666
PARTISAN REVIEW
fronted with an endless cataloguing of losses, gains, skirmishes; it is
to feel virtuous, outraged, helpless, as though his continuing status
among us were somehow analogous to disease-cancer, perhaps, or
tuberculosis-which must be checked, even though it cannot
be
cured. In
this
arena the black man acquires quite another aspect
from that which he has in life. We do not know what to do with
him
in life; if he breaks our sociological and sentimental image of
him
we are panic-stricken and we feel ourselves betrayed. When he vio–
lates this image therefore, he stands in the greatest danger (sensing
which, we uneasily suspect that he is very often playing a part for our
benefit); and, what is not always so apparent but is equally true,
we are then in some danger ourselves-hence our retreat or our
blind and immediate retaliation.
Our dehumanization of the Negro then is indivisible from our
dehumanization of ourselves: the loss of our own identity is the price
we pay for our annulment of
his.
Time and our own force act as
our allies, creating an impossible, a fruitless tension between the
traditional master and slave. Impossible and fruitless because, literal
and visible as this tension has become, it has nothing to do with
reality.
Time
has
made some changes in the Negro face. Nothing has
succeeded in making it exactly like our own, though the general
·desire seems to be to make it blank
if
one cannot make it white.
When it has become blank, the past as thoroughly washed from the
black face as it has been from ours, our guilt will
be
finished-at
least it will have ceased to be visible, which we imagine to
be
much
the same thing. But, paradoxically, it is we who prevent this from
happening; since it is we who, every hour that we live, re-invest the
black face with our guilt; and we do this-by a further paradox, no
less ferocious-helplessly, passionately, out of an unrealized need
to suffer absolution.
Today, to be sure, we know that the Negro is not biologically
or mentally inferior; there is no truth in those rumors of
his
body
odor or his incorrigible sexuality; or no more truth
than
can be
easily explained or even defended by the social sciences. Yet, in our
most recent war, his blood was segregated as was, for the most part,
his person. Up to today we arc set at a division, so that he may not
marry our daughters or our sisters, nor may he-for the most part-
