When Race Becomes Real: Black and White Writers Confront Their Personal Histories

Crazy Sometimes

© Leonard Pitts, Jr. 21 Crazy Sometimes Leonard Pitts, Jr. It has been suggested—and fairly so, I think—that black people spend entirely too much time talking about race. That we interject it into situations where it has no business, use it to explain slights that could just as easily be explained in other ways. I can tell you why we do: It’s because this thing makes us crazy sometimes. Race, I mean. A story. A few years ago, Ted Koppel was conducting a group interview on the subject of race. His subjects: a group of white Philadelphians who had bullied a black newcomer into moving out of their neighborhood. These people, blue collar, young, old, and middle-aged, had all kinds of excuses for what they had done. They were worried about crime, they said. About the woman’s effect on property values. About what sort of neighbor she might have been. 22 L e o n a r d P i t t s , J r . Not one of them stood up and said, “By God, I didn’t want that woman here because I’m a racist.” Had they done that, I think I’d have had more respect for them. Instead, the group was impatient with the idea that because of white animosity, black Americans have it harder than others or deserve recompense for their sufferings. Blacks, went the general consensus, have it as good or better than anyone. Then Koppel asked a telling question. How much money would they each require, he wanted to know, before they’d be willing to give up their white skins forever and become black? Surprisingly, a man in the audience was willing to answer. Fifty million dollars, he said. That was the going rate for white skin. That’s what he’d require to be black. If he had fifty million, he told Koppel, “I could live anywhere I want. I wouldn’t have to deal with any . . .” And here there came a pause, a half-beat of stammering, at a word he didn’t quite know how to confess. That instant of hesitation told you everything you needed to know about why black people get crazy sometimes . Because he finished his sentence with the word you knew was there, the one that was hiding all along behind the rationalizations, that gave the lie to him, his neighbors, and all their protestations and excuses. “. . . racism,” he said. I was watching this and didn’t know whether to laugh or cry: laugh, because the idea that money buys an escape from bigotry is so ludicrous ; or cry, because I knew the dissonance between what he said before and the word he just forced himself to stammer was probably lost on him, lost on them, lost on many of those watching. I wanted to holler at the TV, I wanted to grab this guy by the lapels. In the end, I didn’t holler, laughing and crying canceled one another, and his lapels were beyond my reach, so I just shook my head and wondered the same thing I’ve wondered so many days and nights after listening to people like this say things like that: can they hear themselves? It is the question that rises inevitably from the places black folks gather. It is asked in amazement, often. Asked with laughter, occasionally . Asked with glittering eyes, once in a while. The thing makes us crazy sometimes. C r a z y S o m e t i m e s 23 Because if, by almost every available measure, it was more difficult to be black in America thirty or forty years ago, there is one area in which it is indisputably harder now: the area of knowing who and where your enemy is. In the days when segregation was a widely accepted political philosophy, those who bore black people ill will had no reason to deny it. Indeed, such people spoke openly and with no evident fear of contradiction—much less stigmatization—about the athletic and intellectual inferiority of blacks and their general unfitness to participate in the social and political life of the nation. The Civil Rights Movement made those views unfashionable, drove them underground. Which is, of course, not quite the same thing as making them go away. The result is that to be black in modern America is to feel the touch of hidden...