A NATION OF PAINED HEARTS

By Roger Rosenblatt

At least there was one moment of visible black-and-white unity last week. It occurred on Tuesday, shortly after 10 a.m. Pacific time, when crowds of citizens, gathered together in the streets like extras in a War of the Worlds movie of the 1950s, stood staring up at outdoor television screens, waiting for the word.

They were united, briefly, in an anxious silence of the heart. As soon as the verdict was read, however, they split apart; they could watch themselves do it on the split screens. On one side jubilation, on the other dismay. Afterward it was said that America should have seen this coming, that the division of the races cut so deep, it ought to have been obvious that two nations had always been hiding in one.

Many white people, liberals especially, said that it had not been obvious to them at all. Yet when they gave the matter a minute's thought, they wondered why they had been so ready to praise the jury, which included nine African Americans, as unbiased if the verdict had been guilty. If one believed the jurors could honestly find the circumstantial evidence overwhelming, could they not also, just as honestly, find it unpersuasive? No, it was not the jury that was thinking in terms of categorical behavior; it was much of white America. And if that were so, the shock expressed at the polar reactions to the verdict was a Casablanca "shocked." Who was hiding what, from whom?

To many whites, O.J. entered the trial as a fellow white man and grew darker as the proceedings went on. He was the perfectly assimilated minority hero until he was associated with terrible crimes. Then he became just another black male under arrest, presumed to be guilty of everything. In their imagination he was transformed in the course of a year from one of their own to Bigger Thomas.

It could not have gone unnoticed by black Americans, who looked around them for the past year, that a great many whites seemed a bit overeager to hang another black man in spite of a prosecution case that was proved, in the very least, friable. How many jury trials of the old South came to mind? As O.J. became blacker for whites, he became blacker for blacks too, but the reception was quite different. They were willing to overlook the wife beater for the return of the native son.

Of course, it is possible to read too much into that single dramatic scene of division. Television had played the murder trial as a news-cum-soap opera maxiseries. Maybe the country was simply splitting into two camps of fans. As the verdict was read on TV, a hallful of law students at Howard University exploded out of their seats: they could have been cheering the victory of a black lawyer over the system, or perhaps they were cheering the system itself, since the jury had made it work for them. Even if the division displayed was real, it might not necessarily be as deep as was being said. Contrary to pop psychology, people usually behave least, not most, like themselves in moments of high excitement, and they are truer to their feelings in repose.

Or say that the black rage was indeed as serious as that eruption of joy made it appear. It still might be limited to the post-Rodney King L.A.P.D., or to the California system of justice, or, at its broadest, to the American system of justice; but surely never to America as a whole. If the rage was vented on America as a whole, well, it could mean that James Baldwin had been right in Another Country, that African Americans can never feel at home at home.

Yet how could this still be true, 30 years after Baldwin's novel? If the intensity of ill feeling between blacks and whites is the same these days, the causes are new. Many white people look at progress made and think African Americans have little excuse for complaint or for failure. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 secured them the vote; their number in the House of Representatives is close to their proportion of the population; the black middle class has grown so large that it constitutes nearly a third of black families; African Americans of stature and achievement are everywhere in sight (see Colin Powell; Marian Wright Edelman; Ruth Simmons, the new president of Smith College; and Christopher Darden and Johnnie Cochran Jr.).

To many African Americans, on the other hand, these indications of progress are undermined by the facts that about a third of black families live below the poverty line; that 1 in 3 black males in his 20s is in jail, on probation or on parole; that a black lower middle class consisting of blue-collar workers is shrinking; that a resentful white attitude has resulted in attacks on affirmative action and government assistance, which, African Americans contend, rather than disabling black families by creating excessive dependencies has been inadequate to their needs. These antipodal positions have been hardened by an intellectual debate between those who state that antiblack sentiment has never been more harsh and those who claim that racism is dead.

AT THE UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA in Lincoln last Thursday, a group of 30 students, faculty and others met to try to come to terms with their thoughts. Everyone seemed weary and heavyhearted. A young white woman said, "It pains me to think that this is still going on. I take it personally. It upsets me. I've been brought up to believe that there is no difference between the races. Now I think I've been fooling myself."

"Think of it," a young man said bitterly. "O.J.'s lawyer tried to separate the races, and it worked." He shook his head. "It's a payback for Rodney King; that's all it is. Everybody was so stunned to see that police beating on tape."

"I don't think black people were stunned," said another female student. "And to tell you the truth, I'm not sure that we whites were all that surprised either. We just didn't want to look at what we feared was really happening."

"So maybe we weren't as floored as we pretended to be at the Mark Fuhrman tapes," a young man offered. "Somebody on TV said that every black person sees something of Fuhrman in every white person."

"I don't believe that," another student said, not looking too sure of herself.

"We have not been paying attention," said an English professor, who looked exhausted. "Maybe we suffered compassion fatigue. After civil rights, we told ourselves we had solved everything."

"What do you think, Steve?" The question was addressed to an African-American student.

"I thought O.J. was guilty," he answered. "But when the verdict came down, and I was standing with everyone in the dorm, my white friends gave me dirty looks. It was as if I was being held accountable for being black."

"I always feel that," said an African-American woman in her late 20s who works with Nebraska educational television. "I walk down the street, and I know that many of the whites who look at me are thinking 'inarticulate' or 'stupid.' If I were male, they'd be thinking 'dangerous.' I don't say these words for them. The color of my skin says them."

"Is that it?" someone asked her. "Is it just a difference of appearance?" The woman nodded.

"You know," said a young man, "after Tuesday I walk down the street and I wonder what blacks are thinking. Do you feel like an American?" he asked the black woman.

"Some days," she said.

A HUNDRED YEARS AGO, W.E.B. DUBOIS ascribed a "double consciousness" to black Americans that created the feeling of living in a country within a country. Certain black intellectuals have perceived that separateness as allowing blacks to see America more clearly than the rest of America sees itself, and to grasp the cruelty and injustice that much of the country seeks to deny. LeRoi Jones compared the black person in America to someone locked in one room of a big house: "If you never go into that room, you don't know anything about [it]. If I come out of that room to clean many other things in the rest of the house, then I know about the whole house." Richard Wright said that the "Negro is America's metaphor." The idea is that black people, merely by existing, hold up a mirror to white America, in which it may see itself darkly.

But when the world it sees is literally dark, white America recoils, or as the Nebraska woman said, it retreats to stereotypes. Frantz Fanon explained this phenomenon as a response to an image of the negative; blacks are automatically deemed bad (inferior, dangerous) by being the opposite of whites. African Americans cannot hide their color the way whites can hide their feelings about color. The only ways they can conceal themselves are to "pass" or disappear into white culture (this is a major theme of early African-American fiction), or to develop secret forms of knowledge or communication, as slaves once did. In the opening scene of Spike Lee's movie Clockers, street kids deliberately are shown to speak unintelligibly, as if to say, "This is not your world."

If it is true that less has changed for the better in the past 30 years than white people have believed, or have wanted to believe, it is also true that the will to improve things, which was always strong, is strong still. Baldwin, who wrote Another Country, also wrote Notes of a Native Son. In it he described the day of his father's funeral:

"That bleakly memorable morning I hated the unbelievable [Harlem] streets and the Negroes and whites who had, equally, made them that way. But I knew that it was folly, as my father would have said, this bitterness was folly. It was necessary to hold on to the things that mattered. The dead man mattered, the new life mattered; blackness and whiteness did not matter; to believe that they did was to acquiesce in one's own destruction. Hatred which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated and this was an immutable law."

Many thoughtful observers of last Tuesday's events do not interpret them as signs that race relations are worse than ever. Russell Adams, chairman of Afro-American studies at Howard, says that "we have set a higher standard for evaluating racial conduct now. I don't mean to sound Pollyannaish, but the bar has been lifted. We expect more. We have been unfair to ourselves in not recognizing that." Writing in the current New York Review of Books, George Fredrickson, a professor of history at Stanford University, notes that what is often played up as racial division is equally divisions of region, religion and class. "The notion that race automatically overwhelms" such other considerations, he writes, "strikes me as untenable." Fredrickson would probably agree that most middle-class blacks would not understand the Clockers language either.

The problem America faces, however virulent race hatred remains, is how not to bury it again. A black young woman walks down a Lincoln, Nebraska, street, and she believes the whites she passes are thinking the worst of her. The white young man who passes her believes she is thinking the worst of him. If they were to tell each other what was really on their mind, they might both be surprised, or at any rate instructed. Each has the capacity to make another country, which was as much Baldwin's theme as his condemnation of the existing one. America is still another country from the one it seeks to be, and that ideal always hovers within reach.

Everyone agrees that the answer lies in talk and more talk, but the conversation has to be candid. If the reactions to the O.J. verdict proved anything, it was that the polite niceties shared and the dirty little secrets kept in recent years do nothing but infect the wounds. In future conversations it might be said by whites that some part of them reluctantly believes the accusation of genetic intellectual inferiority leveled at African Americans. It might be said by African Americans that they are as fearful, and perhaps as ashamed, of the black underclass as whites are. Both might speak of anti-Semitism, the white responsibility as well as the black. Some Jews might speak of prejudices of their own.

Blacks might be reminded that a flawed judicial system will not be corrected by lowering penalties for, say, drug crimes--even though there is clearly a double standard for sentencing. Whites might be reminded that every day mostly black juries send criminals, black and white, to jail. It might be said too by whites that they have been speaking in code (their own secret language and knowledge) for too long, about everything from welfare to real estate. It might be said by blacks that rap lyrics that advocate cop killing are abhorrent to them or even that they have known a few honorable policemen in their lives. Both might tell each other that they are tired of posturing about victimization, pro and con, or that they are sick to death of talking about race, though they acknowledge its usefulness. Those who do not think about race at all might explain why.

It might be said that relations are, in fact, more comfortable than they have been portrayed; that some polls before the Simpson trial showed a considerable lessening of tension and a growing respect among races. It might even be said, or discovered, that deep in their newly pained hearts, blacks and whites know that they do not really live in different countries after all, that they have together made the same country, which has always been a complex of heaven and hell, as alert to its failings as it has been intent on repeating them. The black American Dream shares much with the white American Dream; one could never be realized without the other. That might be said. And it might be added that a shaky economy frightens everybody into behaving badly. And that a difference of generations may be as significant as a difference of color. And that more than a few blacks are ambivalent about affirmative action. And that most people think in more subtle and nuanced terms than the heat of any moment reveals.

By the end of last week, television was beginning to run dry of experts, and there was less talk of what had happened, not more. One could hear the creak of the hinges again, as the old, heavy doors were starting to close. If that should occur once more, the country will wait for the next occasion to demonstrate its division by symbolic action, and the form of the demonstration may be far less benign than Tuesday's.

But perhaps something else will happen this time--a change of direction, a pilgrimage together toward another country--undertaken by the great majority of blacks and whites, who, beneath the skin, know perfectly well that hatred destroys the one who hates, and this is an immutable law.