The Education of a WASP

Epilogue

Epilogue A book must end; an education must not, and there must be a better ending for my country than I see now. For myself, one question I asked for eight years was answered the night Richard Nixon was elected President. He talked of a sign he had seen during his campaign, which read: Bring Us Together Again. The wave of sadness and yearning I felt at hearing those words finally explained my personal anguish over hate between two groups of people. "Bring us together again" were the words I wanted so desperately to hear as a child, from my parents who had parted in anger. I never heard them and my father is dead. Somehow this deeply hidden childhood wish had got mixed in with my hope that black and white Americans could understand each other. It had produced the personal pain when they did not. My parents ' misunderstandings destroyed my home; black and white misunderstandings can destroy my country. Perhaps recognizing the parallels made me able to accept certain somber realities. Eight years ago my first black friend, Grace Christopher, said she was afraid she could not raise her son in America; Mrs. Kozarik, the immigrant woman in - 325 Rockbrook, said, "Most Americans don't care about others." I cannot tell either of these women I have proved them wrong. Instead, I wish, as Dorothy Parker once wrote, that "I knew a little more or very much less." I wish I knew how America, the one country created by people from all over the world, could realize its potential as the natural bridge between Europe and Africa. Our people have their roots in both these continents, and we are the human links through which the world could be joined. If the blood of the hyphenated Europeans-the Italian-Americans, the Swedish-Americans, and my own German-American blood-had mingled, as it should have long ago, with the Americans who were involuntary immigrants from Africa, we would look as Americans should look. 'Ve would, some of us, be dark brown, and some of us pink, but most of us would be the golden color that would at last distinguish the genuine American. But I am afraid that time and the astonishing American luck we took for granted have run out. For if white Americans have already begun to fear the black citizens whom we so greatly outnumber, then we are too vulnerable. Somewhere , right now, there is surely an insane black man ready to commit an act as unspeakable as those of Lee Harvey Oswald or Sirhan Sirhan or James Earl Ray. And somewhere there is a skillful white demagogue becoming aware of how effortlessly he could exploit white fear and convince the white majority it is "necessary" to intern those we fear. He could persuade us so easily to trade our morality and our freedoms for our "safety" and his power. And we would be, all of us, ten miles from Dachau.·When I say these things white people often look alarmed. Some ask, "What can I do?" I find I cannot tell them. The wall between two groups of Americans was built with millions of stones and I have finally come to believe it can only be removed by millions of white people each taking one stone away. Surely you and I know which stones we are personally capable of removing in our school or neighborhood or office or factory. And until I have done all I know to do, I cannot advise others. Yet whatever I do may not be enough. There would then be agonizing alternatives from which my family must choose. If concentration camps for black Americans became a reality, I could not close my eyes and become a "good German." I would do everything, with all my strength and as long as I could, to prevent this horror in my country. Yet I must not pretend, even to myself, that I have the courage to enter those camps with friends like Leland and Barbara and their children . Nor am I brave enough to fight in some underground resistance. If I cannot die or fight with violence or stand silently by, then there remains only the coward's course of running. When Ben and I discuss the sad alternative of leaving America, we know we must flee to a country immune to the tempting and contagious disease of white superiority. Africa...