LEONARD
KRIEGEL
577
Am I simply one more white liberal PC'd out on guilt, starching mind
and insight with the fear that I, too, may be tattooed with the dreaded
label "racist"? Is this what makes it so difficult for me to write that in
today's New Yark, blacks seem at least as racist as they accuse whites of
being? A note more and more whites in this racially obsessed city have
begun to sound - but sound with caution, among themselves. Even
childhood fantasies get sucked into race, echoing in the mind like those
scratchy old blues records still known as "race music" in the 1930s.
And race matters, as Cornel West recently reminded us. In Princeton,
where West teaches, race matters. But in New York, race overwhelms.
Race is the raw energy of life in this city - structuring lives, dictating the
schools to which we send our children, making suburbs of swamps and
swamps of streets. Race defines our relationship to the landscape, even as
we pace Melville's deck in the open air. Race echoes with tremors of
the past. Jews become whites and blacks choose as the visible symbol of
their rage this blood brother to Berryman's "imaginary Jew" of fifty
years ago .
Racism in New York threatens to become as much a white problem
as a black problem. Andrew Hacker might disagree. Since I possess nei–
ther the statistics nor the attitudinal surveys social scientists demand as
"proof' of such an assertion, I can offer only a grab bag of personal
observation. That is not proof, and writers are not social scientists. Nor
does a lifetime in this city make me an expert on race matters.
A writer speaks for himself alone. Yet like the child who cannot
help seeing that the en"lperor has no clothes, I, too, cannot help seeing
what I see. Experience may be a casual teacher, its lessons to be ap–
proached warily. But in race matters, experience remains the only record
one has. It is where one invariably begins. That woman in the supermar–
ket may have believed she was shafted because she was black. And the
imaginary Jew was somehow involved in that shafting. In her eyes, that
abstraction of the ages,
the Jew,
stood behind the assistant manager's re–
fusal to take back the mop and return her money. Invisible in a super–
market staffed by blacks and Puerto Ricans, the Jew had become her
stand-in for whites in New York.
That supermarket is in a housing co-op in Chelsea built by the
ILGWU, one of the last bastions ofJews in New York who "have poli–
tics" (as the cautionary phrase, tempered by still-fresh memories of
McCarthy, put it back in May of 1962, when the co-op opened). The
population is a curious amalgam of trade unionists and people like me
and the head of the ACLU, both of whom arrived here in our twenties,
