"America as It Now Exists"

LOOK OUT, WHITEY! BLACK POWER'S GON' GET YOUR MAMA by Julius Lester. 152 pages. Dial. $3.95.

BLACK RAGE by William H. Grier and Price M. Cobbs. 213 pages. Basic Books. $5.95.

White America is endlessly accommodating, verbally, in the matter of race. Southern politicians are learning to say "Negro" when they mean "nigger," and Northern liberals are careful now to say "black" when they mean "Negro." (That's because blacks have begun saying "Negro" when they mean "sellout.") Opportunities to use these terms do not occur every day, but whites keep in practice just in case.

When Black-White conversation does occur, it is likely to consist of Black's saying blackly that "America as it now exists must be destroyed," and White's answering, "Yes, but what do you really mean?" Kill Whitey? Or (smiling whitely) merely destruction of the social order? And what then? Black points out with sour pleasure that his "revolution" has 22 million members and that there are few recruiting or dropout problems. White says yes, but so long as blackness and separatism are requirements, the membership can do no more than cause disruption, because it can never grow large enough to complete a revolution ... It is a weird sort of coffee-housing, especially if Black and White happen to be friends; it never seems quite real, nor does it seem completely fake.

Mean Mischief These new books offer some value as footnotes to the argument. Julius Lester is a former field secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. His Look Out, Whitey! is a long harangue that reproduces accurately the black tone of voice at its angriest. It is street-corner oratory aimed at blacks but spoken, as the mean mischief of the title suggests, with sly awareness of the whites standing at the edge of the crowd.

Lester is good at it. He scornfully caricatures the breakup of the civil rights movement. Thus S.N.C.C. had been getting heads busted and shot in Mississippi since 1961, he says, but it was not until whites came into the state three years later that there was any press attention. Then the stories, he claims, went something like this: "Blop-blop is a blue-eyed blonde from Diamond Junction-on-the-Hudson, N.Y. She is a 20-year-old junior at Radcliffe majoring in Oriental metaphysics and its relationship to the quantum theory when the sun is in Sagittarius. This summer she's living with a Negro family in Fatback, Miss., who has never heard of the quantum theory, etc., etc." Fifteen black people were killed in the state that year as a result of S.N.C.C. activity, Lester adds, but the only murdered black mentioned in the press was James Chancy, who was killed with white Civil Rights Workers Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner.

The spit flies: "There is no wind that blows that is not moist with the blood of black people." Then the talisman sentence: "It is clear that America as it now exists must be destroyed. There is no other way . . . We will destroy you or die in the act of destroying." Now a slight backing-off: "To those who fearfully wonder if America has come to the point of a race war, the answer is not certain. However, all signs would seem to say yes." Then the calculated shocker: "When the three astronauts were killed in February 1967, black people did not join the nation in mourning. They were white and were spending money that blacks needed."

Black Is Black. This is the self-indulgence of rage, but it is not merely one man's neuroticism. Any reporter who has served time in a ghetto has heard the same words. Two black psychotherapists try to make some sense of the anger in Black Rage. William H. Grier and Price M. Cobbs start with a widely unbelieved truth: "All blacks are angry." Their evidence may be unsuspected even by liberals who know the causes usually mentioned for black anger--bad schools, bad housing, scanty and futile employment.

One chapter deals with black women and society's notions of beauty. Among the white customs and altitudes that Negroes have accepted--having been cut off from all memory of African customs --is the blue-eyed, wavy-haired ideal of female beauty. Nothing can be done about the eyes, but for generations the kinky hair of little black girls has been straightened painfully by their mothers. Of course it does not achieve the unadmitted goal--hair that looks like Caucasian hair. The repeated failures, say the authors, work unconsciously to convince black women that their beauty and sexuality are hopelessly flawed; consequently, more black women than white give up the struggle for sexual desirability and slide into neutral obesity. Viewed with this insight, the unstraight-ened, "natural" hairdos that are now so prevalent are more than badges of belligerence, and "black is beautiful" is not only a poignant truth but a simple declaration of sanity: black is black.

At the core of the book is the realization that blacks have opportunities to become unstable solely because they are black in a white society. A black man, the authors suggest, "must develop a cultural paranoia in which every white man is a potential enemy unless proved otherwise and every social system is set aganist him unless he personally finds out differently." This is not startling news, but for therapists there is additional advice: to find how sick a black patient is, subtract the "normal" paranoia toward whites, and "what remains is illness and a proper subject for therapeutic endeavor."

For whites the two books are basic education. One describes normal black paranoia and the other demonstrates it. Giving the condition its accurate name is useful; it suggests to affronted liberals why a few gestures of sincerity do not make black rage go away. As for Negroes, the books tell where reality has always been at. To blacks who can read with coolness, they offer the hardest lesson of all: suspicion is justified, but paranoia is a disease.

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