The Daily Irritations

A black man in America has serious and sometimes tragic problems. But he is also subject to seemingly minor irritations that crop up innumerable times during the ordinary business of getting through a day. They are all consequences of the basic trouble--his inequality. They sound petty, says a black businessman, "but a toothache is petty too. When you live with a toothache year in and year out, it adds up. And what it adds up to is not petty."

Even the black whose earning power has put him, theoretically at least, into the financial middle class has his problems. An American editor, black but married to a white woman, recently returned to New York after a longish stint in Canada. His experiences while apartment hunting, always a harrowing ordeal in New York, were significant. "Friday," reads his diary. "Answered Times ad. Four rooms in East 70s for $170. Start scratching out checks when landlady says leave name and phone and she'll call back. She never calls.

"Saturday. Try again on West End Avenue. Super slams door in face. Later, go to Park Avenue and get stopped by very cool doorman. 'We never rent on Sunday, sir,' he says. A week later: We flee Manhattan and head for Brooklyn. Broker sends us to ground-floor tenement with smell of urine, puddles of excrement, broken windows. Next place is also unlivable, so we insist on seeing five-room floor-through advertised in newspaper. It turns out to be a palace. We write out checks, get told to fill out forms and wait. A week later we're told it was rented to somebody else.

"A week later: I decide I'm a liability and wife should go alone. She does. Landlady charmed with wife. 'We have a cat,' says wife. 'Don't worry,' says landlady, 'we'll just love to have you, your cat and your husband.' I go over to meet landlady. Next day the movers call to report that 'a screaming, hysterical lady won't let us into the apartment.' It's the cat, it seems. 'My poor old mother is allergic to cats,' which is funny because she has had a cat for two years. We call the Commission on Human Rights and they send an investigator. After four hours of shouting, screaming, weeping and some shoving, the landlady is served--or rather swatted--with a subpoena. Finally we move in, landlady threatening to kill our cat. Only later does she subside into some measure of civility."

But the irritations of being black also occur in less important situations than trying to rent an apartment. Try hailing a cab. "On my graduation day," recalls one Boston man, "I walked off the stage with my Ph.D. and I couldn't even get a cab to take me home. They'll slow down and then speed away. If you get into one that's standing still, chances are the driver will refuse to take you anywhere." A Manhattan physician fumes: "Four cabs passed me the other night before I was finally picked up--by a hippie driver. Before he picked me up, I had grabbed a bottle and was going to throw it through the window of the next cab that went by."

Separate Tables. Blacks go to restaurants and often find themselves sitting under the air conditioner or behind the kitchen door. Or they are turned away from a half-empty restaurant because they don't have reservations. In more enlightened places a subtler distinction has developed; blacks are often put on display at the separate tables in the center of the room, while the more intimate wall tables and banquettes are filled with whites.

In Black Is, a booklet of black-humored cartoons by Turner Brown Jr. and Illustrator Ann Weisman, being black is "when you get patronized by everybody downtown--and you don't' even own a store." Shopping is a more than ordinary chore. In black neighborhoods, shoppers run into "the color tax": in other words, inflated prices charged by neighborhood merchants for inferior products. Sometimes the markup runs as high as 400%. Ghetto blacks, cut off from normal credit sources, are particularly vulnerable to such price gouging.

In almost any setting, blacks are still constantly mistaken for the help, or worse. Passing through the basement garage of his Chicago office building, one black journalist is often asked to park cars, even though he is wearing a business suit. When he putters around the yard of his house in suburban Scarsdale, a New York dentist is invariably asked by delivery men for the "madam." She's not at home? How about "the man of the house"? The "gardener" says, "Wait a minute," goes through the back door and emerges at the front, getting a little of his own back at the deliveryman's discomfiture. A black woman lawyer in a federal agency was eating lunch in a suburban restaurant when a << hite matron approached her and asked if she was interested in babysitting.

A well-known Manhattan photographer who is black but lives in a wealthy East Side neighborhood is often stopped by policemen while walking at night and asked where he is going. Another black homeowner in Scarsdale recalls the night he accidentally set off his own burglar alarm and was afraid to go outside to turn it off. "Some rookie cop might have come to check, seen this soul brother and let fly. Blam! One gone!" A black teen-ager driving an expensive car is far more likely to be halted and quizzed than his white counterpart.

Lousy Dancers. The frustrations of being black are shadowed with bitterness as well as violence. A constant TV watcher, the five-year-old son of a black Chicago professional man recently asked: "Daddy, we're not black, are we?" When asked why, he said: "When you're black, the police will shoot you." The boy does not want too many black children living near him "because they do bad things." He has decided, he says, that he is brown.

Ironically, some of the newest irritations felt by blacks are the result of liberal good will on the part of whites. Although a white often self-consciously displays his lack of prejudice by dancing with blacks, he sometimes unwittingly reveals a hidden attitude by praising his partner's sense of rhythm. "Blacks got rhythm." That kind of remark infuriates Negroes. "It's a phrase that makes me want to turn and stalk out of the room," says a Boston girl. "I know as many lousy black dancers as white ones." Well-meaning whites cause other problems in social gatherings. "I work in an office where I'm one of the few blacks," says a 25-year-old Washington bachelor. '"There are frequent cocktail parties, and I generally go. But as soon as I get into the room, the 'liberals' corner me. They want to talk about 'the race problem' when I want to talk about football or politics."

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