condition and prospects of so many black males.
On that last, Timuel Black, a former teacher in the Chicago public schools and the City Colleges of Chicago and also a familiar figure to readers of Terkel`s earlier works, was probably most eloquent.
”The male may still live in the ghetto community in spirit but not in body,” Black says. ”If he cannot assert what is the classic idea of masculinity-a man able to take care of his family-the chances are he may walk.”
The effects of this abandonment are all too readily apparent in the stunted lives and behavior of ghetto children. Says Black: ”The absence of a black male presence leaves a void in these children`s lives.”
But not all blacks are ghetto-dwellers and not all black life is underclass life. There is a substantial and growing black middle class. But it remains a distinctly black middle class. While the significance of race in American life undoubtedly has declined, it has not disappeared.
Clarence Page, my Tribune editorial page colleague, may be the best exemplar in Terkel`s book of the new black middle class and the best explainer of the continuing significance of race.
”What else do I think of when I wake up in the morning?” says Page, citing one mundane example to illustrate that significance. ”Getting to work. I hope the weather`s nice, because if it`s bad, a taxi will pass me by and pick up a white person halfway down the block.”
But for Page and many of the others Terkel interviewed, black and white, race has taken on an even more bedeviling aspect-affirmative action. On no other issue, it seems, was so much anguish-and, frequently, anger-expressed.
Consider Page, who, as a Pulitzer Prize winner, would seem to be above feeling doubt about his mastery of his craft:
”I`m always wondering what other people think of me. Even now. What they think of why I am where I am. Am I where I am because I`m black? It used to be: Would I be further advanced if I were white? Nowadays, people wonder: Am I being advanced because I`m black?”
Reflecting on the irony of his situation, Page says he has ”aspired to a new level of insecurity.”
From a different perspective, consider Margaret Welch, a white welfare mother who was deprived of a college scholarship she needed to escape the welfare rolls-because, she says, of affirmative action:
”I never, never had any racist feelings. . . . But with this scholarship thing, I deserved it. Just because their skin`s darker than mine, why should they get it and I don`t? It`s the first time I`ve had feelings like this and it`s hard to deal with. I`m really torn apart.”
But one cannot overlook the testimony of Ben Hensley, a resident of the Southwest Side bungalow belt, who recalls an era before affirmative action, when he was leapfrogged over an older, more knowledgeable and experienced black man into a truck driving job:
”I don`t get out on any protest line, but I know I profit from the system. I got that job at the expense of that black man in Nashville. I didn`t refuse it even if it was unjust. I needed the money. I may have felt bad about it, but I took it. I guess life`s that way.”
A rare bit of honesty that: ”Life`s not fair and I have benefited from the unfairness.”
Do Americans find that harder to say than people of other nations, people from places where the notion of meritocracy is less of a national fetish?
Could that be why race, the inequity that was woven into the national fabric at the beginning and that we have been trying to extract from that fabric ever since, remains such an American obsession?
What Studs Terkel`s book demonstrates is that we`re still at it, still working and worrying over how to even things up in our communities, in our institutions, in our souls. There`s something reassuring about that.
