SLIP
THE YOU
219
And it
is
this which makes me question Hyman's designation
rI
the "smart man playing dumb" role as primarily Negro,
if
he
means by "conflict situations" those in which racial pressure is
appennost. Actually it
is
a role which Negroes share with other
Americans, and it might be more "Yankee" than anything else. It
is
a strategy common to the culture, and it is reinforced by our anti–
intellectualism, by our tendency toward conformity and by the re–
lated
desire of the individual to be left alone; often simply by the
desire to put more money in the bank. But basically the strategy
grows
out of our awareness of the joke at the center of the Ameri–
can identity. Said a very dark southern friend of mine in laughing
reply to a white business man who complained of his recalcitrance
in a bargaining situation, "I know, you thought I was colored, didn't
you."
It
is
across this joke that Negro and white Americans regard
ODe another. The white American has charged the Negro American
with being without past or tradition (something which strikes the
white man with a nameless horror), just as he himself has been so
charged by Europeans and American critics with a nostalgia for the
ability once typical of European cultures; and the Negro knows
that both were "mammy-made" right here at home. What's more,
each
secretly believes that he alone knows what is valid in the Ameri–
can experience, and that the other knows he knows but will not admit
it,
and each suspects the other of being at bottom a phony.
The white man's half-conscious awareness that his image of
the
Negro
is
false makes him suspect the Negro of always seeking
to
take him in, and assume his motives are anger and fear-which
very
often they are. On his side of the joke the Negro looks at the
white man and finds it difficult to believe that the "grays"-a Negro
term for white people-can be so absurdly self-deluded over the true
interrelatedness of blackness and whiteness. To him the white man
ICCIllS
a hypocrite who boasts of a pure identity while standing with
his
humanity exposed to the world.
Very often, however, the Negro's masking
is
motivated not so
much by fear as by a profound rejection of the image created to
1IIUIp
his
identity. Sometimes it is for the sheer joy of the joke; some–
times
to challenge those who presume, across the psychological
dis–
tance created by race manners, to know his identity. Nonetheless, it
iI in
the American grain. Benjamin Franklin, the practical scientist,
