A Racial Rorschach : RACE: How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About the American Obsession, <i> By Studs Terkel (The New Press: $24.95; 403 pp.)</i>
Van Gallios is a classic Studs Terkel character. “I’m probably 56,” he says. White, middle-class, the owner of a popular Chicago restaurant, he is a thoughtful and articulate Everyman. Years back, when Chicago business was still lily-white, he catered to his customers and ran an all-white restaurant: no black diners, certainly, and no black help. Over time, as his patrons grew more open-minded, so did he. He didn’t buck the tide, didn’t really have a change of heart, but the momentum began to flow the other way, and he followed.
Then one day, something happened in the restaurant. A black man appeared at the cashier’s desk asking to use the men’s room; Gallios said no, it was for customers only. A few minutes later, deep inside the tavern, the same man brushed past him, clearly on his way to the bathroom. An argument ensued. It turned out that the man was actually dining in the restaurant. Why hadn’t he said so, Gallios asked. “Why should I?” he retorted. Gallios tried to apologize, tried to buy the man and his wife a drink. They refused--just finished their dinner and left. Eight years later, Gallios was still thinking about the incident. “I was a racist. . . . I was guilty. . . . I never felt so wrong. . . . I respected that man for not accepting my apology. Why should he?”
There are as many ways to read this story as to read a Rorschach inkblot. You can see Gallios as a racist; you can see him as a decent man. You can sympathize with the black man’s anger. You can wish he could have seen past it, accepting the drink and exploring the racial opening. Gallios’ changeability can seem a sign of weakness or of hope--proof of just how banal evil is, or evidence that change is contagious, that the shifting racial climate has a promising momentum of its own.
The episode is, in this sense, very much like the whole of Terkel’s book. Nearly 100 interviews, with whites, blacks, Latins and Asians, the collection is a rich and contradictory portrait of American racial attitudes. Just what you feel in the end--how bleak or how optimistic--will say as much about you as about anything in the book.
Terkel himself is pessimistic, or at least he says he is, and he offers plenty of evidence to support his grim view. Black after black tells him of the slights they have had to bear: the taxi driver who cruises past, the teacher who assumes they’ve plagiarized, the cop who stops them for no reason, and the countless ordinary whites who just look through them.
White interviewees talk candidly about their prejudice, indulging every imaginable stereotype. Recollections of the Reagan era show just how poisonous the climate can be: The former President, says one black woman, “gave people permission to be their worst selves.” Blacks are deeply bitter and many have as hard a time as any white seeing the human being inside the other color skin. “We’ve come an inch,” says one woman, “we still have a long ways to go.” We are all “trapped by race,” says another witness, and it is “a vicious cycle.”
Both Terkel and many of his subjects talk about a country where racism reigns triumphant. What’s interesting is that almost all also offer some evidence to the contrary. Subject after subject tells Terkel how things have changed for the better in recent years. Even the most fiercely angry and dismissive know “exceptions” to their stereotypes.
Two people out of every three talk of being thrown together with the other race, of getting to know someone--often in spite of themselves--and watching their own prejudices fade away like smoke. “I’ve spent all my life,” says one old woman, “being scared to death of what would happen when the coloreds moved in.” Then one day they did, and now, it turns out, “my black neighbors are a lot better than a lot of my white neighbors ever were. They care about their kids, they care about their property, and they care about me, as their neighbor.”
Very often, as in Van Gallios’ case, the grim and the hopeful sit side by side: feelings of guilt and lingering prejudice, anger and a desire to overcome it. Many whites recall occasions when they unwittingly slighted blacks--or worse. “Traffic’s beginning to close in on me, and I’m behind on my money,” recounts a cabdriver. “There’s a black driver in front of me, the word ‘nigger’ will come into my head. No matter how much education you may have had, the prejudices you were taught come out. These sinister forces are buried deep inside you.”
What is more important--this man’s gut feeling or his effort to wrestle with it? One does not make up for the other; a little regret does not cancel years of cruelty. But at the end of these testimonies, it is hard not to be impressed by the profound soul-searching taking place on both sides of the color line as blacks and whites are thrown together and forced to look beyond their hatred.
Is the glass half-empty or half-full? As these testimonies show, it can be dangerous to exaggerate in either direction. Certainly, as the past few days in Los Angeles have shown, there is much still to fix. White prejudice is still staggering: According to one survey, just over half of all whites think blacks are less intelligent than they are. This bias is still matched and often bettered by black anger. Louis Farrakhan, says one of Terkel’s sources, “is venting . . . what most blacks feel, but are afraid to say.”
Terkel himself and many of his subjects are convinced that it helps to air these feelings. “We have never acknowledged the disease,” says one white man, exploring what he calls his “Negrophobia.” “Until we do, we’re not going to find an antidote for it.”
The argument is compelling, but other interviews point in a different direction, suggesting that recriminations can also be counterproductive. Many whites feel they have been unfairly blamed for black people’s problems. More than one thoughtful black is troubled by inner-city kids who shrug off arrest, claiming that they are the victims of racism. When charges don’t kindle countercharges, as they generally do, the guilt feelings can be sadly misleading for blacks and whites alike. “This is probably a racist statement on my part,” says one confused woman, “but I feel the black males should take responsibility for their families.”
Oral history, by its nature, trades in feelings and perceptions, and sometimes, in the matter of race, it seems too blunt an instrument to be useful. These limits are nowhere clearer than on the subject of the underclass. Witnesses paint a devastating picture of what is happening in the projects: children without futures, unrelenting crime and fear of violence, a demoralization so profound that most people are at a loss to describe it. Personal testimonies convey the despair; even a raw cry of pain from the ghetto may serve a useful function if it galvanizes some concern. But no string of stories, no matter how powerful, will explain black poverty or produce a ready cure. Here more than anywhere, it is much too easy to imply that the problem is racism, that it is all Reagan’s fault or that the solution depends on white society. Like a stream of TV images, the stories here are startling, but sometimes perilously simple and ill-served by an editor, like Terkel, who thinks that the powers that be are always at fault.
At the same time, in other ways oral history is a perfect tool to help us dig ourselves out of our racial fixations. To the degree that these testimonies have a common theme, it is that knowledge--contact and acquaintanceship--is the only real antidote to bias. “Racism,” says one witness, “is based on ignorance and lack of exposure.” “I think the only change can take place if there’s a mingling,” echoes another.
Blacks and whites get to know each other, they see beyond their stereotypes: It works every time, according to countless Terkel sources. “They cried, they cussed, they prayed, they had desires. Just like myself,” says a former Klansman of the blacks he came to know through his work on a school board--and before he knew it, a man who had rejoiced at Martin Luther King’s death was devoting all his time to school desegregation.
What’s needed between the races, says Terkel, is mostly “Affirmative Civility.” This is not a lot to ask, but it won’t happen until black and white spend time together, working through their ritual accusations and then getting to know each other. Terkel’s collection is no substitute for an experience of integration, but it is as good a place as any to start to listen to the other race.