AN ELEGY FOR INTEGRATION

By LANCE MORROW

WHEN THE OLD SOUTHERN RACISTS FILIBUSTERED A civil rights bill, they would serve up fatback inanities to an almost empty Senate chamber--homily grits to obstruct the hours.

Minister Farrakhan's performance, playing to a packed house, rose through Washington's sweet October air and bounced off satellites. Farrakhan banged on the American mind with a silk umbrella and the handle of a broom: Mumbo jumbo will hoodoo you. He went on about obelisks and the intricate, unintelligible meanings of mystical, pseudo-Pharaonic numerologies. He sounded by turns menacing and Rotarian: a salesman in a sharp bow tie, the hallucination of Mussolini channeling Booker T. Washington. Behind him postured his son from the Fruit of Islam, in sunglasses and paramilitary Graustark.

Farrakhan had his moment in history. But he talked too long, and the moment went away. He was strange while it lasted.

And the white marble city was washed in a tide of black men's anger, yearning, hope, self-affirmation and, during Farrakhan's weirder passages, restless bewilderment.

There was more to the manifestation in Washington than Farrakhan. But what did it mean? Is there an articulable meaning in the numbers and energy? Was the Million Man March a Woodstock of black American manhood--a vivid but perishable spectacle? A protest without a program, the dictum has it, is mere sentimentality. Or was the march a turning point, a moment of moral lift-off, a Great Awakening? And would there be, down the road when nothing changes, another Great Disillusioning?

I came away with the thought--melancholy, unhopeful--that it is getting to be time for Americans to clarify their minds about integration. Time for blacks and whites to stop indulging themselves--as Farrakhan does--in separatist fantasies and to return to the text of that infinitely superior speech that Martin Luther King Jr. delivered at the march on Washington in 1963. Time to return to the ideal of an individualist, integrated, color-blind society--and to understand that that ideal will require yet more time and hard work. But perhaps I also am guilty of a sentimentality without a program. I don't know anyone of any race in multicultural and coreless America who acts as if he thinks integration is a good idea.

The country, almost without knowing where it was going, has wandered down unpaved roads that vanish into swampland. The Farrakhan march--warmhearted, festive, lovely in its way--was a sort of culminating symptom. On respectable op-ed pages, writers have been suggesting that we might as well consider breaking off part of the U.S. to form a separate Republic of African America. The arrangement would confirm a secession that has already occurred in millions of minds all over the country. The attitude is that it was a horrible marriage from the start and has long since dissolved in chronic dysfunction, occasional riot and permanent mutual contempt. Why keep the ugly, abusive charade going? (Was it some such domestic metaphor playing in the unconscious mind that made the Simpson case so fascinating?)

With the Simpson verdict and with the country about to turn the autumn corner into the 1996 presidential election, I keep returning to the sentiment that Americans could find, if they were looking, in the old hymn "Lord, plant my feet on higher ground." King was right: The content of one's character, not the color of one's skin, is what matters. Stop defining people by color, by groups (blacks, whites, Asians, gays). Stop practicing the politics of tribal identity. But you would have to rescind a universe of political correctness and poisonous identity politics in order to restore the old moral order.

Still, I think wistfully, America has made a career of transcending itself, of leaving its worse selves behind. If it had not, the U.S. would have devolved into a sort of continental Beirut long ago. The worse self that should now be left behind may be the oldest residual American self--the racial-tribal. The continuation of the American idea depends upon the nation's transcending that. All Americans will arrive at civilization together, or they will not arrive at all.

It is too bad that the main speaker at the Million Man March was not Glenn Loury, the Boston University economist and author (One by One from the Inside Out) who brings more clarity and decency to the subject of race in America than almost anyone else. Is integration mere sentimentality? Is justice not the deeper need, the more attainable? Can there be justice without integration? What kind of justice, and for whom?

Unlike Louis Farrakhan, writes Loury, "Dr. King was a leader of both black and white Americans." Part of his accomplishment, Loury points out, lay in "assuring the 'good people' on each side of the racial divide that their counterparts on the other side do in fact exist. He sought to create a dynamic within which growing numbers of Americans could embrace a strategy of reconciliation among decent people of both races." Today it is the bad people on either side who know for certain that their counterparts exist.