During this serene period, Anatole had written a scathingly honest (but in retrospect self-serving) critique of blackness called a "Portrait of the Inauthentic Negro: How Prejudice Distorts the Victim's Personality." In it he locates the cause of America's race problem, in the Negro's "conditioned" psychological responses to the prejudices of the "anti-Negro;" i.e., "racist whites."
His list of conditioned responses of the Negro were: "minstrelization," "romanticization," the "rejected attitude," and "bestialization." One can easily summarize this very high quality Freudian list as being the blueprint of a kind of generalized self-hating Negro reflex, actually a genuflection by the Negro in he face of overwhelming white power. And when his list is thusly summarized, it dovetails perfectly with my own list, which I too have summarized as "the Uncle Tom and Aunt Jemima Nation."
Thus, his analysis of the Negro, was not where I saw a problem with Professor Broyard's timely and brilliant essay. The problem I had with it was this: Oddly the question of how does whiteness contribute to, or even factor into, America's race problem, was not even on the table for examination? Nor, for that matter, was its corollary, a corresponding portrait of the inauthentic white man?
Given that the essay was written in 1950, only a few years after America had sent a segregated army to WW-II to defeat the world's worst racist, Adolph Hitler, the fact that Anatole did not even raise whiteness as an issue, was at least a glaring intellectual foot-fault. At worst, it was a conscious attempt to shield his newly endorsed tribe from moral complicity in moral crimes only one moral level above those of Adolph Hitler, crimes that Frederick Douglass said "would embarrass a nation of savages."
It seemed all the more curious and incongruous that it occurred at the around the precise time when Algeria's demand for independence from France had triggered an intellectual revolt, not just against France, but against all of the colonial powers, which is to say against all whiteness? In fact it would be another decade before America would be called to account to answer for its own racial crimes. Anatole Broyard and his Greenwich Village cohorts, would factor prominently in building an intellectual framework in which this judgment would take place.
It was the Civil Rights movement in America that took up where Sartre's coffee house disciples left off, and that eventually brought the matter of racism in America to a head. First leftwing white intellectuals, then black Civil Rights leaders, began to critique whiteness in the same way that blackness itself had been critiqued only a few years earlier by Anatole.
And, when the dust finally settled from these debates, it was, as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had summarized so aptly in an aside made to Harry Belafonte: "for blacks to want to integrate (into whiteness) is like wanting to run back into a burning house?"
We now know the result of the colossal American experiment in the heavily-freighted hypocrisy of fighting Hitler's racism in a segregated army in Europe, while at the same time, maintaining America's own sacred institution of Jim Crow intact at home. And while Americans were not exactly roasting Jews in the ovens, they were still hanging Negroes from trees, and what is even worse, they were forever hanging on to the worse possible version of separation of the races, apartheid American style.
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