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M 0 RRI S Die KSTE I N
it helped to spark and which has helped it to flourish. It is our own
history that is enacted in their pages, which we too have lived, and
which has influenced us crucially. I'm not speaking of the heavy
debts which the counterculture owes to black music and life style–
debts which have repeatedly been commemorated, at least since
The White Negro
-
but more broadly of the whole spirit and tone
of America since 1960. Consider how, at every stage, the black quest
for social justice and cultural identity finds its immense echo in the
culture at large. First, in the integrationist period of the early
sixties, the direct-action tactics of the freedom rides, marches, sit-ins,
inaugurate a new social consciousness, a .politics of confrontation and
protest the likes of which we have not seen since the thirties. Then,
as integration gives way to nationalism and separatism, the ethnic
self-assertion of blacks is imitated not only by other ethnic groups but
by women, homosexuals and other second-class citizens. Much as it
might discomfit him to think so, the black man in an afro, proud
of his skin and hair, has helped enable the gay person to "come
out." The black challenge to American liberalism - the sixties'
challenge, as it turned out - becomes in a different key the femin–
ist or homosexual attack on Freud. The message at bottom is the
same: your pluralism is a sham, a cover for assimilation and psychic
aggression. "Come in," sings the siren, "and be like us. Park your
identity at the door."
The rejection of this message is still only marginally widespread
in
the general culture, though not among the young, who as yet
show remarkably few signs of aging into their parents. But among
blacks it constitutes an immense revolution in consciousness whose
final outcome remains incalculable. Who has not been riveted,
fascinated, perhaps frightened, by these majestic and angry new
blacks, by turns hard-edged and remorseless or smoothly self-delight–
ing, all rage and assertion in public but sometimes twinkling with
affability, even self-irony, in private? How hard it is to recall that
scarcely a generation ago, while black men died in a
Jim
Crow
army under a liberal president, Richard Wright had to mobilize
his own large resources of anger to tell the world that whatever the
appearances to the contrary, Negroes were not really very happy
with their lot. This was the message of
Native Son
in 1940 and
Black Boy,
his 1945 autobiography, and, despite his quarrel wit4
