582
PAl~
TISAN REVIEW
filmed by one of Leonard Jeffries's invidious Hollywood Jews. A crippled
white adolescent was the last person in the world who had anything
to
fear from cops in Harlem. I knew that. But so what? Imaginary men
learn to suspend disbelief.
"I
yam what
1
yam,
"
says the narrator of
fllIlisible Mall.
Three years
before Ellison's great novel was published, I chorused my own very per–
sonal "Amen!" to that.
To become an imaginary other is to assume the weight of the oth–
er's fantasies, even when those fantasies are conspiratorial. It happens to
blacks who assume knowledge of
the Jews;
it happens to Jews who as–
sume expertise on what
they
want. By reading ourselves into the other,
we read the other out of existence. Imagining the other, blacks and Jews
serve the cause of their own sense of victimization.
For it is suffering itself which has now become politically correct in
this city. There was a time when we New Yorkers were expected to re–
sist suffering, our own and everybody else's. Today, we seek to create the
hegemonies of suffering with which to battle against each other's claims.
"I suffered, I was there!" is turned into, "We suffered, we are here!" An
added codicil: "You had better acknowledge our suffering." As if suffer–
ing is definition. Even in PC-land, suffering must have its limits. Why
make it the defining aspect of any group's humanity?
Neither professors of pigmentation at City College nor that middle–
aged woman in my local supermarket are the first blacks
to
find in the
imaginary Jew the demonic presence behind black problems in New
York. "Georgia has the Negro and Harlem has the Jew," Baldwin
wrote around the time [ was fantasizing about my mulatto therapist and
pursuing my own imaginary blackness in Mount Morris Park. In the years
to come, Baldwin himself would move uncomfortably close to framing
the Jew as the source of black difficulty in New York. "The Jew, in
America, is a white man," he decided. In Baldwin's eyes, white was sin
enough, the one color beyond the rainbow.
Georgia may no longer have the Negro, but Harlem still has the
Jew. And not merely Harlem. The imaginary Jew is a decisive presence in
the minds of so many black New Yorkers, from that middle-aged
woman in my local supermarket to the "activist" Sonny Carson and the
lawyer Alton Maddox and the preacher Al Sharpton. If there are still
Jews - not all of them aged trade unionists - who guard their vision of
"the oppressed" with a passion so fierce they simply cannot admit, either
to themselves or to others, that black anti-Semitism exists, there are con–
siderably larger numbers ofJews who now look at blacks as their Italian–
American and Irish-American and Greek-American peers look at them -
