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Chapter Nine "THEY NEVER DID REALLY SEEME" The Assertion ofBlack Ethnic Identity ATHE height of the black renaissance in Harlem in the 1920S, the poet Countee Cullen recalled in "Incident" the memory of an eight-year-old black boy. Now, I was eight and very small, And he was no whit bigger, And so I smiled but he poked out His tongue and called me "nigger." Cullen, poised, urbane, a man with many white as well as black friends, concluded the poem: I saw the whole of Baltimore From May until December; Of all the things that happened there, That's all that I remember.l Cullen knew what all educated Mrican-Americans knew-that whites had invented a name to keep all blacks in a position of caste. "Nigger" was their word of disrespect, contempt, and fear. It was a caste word. When Malcolm X, the most brilliant and articulate ofall separatist leaders in the 1960s, spoke to a campus audience at a large university, he was heckled by hostile questions from a black intellectual who opposed Malcolm 's separatist ideas. Malcolm questioned the man: "Do you know what they call a Negro scholar? Ph.D.? Professor?" "No," the man said, and Malcolm answered his own question: ''They call him a nigger."2 For Malcolm, revolution meant discarding the identity that a white racist society had imposed on Mrican-Americans even more than it meant civil rights legislation. What, he seemed to be asking, will be the good ofnew laws? With or without laws, whites would continue to assault and destroy the dignity of blacks through racism unless blacks repudiated white society by creating an identity and institutions of their own. Before blacks could achieve the self-respect that was a precondition for power, they had to cast offthe racist values and white names they had taken for their own. Malcolm argued that white immigrants did not have to struggle to become Americans. "Those Hunkies that just got off the boat," he said, "they're already Americans; Polacks are already American; Italian refugees 174 ASSERTION OF BLACK ETHNIC IDENTITY 175 are already Americans. Everything that came out of Europe, every blueeyed thing, is already an American ... being born here in America doesn't make you an American ... they don't have to pass civil-rights legislation to make a Polack an American."3 By emphasizing race exclusively, Malcolm ignored the resistance of nativist Americans to newcomers, such as Irish Catholics and Jews. By stressing the importance ofblacks discovering a new identity as Mrican-Americans, he understood intuitively that one great advantage all immigrants-not just the Europeans-had over Negroes in being accepted as Americans was pride in their ancestral cultures. To be an ethnic-American meant three things: confronting other Americans with pride in one's past; confronting the polity with claims made in the name of the group; and embracing the symbols, institutions, and history ofthe American civic culture. Malcolm X wanted blacks to do the first two of these; Martin Luther King called for all three. The issue of group pride had long plagued Mrican-American leaders in the United States. Frederick Douglass had urged blacks to follow the example of modern Jews in Europe and America, who, by emphasizing group solidarity and pride, improved their status.4 Booker T. Washington also pointed to the example ofthe Jews, to their unity, pride, and love of their own people that would, "as the years go on," make them "more and more influential in this country."s Only a few days before he was killed, Malcolm X told an interviewer that, unlike "the Negro ... the Jew never lost his pride in being a Jew ... his sense of his own value gave him the courage to fight back."6 King also frequently compared the situation of blacks to that ofJews, arguing that blacks could learn from the Jewish combination of ethnic traditions with social and political action.7 How could blacks achieve the unity and pride of Jews, who for two thousand years had been held together by a sacred book and dozens of rituals, ceremonies, and customs revolving around the yearly calendar and the life cycle? To achieve such unity and pride it was necessary, Malcolm sometimes said, for blacks to accept the fact that they were not Americans; only whites were Americans, no matter what the laws said. That was a message most blacks did not want to hear. Malcolm was popular because he gave vent to...

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