Taking Yes for an Answer

By LEON WIESELTIER Literary editor of the New Republic magazine

It is beneath the dignity of decent and intelligent men and women to struggle over the superstitions of Louis Farrakhan, except that the struggle is really over the definition of dignity. Farrakhan represents the view that hatred is an element of dignity, that a proper respect for oneself and one's own is well expressed by a proper disrespect for others. In this view, he is not alone; as a society we have gone from a hatred of hatred to a fascination with it.

Or, to put it differently: the persistence of racism in America notwithstanding, the age of American racism has been succeeded by the age of American racialism. Racism and racialism agree that the color of a person's skin is an essential attribute of the person. For racism, the attribute is a negative one. For racialism, the attribute is a positive one. For a just social order, of course, the attribute is a neutral one. Neutral, not because race is not a fact; neutral, because race is not a value. Many people who do not share Farrakhan's bizarre beliefs share this belief that race is a value, which is why he has the power to disturb.

Farrakhan is foul, but he is useful insofar as he casts light upon the larger confusion. For this reason, he should not be pressured, nor should any black leader be pressured, to recant anything. This lets him, and the present state of race relations in this country, off the hook. It is an invitation to euphemism, as Farrakhan cheerfully showed. We all should know what each of us thinks, and draw our conclusions. The advertisement in which the Anti- Defamation League reprinted Kallid Abdul Muhammad's little catalog of hatreds was brilliant for its restraint. It was an exercise in clarification. It said to its readers: here is prejudice, measure yourself by it. If it made some (but hardly all) black leaders trim and squirm, well, that was clarifying too.

The A.D.L. advertisement was also an uncanny moment in Jewish history. In what other country would Jews themselves have disseminated anti-Semitic propaganda, in the certainty that its dissemination would protect them? The A.D.L.'s response to Farrakhan was an expression of the confidence of American Jews in America. I do not expect quite this degree of confidence in America from American blacks; racism, not anti-Semitism, has always been America's ugliness of choice, and the fate of blacks in America was, for whole centuries, obscene. In this century, however, this country has challenged its black citizens precisely as it has challenged its Jewish citizens. The political and philosophical procedures of America have dared both these groups, and not only these groups, to take yes for an answer.

Taking yes for an answer is not as easy as it sounds. It means celebrating individual experience even as you celebrate collective memory; acknowledging the changes of the present in full, learned sight of the unchanging cruelties of the past; believing in politics, and pitting politics against the lachrymosities of culture. For groups that have suffered extremely, as blacks and Jews have suffered, taking yes for an answer may even be experienced as a form of betrayal. And so, in such groups, the improvement of life will be a great opportunity for the mongerers of guilt, and for those who flog their own brethren with ideals of authenticity to prevent them from recognizing the reality of progress.

Farrakhan and the other racialists in the black community (and they are not all figures of the margin, and many of them flourish in popular culture) are precisely such mongerers and such floggers. Their chilling thesis is that the similarity between the black past in America and the black present in America is greater than the difference. For the past hundred years or so, the Jews have also had to contend with such a thesis about their own modernity. If they are more secure than they have ever been, in America and (for different reasons) in Israel, it is because they repudiated that thesis, not without bitter internecine battle, and because they made themselves ready in their own self-interest for the costs of change.

America represented a revolution in Jewish experience, and the Jews wisely assented to the revolution. But there has also occurred another revolution in this country, more recently, in the name of civil rights. Can anybody any longer doubt that America, most comprehensively in the realms of law and politics, has repented of its repulsive treatment of blacks? Indeed, the contemporary troubles of the inner cities are so painful precisely because they are taking place after, and not before, the civil rights revolution. But even those troubles are not great enough to justify a denial of the revolution. Farrakhan speaks for such a denial. It is grimly amusing to watch black politicians who owe their distinction to the new dispensation flirting with this teacher of the old, with this peddler of reaction.

There is no law of American history according to which all its minorities will forever be friends. To be sure, some of the conflicts between blacks and Jews have been false; but a false comity is not much better than a false conflict. Not every fight is the result of misunderstanding. There are fights that are the result of understanding. In the wake of the latest Farrakhan flap, the positions of many black leaders are more clearly understood. In some cases, this is for the better. In many cases, it is for the better. We do not need to honor each other as brothers. We need to honor each other as citizens.