Dialog in Black and White

This dialog between James Baldwin and Budd Schulberg began spontaneously. They have been friends for years--a relationship that has included fervent agreement and fierce disagreement. There had been one evening long ago when they had argued into the earlymorning hours about the motives of Bobby Kennedy in backing the efforts of James Meredith to break through the color barrier at Ole Miss. Baldwin suspected that Kennedy's was a grandstand play and that he did not care profoundly about redressing the wrongs that have been done to Negroes over the centuries. Schulberg, who knew the Senator personally, argued that Kennedy was much more involved than many people seemed to realize, not merely in the individual issue of a James Meredith but in the national deprivation of the Negro.

In subsequent meetings, from New York to Chicago to Hollywood, this impassioned and friendly American dialog continued. At the 1964 Democratic Convention in Atlantic City (which Schulberg reported for Playboy), he had said to Dick Gregory, "I agree with what you say about the setup of the black ghetto in Philadelphia"; to which Gregory had snapped, "We don't need you white liberals to agree with us." Schulberg related this exchange to his friend James Baldwin, wondering if this were a counterracism the more militant Negro spokesmen were beginning to reflect.

It may have been at this point of the extended discourse that their dialog took a subtle but crucial turn. Had the Negro's sense of rejection and alienation, a hundred years of galling frustration since the so-called Emancipation, pushed this bottom tenth into irreconcilable hatred of "Whitey"? Schulberg asked Baldwin, "What is the real goal of the Negro revolution? Is it to become part of the American body politic, something not yet achieved despite all the good old laws and the good new laws? If it is, then Dick Gregory is wrong; you need all the genuine white allies you can find. I mean me, Saul Alinsky, Nat Hentoff, Walter Reuther, Bobby Kennedy, the white kids who die with the black kids in Mississippi; you need anyone who actively despises the color line, trying to save our country from what you call 'the racial nightmare.'

"On the other hand," Schulberg conceded, "there has begun to run through the attitude of some Negro leaders and intellectuals a feeling that it is too late for American whites--indeed, for the entire Caucasian Western civilization-- that we had our chance and blew it, in Vietnam and Algeria, Harlem and Watts. Elijah. Muhammad sees only a few short years until the new Armageddon in which the nonwhite races of the world-- from the black ghettos to Red China-- will regain their rightful place as dominators of the world. I can understand the appeal of this idea to the Negro who has suffered 400 years of slavery and humiliation. But it seems to me that you, as a celebrated Negro spokesman, have not quite decided--which side are you on, Elijah Muhammad's side or what you call my sloppy liberal-interracial side?"

To which Baldwin responded, "Baby, don't lay that on me. It's not for me to decide, it's for you to decide. I don't mean you, personally, I mean you and all my well-meaning white friends. From where you sit, maybe you think we're making encouraging progress. But from where I sit, and from where my brothers are huddling tonight in their black ghettos from Boston to San Diego, we can't wait for laws that take so long to pass and then so much longer--it seems forever--to enforce. We're ready now. We've been ready for generations. And if white America isn't ready with us, then Elijah has a point--history will swallow you up as it has swallowed other arrogant civilizations that seemed invincible but that carried along in them some cancer, some fatal flaw."

It was against this background--against the fire-streaked skies of Los Angeles, the smoldering slums of Chicago and Cleveland and New York, the imminent explosion in the nation's capital that L. B. J. calls a ticking clock, against this storm-darkened sky--that Schulberg and Baldwin continued to talk. What follows is in no way a formal debate but what might be called a recorded eavesdropping, a taped but thoroughly informal conversation between two contemporary American authors who have managed to remain close friends in the heat of conversational battle, on dangerous ground.

Baldwin: It's the nature of the human race, isn't it, to categorize, to label? Using both of us as abstractions, you and me, Budd Schulberg and Jimmy Baldwin, one crucial difference between us is that you, Budd Schulberg, are one kind of abstraction, or legend, in the eyes and ears of people who don't know Budd Schulberg. And I'm another kind of abstraction, or menace, in the eyes and ears of the people who don't know me.

Schulberg: But, Jimmy, when you talk about abstract difference--I feel no difference, no abstract sense of superiority or inferiority between you, James Baldwin, and me, Budd Schulberg--

Baldwin: As a matter of fact, there are a great many differences between you and me. I'm James Baldwin. That's a very essential difference.

Schulberg: I mean I feel no subjective superiority because my skin happens to be fair and yours dark. I know that doesn't make me smarter or more talented and I don't believe it should give me any special privileges. It does but it shouldn't, and I think I have a right to resent it as much as you do. There is, of course, that practical difference between us. You go out on the street, as you reminded me on Central Park West, and you can't get a cab. And you--not Jimmy Baldwin, but speaking for Negroes generally--can't get a job, or as good a job.

Baldwin: Well, as far as that goes, sometimes neither can you.

Schulberg: If you're thinking of me not as a WASP but as a member of another minority, that's perfectly true. It's forgotten in the light of all that talk about Jewish success in America, just how many big American companies still have anti-Jewish policies, how many hotels, resorts, real-estate developments discriminate against Jews. That's why I think it's tragic when Negroes and Jews start to stereotype each other. I agree with a lot of what you say, Jimmy. But what happens with racial suffering as it happened to the Jews and is happening to the Negroes is that they fight back with their own counterprejudice.

Baldwin: Let me put a parenthesis here--a dangerous parenthesis, but one that may serve to illuminate something of the American Negro's resentment. And it's this: I was here first. I mean, historically.

Schulberg: Who?

Baldwin: The Negro.

Schulberg: On what basis--

Baldwin: I, the Negro, arrived before the Jew.

Schulberg: What are you talking about, Jimmy? I've read a lot about the Muslims--I'm not talking about the black nationalists or the followers of Malcolm X now--and I think that's Muhammad's pseudo history. I don't dig anybody's racism--white, black or yellow. That "I was here first" is Muslim bullshit.

Baldwin: Now we're getting down to it.

Schulberg: I don't know what that means--you came first. It is the most absurd--

Baldwin: Obviously, you know that. I don't mean that we came first on earth.

Schulberg: But it sounds so close to the Muslim oversimplification, what Elijah Muhammad said about the black man being the original man and the white man a pale, mongrel, "white-devil" bad imitation. It's just the blond-Aryan-supremacy myth in reverse; it has no real, no scientific basis. It's the crude theory of the white racist turned inside out. If you really want to go back to the origin of man, we'd have to go into all--but that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about today.

Baldwin: Precisely. Let's take me, Jimmy Baldwin. Historically speaking, I've been here for 400 years. Let's say that you just got off the boat on Friday and you can't speak English yet; but on the following Tuesday I'm working for you.

Schulberg: Jimmy, nobody could speak English! The Jews, the Italians, the Germans, the Poles--who could speak English when they arrived here except the first settlers who came from England? None of these people could speak English, but they brought with them their share of European culture and education that enabled them to pull them-selves out of the ghetto--although it didn't happen overnight. First-generation Jews, Italians, Irish lived in slums, worked in sweatshops, they suffered; and if they painfully pulled themselves up, it is culturally explainable.

But the Negro was brought here forcibly in chains--the cultures of his home land were crushed, wiped out. The slave was no longer allowed to identify with his past; he sang Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child--he was a motherless child in a cruel new world. But the Jews had thousands of years of written culture and recorded oppression to relate to--it could not be stamped out, unless you gassed them by the millions, as Hitler did. You can't take the Negro "nightmare" and the fact that the Jewish culture was more intact, and then try to compare one kind of persecution with the other. I feel we're drifting into what could become a careless attack on the Jews. That's what some of the Muslims do. The positive things that Elijah Muhammad does for the dignity of his disciples, and what other black nationalist groups do for their followers--I can understand the appeal; I can understand why that attracts you. But at the same time you can't swallow the "all white men are white devils" theory, not quite.

Baldwin: I'm not aware that I've ever been even vaguely tempted by the "white-devil" theory. I would certainly never teach it or allow it to be taught to any child of mine, or to anyone I cared about. But I'm trying to get to something else--

Schulberg: I think if there is any value in this conversation, this dialog, in which we agree, I think, on immediate issues, it's to root out our differences. Are you, Jimmy Baldwin, disagreeing with me? Or are you the Negro saying goodbye, even to your white liberal or--since that has become a worn-out adjective--your white allies? It's an odd question--

Baldwin: It's a very curious gamble.

Schulberg: --because there is so much that we agree on and yet there is this rankling difference. I am willing to say to you, to every citizen of this country--

Baldwin: I am not a citizen of this country. Or I am not so considered by the people of this country.

Schulberg: Then we have to make them consider you a citizen, Jimmy. We have to make you one.

Baldwin: But, baby--

Schulberg: I mean, either you go the Negro separatist route, like the Muslims, or you go the full-citizenship route. The former is more dramatic. It's an emotional answer to galling frustration. I really get the Elijah Muhammad message: The "full citizenship" thing is maddeningly slow, yes, and suspect--years and years overdue and still so damned far from genuine acceptance, the kind of acceptance where race prejudice is an archaic problem, like capital punishment for ten-year-old pickpockets. Not that we all have to be the same color; but that we finally accept each other's humanity--what's inside of us, not the superficial coloring of the epidermis. I'm ready for that now. I don't see any other way. But all this talk about the past--"I was here first"--frankly, Jimmy, I don't see how that helps to--

Baldwin: Budd, what I am trying to get at when I talk about the past is not meant principally to refer to the past, but to the present. When I said, "I was here first," I wasn't trying to pass myself off as some kind of aristocrat. I was trying to suggest the depth and tenacity of the anti-human attitudes which have ruled in this country for so long and which have effectively prevented the Negro, for the most part, from acquiring or from using those modern skills which you say Europeans brought here with them. It's these attitudes which have created so dangerous a depth of Negro bitterness, resentment and despair. My image of you getting off a boat on Friday and my working for you on Tuesday wasn't pulled out of the air. A Negro in this country is endlessly confronted with the spectacle of somebody getting off a boat, from Hungary, from France, from England or Switzerland, from Germany, from anywhere in Europe, who can't speak English when he arrives, who has certainly not, this time, brought from Europe skills more modern than those which should be at the disposal of the Negro here; and, yes, on Friday, he does get off a boat and on Tuesday, you, the Negro, are working for him and he tells you what to do. It takes him that long to become an American. Only that long. You, the Negro, have been here for 400 years and you haven't made it yet--you're still expected to "wait"--but he's made it in a matter of hours. And he treats you like all other Americans do.

What more can any society do to make vivid how profoundly you are despised? And how is one supposed to react to this? I must say that I think the Negro patience or resilience or whatever--I don't know what the word would be--has been incredible, is a fantastic achievement. But, of course, there are Negroes who feel that this patience has been abject, is ignoble, and, frankly, I'm unwilling to dismiss their point of view. It's a point of view which would simply be taken for granted if we were talking about white men. Which throws a very curious light on that Judeo-Christian ethic we have argued about from time to time. I'm forced to realize, after all, that the creators, the heirs, of this ethic have, very deliberately, with a ruthless single-mindedness, attempted to reduce me to something less than a man. And where you get confused, Budd, I think, and talk about my throwing in the towel with Elijah--although you know very well that that could never happen--is that, of course, out of motives of self-respect and self-preservation, I'm bound to question an ethic, or a way of life, or a system of reality which has nearly destroyed me and which obviously intends to destroy my children. How long am I expected passively to acquiesce in the mouthing of an ethic in which no one--at least no society, and certainly not this one--believes? One begins to feel despairing, one begins to feel foolish; and one begins to dig beneath the bequeathed realities in the hope of arriving at a new coherence and a new strength, in the hope, in fact, of being released from an incipient schizophrenia. But at that moment, the moment one begins to pull away in order to see, one is accused of thinking "black." But I don't really know what thinking "black" means--except that it seems to pose a threat to people who think, I suppose, "white."

Schulberg: OK. You put it well. I agree with you that the Negro has been fantastically patient, resilient. I know it's heresy to what they call the"white power structure," but in Watts, from my firsthand experience, the young people are mentally healthier, have more pride, a stronger sense of identity since the revolt. Mayor Yorty and even the McCone Report called it "a riot of criminals and hoodlums," and refused to dignify it as rebellion. But the overwhelming majority in Watts called it The Revolt. It cost 31 Negro lives and 3 white lives--34 human lives: a terrible price; but they broke through a wall; apathy turned inside out became hostility.

I have members of my writing group, talented writers, who are antiwhite. I think I understand them. As long as we have the Birchers and the Reagans and the Murphys who "think white" with a vengeance, some of my young poets in Malcolm X sweatshirts will draw their energy and inspiration from being antiwhite. If I can understand that, maybe I am able to "think black," too. It all depends on what we mean by "thinking black." Maybe I don't think as black as Malcolm X, but I have a hunch I think a hell of a lot blacker than the Urban League or the brass of the NAACP. "Thinking black" sounds like an absolute, but it's a relative term--there are so many shades of black, so many shades of white. I agree I shouldn't try to put you in the same bag with Elijah, if you won't put me in another kind of bag--the ofay bag. Only the truth can set us both free, not oversimplifications like black this and white that. As a writer, you would have a hard time describing that--

Baldwin: Well, perhaps. Of course, I'm a writer. But I must say this: This is the first time I've ever tried to talk about Jews at all; because I really did grow up in the Old Testament, because my father was a preacher. But when I was very young, in high school, my best friend was a Jew. And this was very strange. Because all Jews were in the Bible. And I had never seen a Jew my age, and I had been taught to hate' them by my father, who considered himself a Jew. Now this is probably very interesting: who considered himself a Jew in terms of the children of Israel coming out of Egypt. We have that song, you know, I Wish I Had Died in Egypt Land. That's all Old Testament.

Schulberg: So, you see, we're very close.

Baldwin: That's why I'm here today, because we can talk together. But as a writer, I didn't dare try to create a Jew. I didn't dare. I never have; because I was at once too close and too far. I did not know what it meant--what it meant to the Jew to be a Jew. And since so much of my life had been involved with Jews, and so much of my life had been saved by people technically called Jewish, whom I loved very much, I didn't dare malign, by my own inadequacy, a people who meant so much to me.

There is an irreducible fact, I think, which contributes to the Negro resentment of the Jew. I don't think it's rational--it's rooted, perhaps, in the expectations one victim has of another victim, and maybe it has something to do with the Old Testament and old songs; but, you know, whatever Jews came here, came here to get away from something. You know--in the main, not entirely; and in the spirit, perhaps, not at all. On the contrary, I suppose the journey here was an attempt to hold onto, to keep alive the Jewish heritage. But here they came, and in the main they prospered and did not appear to have any difficulty in adopting the racial mores of the country. And I suspect that the Negro resents this from the Jew far more than he resents it from anybody else. And, of course, I think it's likely that anyone whose history has been destroyed envies and resents those whose history remains intact. And the Jew is the only American, in any meaningful sense, to have brought his history across the ocean. Everybody else really left their history behind them, happy, I think, to be rid of it; though perhaps they have begun to miss it now. Anyway, I think that part of the resentment, or let us simply say the tension, comes from the fact that the Jew managed to survive the European pogroms and came here, to another country, and made no effort at all to understand that what had been happening to the Jew in Russia is happening to the Negro here; and that, furthermore, the Negro has no place to go.

Schulberg: I don't think that's true-- that the Jews don't understand. I think a hell of a lot of them--a hell of a lot of us--do understand.

Baldwin: Where can the Negro go? The Russian Jew came here. An American Negro cannot go back to Africa. He's an American. Not according to the Americans, perhaps, but according to him, and according to me!

Schulberg: According to me, too. I'm an American, and I say--

Baldwin: But you are not. Neither of us is. We're both very American, but we do seem to be, as far as most of the country is concerned, marginal Americans, suspect, perhaps expendable--

Schulberg: Jimmy, look--you ask where can a Negro go--I feel there is a significant difference between the Jew caught in the Polish and Russian and German Pogroms, who escaped to America, and the Negroes caught in the pogroms in the South or trapped in the black ghettos in the North. You might call those big-city riots in the North pogroms in reverse. The Jews of Europe had total state power against them; not just a hostile population, stupid peasants, narrow-minded burghers, but the full power of the national government of those countries against them. The Negroes here in the middle Sixties, no matter how wronged, no matter how desperate their lives are now, how bleak their future may be--still have a lot of Federal power on their side. They have civil rights laws and voting laws. Yes, we have white state juries automatically acquitting white murderers of Negro freedom fighters. But we also have Federal courts finding white Southern officials guilty of contempt for not protecting civil rights marchers, You may laugh, but we even have Lyndon Johnson singing We Shall Overcome on national television. Of course the Negroes are still far, shamefully far, from "Freedom Now." But they are not as alone as the Jews were in Russia and Poland and Germany. I mean, the czar and Marshal Pilsudski and Hitler never sang the Kol Nidre, at least in public. Here the Negroes have allies--if they want them. I know how hard it is for the hostile Negro in Watts to realize that, and maybe there aren't enough allies to satisfy alienated Negroes in the neglected (continued on page 282)Dialog(continued from page 136) ghettos. But I still think there is a difference between the Jew driven out of Russia or Poland and the Negro fighting for his life, his identity, in Watts, Cleveland and Chicago.

Those Jewish victims of hate in northern Europe had no organizations they could turn to, as the Negro has--a whole spectrum, from SNCC and CORE to King's S.C.L.C., the NAACP, not to mention all the contesting black nationalist groups. As the Jews went from Poland to America, the Negro can go from hopelessly white America to an America he is fighting to change and where a hell of a struggle is going on North and South.

A good example is Fannie Lou Hamer, the Mississippi sharecropper's wife who's been in the middle of the voter registration fight. I think the Fannie Lou Hamers are your answer to, Where can the Negro go? From no freedom to some freedom to, hopefully, full freedom is where the Negro can go in America.

I know he's not there yet--we're not there yet, not by several city blocks, like the blocks in Watts and the ghettos of Chicago--we're at the some-freedom second stage. I realize, if you have to qualify freedom, it's like saying, we've got a pretty good race horse--if only he had a fourth leg! I realize time is running out. Hope, for millions of young Negroes, for acceptance from the white man as fellow men, is running out fast. And I'm not saying, Be patient. I think the only way to galvanize what hope is left is to be impatient. But some hope is there. I know it's hard for the unemployed in Watts to see it, or the voteless in Mississippi and Alabama. You can't eat hope. You can't pay your rent with hope. But it's there. Maybe that's what our argument is about--is there any hope for the Negro in a white-majority society? Or, to put it another way, is there no place for the white who genuinely despises the color line, in the so-called Negro revolution?

Baldwin: You're very persuasive. And very moving, too. Perhaps I've talked too much about "Where can the Negro go?" It wasn't I who was planning to go anywhere. I wasn't thinking about my generation at all, in fact. Our children are being murdered. This has been very much on my mind, I didn't realize how much. And some of us have been trying--despairingly--to figure out what to do to save at least a remnant on that day when we are forced to realize that there is no hope for us here, no hope at all. As far as I am concerned, when my countrymen can set dogs on children and blow children up in Sunday school, the holocaust is not far off. And, more than that--if I'm to be honest--one can't but feel, no matter how deeply one distrusts the feeling, that the holocaust, the total leveling, salvation by fire, "no remission of sins save by the shedding of blood," may be the only hope.

Well. Let me quarrel, provisionally, anyway, with your principal assumption. You say that the Jews in Russia, Poland, etc., had the power of the state against them--a power which was often, if not always, reinforced by the Christian Church. Which raises the by-no-means-trivial question of the precise relation of this Church to the Judaeo-Christian ethic you spoke of earlier. But the American Negro, here, you say, has the power of the state behind him, at least the Federal power. This is a very attractive formulation and it would make me very happy to be able to accept it. But I am forced to question it. I am not sure that the implied contrast between the European states and America can be made so quickly; and it seems very clear to me that what we must here call the American state is of a ferocious complexity and is at war with itself. If the real power of the state is behind the Negro, then it is impossible to explain why the people feel free to victimize the Negro as they do. Power, after all, is power; and the very definition of power is that it controls action. It may indeed be true, and this is our hope, that the aspirations of the state are sympathetic to the Negro's claims; and it may again be true that the highest intelligence operative in the state recognizes their urgency. But I think it is also true that the structure of the state, and the habits and presumed self-interest of the citizens constitute the mightiest of bulwarks against social change, particularly a social change so radical and so deep. This is why I am less impressed than you are by the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act--it is my impression that these rights were guaranteed me by the Constitution over a hundred years ago.

Fannie Lou Hamer impresses me very much, indeed. I know her a little, and I don't think anyone can possibly admire her more than I. But she doesn't own General Motors or General Electric, nor does she yet have any relevant existence for them. Her power is entirely moral. But this is not a power which her countrymen, in the main or at this moment, feel themselves free to respect. They consider that they have, materially, too much to lose. We have not discussed the economic structure of the American state in relation to the American Negro, but it is very clear that the problem of his presence can scarcely begin to be resolved without a radical alteration of that structure. Of course, these present days, to suggest that social problems can have economic ramifications, or that the Negro's present and continuing plight is due, to an incalculable degree, to the fact that he began his life in the West as a source of cheap labor, is to leave oneself open to the charge of communism (which has become, simply, a know nothing term). But facts are facts, and they outlast labels.

Finally, however, I certainly agree with you and Mrs. Hamer--I must. The question, for me, isn't whether or not there's any hope for a Negro in a white-majority society; the question is whether or not the society is able to free itself of these obsolete terms and become, in effect, and joyously, color-blind. If the society can't do this, then there's no hope for anybody in it--which answers, it seems to me, your last question concerning the role of-- white liberals. I've had very hard things to say about liberals, but I'm bound to say that I was never thinking of you or people like you. I was thinking of that vast army of people whose convictions are mere quotations and whose good will costs them nothing, who are always presuming to lecture the Negro on his table manners and who are hurt, to the point of vindictiveness, whenever their utterly useless good will is questioned. I think you owe it to me, as my friend, to fight me, to let me get away with nothing, to force me to be clear, to force me to be honest, to allow me to take no refuge in rage or in despair, or in the peculiar form of complacency sometimes known as Negro militancy. And, of course, I owe you the same. This means that we're certainly going to hurt each other's feelings from time to time. But that's one of the ways in which people learn from each other. And we're tough.

Schulberg: OK, Jimmy, I've been listening to you, carefully; and since I agree with so much of what you say, it may be that to make my point about the difference between the predicament of the Jew in czarist Russia and the predicament of the Negro in late-20th Century America I have overstated or oversimplified my argument. "A ferocious complexity" is a phrase I accept for the conditions of our present-day society. That is a much more accurate description of our common dilemma than to say that Federal power is on the side of the Negro or that the Negro has no place to go and that all hope is gone. I don't want to be trapped into saying that because Johnson shrewdly adopts the slogan We Shall Overcome or pushes new voting laws through Congress, all is sweetness and light and the American dream has at last come true. Every hour I spend in Watts--and I have logged hundreds of hours there with my writers' class; I know--I see with my own eyes that the American dream is an ugly nightmare along what we call Charcoal Alley Number One. I still don't know whether we have the guts, the imagination, the generosity, the empathy--yes, and the sense of self-preservation--to break through and cure that nightmare.

But I wonder if we can cure it by pitting black against white as the Muslims have been preaching and the white segregationists keep trying to do. And I'm not talking only of the Ku Kluxers but the real-estate boards who draw a color line across our cities. I'm talking about the people who voted for Proposition 14, a know-nothing prejudiced proposition to repeal a law favoring racial justice in the real-estate field. I am against white nationalists and black nationalists, but I think I have more sympathy for the latter, because they are the inevitable outgrowth of the former. They are the children of despair and neglect and centuries of racial hatred. I think the Negro revolution needs as its ally the white democratic revolution. I think I understand the call for black power, but I don't think ten percent of the population--make that five percent, because the other five percent are probably Uncle Toms--can ever win its battle without the enlightened whites who are just as much against the status quo, the power structure, as are the militant Negroes.

I think the militant Negro movement is a welcome test of our sincerity--it cuts through our hypocrisy and it may even save us from our most dangerous enemy within, complacency. I think our society could eventually fall apart from smugness and complacency and that it's toughened by criticism. I think we should stop kidding ourselves. Look at our affluent Los Angeles, with Watts festering in unemployment and frustration--hell, it's one city, divisible, with liberty and justice for some. As long as we have a mayor and a police department whose attitude toward the ghetto is almost identical to the attitude of the Nazis toward the Warsaw ghetto, what looks like lawlessness--criminality--to the outside is more like self-defense and self-determination to the inside. That may be dangerous talk, but societies can be strengthened and even saved by dangerous talk and tough criticism. Sure, it makes a lot of people mad, but that's good.

I was talking publicly against Proposition 14. I took along your book The Fire Next Time, and I read aloud from it. I closed my talk with it. I passed on to public audiences in Southern California the warning that if they didn't bestir themselves in behalf of Negro social rights-- not just civil rights but what I call soul rights, full acceptance of Negroes into all the streams of our national life--they would face the fire next time. To the shame of California, Proposition 14 passed, about two to one, even with Governor Brown and the state administration trying to defeat it. And, sure enough, the fires lit up the skies in Los Angeles in August 1965. And next time, unless much more is done than is being done, the Negro may sweep into the white communities that deny them jobs and transportation and decent schools and hospitals and pride.

So I agree with 90 percent or maybe 95 percent of what you say. But where I disagree, where I want to pull you over to my side and away from what seems to me a tendency to the Negro-isolationist side, is to urge you, beg you, to keep on thinking in terms of your own happy phrase, "joyously color-blind"--against falling into the danger of looking at the world as if it is inevitably, hopelessly, bloodedly divided between black and white. I know it may seem more realistic to think that way, to think negatively and pessimistically that the white man had his chance and goofed--irretrievably goofed. But that leaves out the millions of whites who keep fighting against job discrimination, housing and school discrimination, facto and de facto, and the whites who have been dying and hurting with their Negro friends in Selma, in Mississippi, in Chicago. If those are what the Klan and the hoodlums of Cicero call "white niggers," then I hope the "white niggers" have the "white bastards" outnumbered in America.

Baldwin: No, Budd--

Schulberg: I am appealing as man to man, writer to writer, not for anybody to say to me--as Dick Gregory said when I said, "I agree with you"--"We don't need you white liberals to agree with us." I notice he's a little more careful when he gets on TV and plays coy, but that's what he said to me: "We don't need you white liberals to agree with us." Maybe that is what this dialog is finally about. There are millions, scores of millions of bigoted whites. Does Dick Gregory really want to join us in fighting them? Or does he want to lump us all together as "white devils" a la Elijah Muhammad? That's what I'm calling on you for, as an influential American writer--to make the choice.

Baldwin: Yes, I see. I don't know what happened between you and Dick, so I won't talk about that. Dick's a friend of mine. But I must say, if I'm to be honest, that I have no difficulty at all in understanding how even an almost totally, or even absolutely totally, unchauvinis-tic Negro can yet be driven, in a given hour, on a given day, to saying, and saying with venom, "You whites!" He may, at the next moment, embrace you and apologize--I've been there, and I know. But, Budd, we live with pain and rage--with pain and rage. And it's got to come out--for your health as a white man, for my health as a black man. That's the only way we'll ever be free. We are attempting, after all, to break a very, very long silence. And we've always known that what lived in this silence was hideous and full of danger; we have to grow--

Schulberg: Grow from there. I am not "you white" and you and Gregory are not "you blacks." Are we to be a society of people--all kinds of people--or not? Not a "Great Society" the way L. B. J. keeps cheerleading us on. That's the post-postgraduate course. Have we matriculated as a society?

Baldwin: That's the dilemma, the American problem. At the moment we have no society at all. Look at what happened with Proposition 14, for example. You mentioned it earlier. I was in California at the time, you remember. Well, of course, out there in that American El Dorado, that unmitigated horror of a place, of course, good, clean, empty American clowns like Reagan and Murphy would be very popular. Ain't a damn thing paid for out there; they're all living in terror of the poorhouse. American backbone! If your Cadillac and your swimming pool aren't paid for and you know you can't go any farther West--the next stop is Tokyo, God help us, which is East--then, of course, any black boy or Mexican coming anywhere near your monstrously mortgaged joint, which is all you have, is an intolerable threat. And it's on this level the country lives, that's our society. Then, when the riots come, they tremble for their unpaid-for swimming pools and ask, "What does the Negro want?" and all that bullshit, and ask the Negro to respect the law. What law? The law which has just robbed him of any possibility of moving out of the ghetto and beats him and brutalizes him, in order to protect their swimming pools? Those riots are always blamed on Negroes, but they're not the Negro's fault. Negro "looters"--who's looting whom, I'd like to know--

Schulberg: Wait a minute, Jimmy, this is something I feel I can talk about firsthand. I mean I swim in those swimming pools and I also have sweated out a lot of time on East 103rd Street in the heart of Watts, on murderously hot days when the older unemployed wander through the vacant lots and the restless, unemployed kids cluster on street corners and dream of the momentary manhood they enjoyed--it's crazy, but maybe enjoyed is the word--under the guns of the National Guard. In a piece I wrote about it for the Los Angeles Times--a piece that provoked a hundred love letters and a score of hate letters--I wrote that there are candles flickering in the darkness of Watts but that the funk is deep; and I said that it was not Negro funk but white funk, white know-nothingism; and I said that, to crib from Marat, unless we pick ourselves up by the hair, turn ourselves inside out and re-examine our sick city--our sick society--with new eyes, we will be inviting riots which are actually deeply rooted rebellions. That piece I wrote was put up on the bulletin board of the Westminster Neighborhood Center and the Watts Happening Coffee House. In fact, they're still up there; and I honestly believe if we can't live up to what I wrote--and Jimmy, I know how big an if that is--if we can't match our performance to our promises, if we can't live up to our noble words from the Declaration of Independence to the Emancipation Proclamation to the new voting laws, this could be the beginning of our decline and fall, even deserves to be. And I'll help you write theepitaph!

Our society will die on the rack of injustice to Negroes if we don't solve it. We're only arguing now about whether we're going to have a Negro explosion against the "white devils" or a common effort of Negroes and whites to solve it. I don't want to sound melodramatic, but we just may be facing the democratic last stand. And I can only pray--not to God but to Sandburg's The People, Yes--that somehow we emerge from this battle in better shape than either Custer or the Sioux.

Baldwin: In this society, more than any other I can think of, with the exception of the Third Reich, one needs precisely an affirmation of the possibility of human life. And what I am trying to say when I say it doesn't matter what you think or what I think--I obviously don't mean that literally--is that what happens to us is less important than what happens to our children, all our children. We can take care of ourselves, more or less. In my case, certainly, it's mainly less, but that's all right. I'm not profoundly concerned about your being a Jew or my being a Negro. We can take these facts as given. But our being American--that's something else, which is yet to be achieved. Or defined.

All that jazz, Negro, Jewish--it's pure bullshit. These terms are used to hide from every one of us, including, at this moment, you and me, the real disaster in this country--the failure of morality that is produced by a failure of identity.

Schulberg: Jimmy, if I follow you, when you speak about a failure of identity, I think you're reaching for something I was hoping we could get around to--I mean Negritude and the positive aspects of black nationalism and the new call for black power, which doesn't seem to panic me as much as it may some other people. It may not necessarily mean the Mau Mau screaming for "white blood" in frightened and prejudiced suburbia; it may simply be the search for self-esteem, self-respect, dignity and pride, and the Negro's fair share of the total power. After all, the Irish were once awfully low on the racist totem pole. There used to be signs that read no Irish allowed; but in New York they built up a full head of steam of Irish power through Tammany Hall. Black power is an emotional phrase that represents an emotional movement that is still groping for its own definition. It may even be that through black power and a period of frustration, confusion and rejection on the part of the would-be white ally, we meet together again on a higher plane of integration.

Now if I say I can see positive aspects to black nationalism, in which the black man goes searching back to his African roots in order to find out who he is--an identity which you say the Jew brought with him intact from Europe but which has been denied the Afro-American--and if I say that I can understand the appeal of black power to young black people who have felt their identity crushed and denied in a world of white power--if I can see how qualities of leadership and self-respect can be developed under the new flag of black power even if the honest feelings of sympathetic whites are hurt or even trampled in the process--then it may seem as if I am arguing not only with you but with myself, that I am arguing for an interracial struggle against the persistent, virulent bigotry, and at the same time being too permissive toward the recent phenomenon called, but not yet clearly understood as, black power. I am inclined to say, if that be ambivalence, make the most of it. I want to see an America that lives up to its promises, not its lies and hypocrisies. I want, for my own preservation as well as yours, an America joyously color-blind. But it may be that the new generation of Negroes, who even reject the term Negro and follow the charismatic Malcolm X in calling themselves black men or Afro-Americans, must find themselves through their own religions, societies, organizations, as the Jews and the Irish and the other minorities did, in order to cope with white America from a stronger position. That is what I mean by the possibility of meeting together on a higher plane of integration.

Baldwin: For many years, aided by what can only be described, alas, as a handful of whites, who are looked on with great suspicion and hostility by the majority of whites, Negroes have been attempting to awaken the sleeping conscience of this unhappy nation. They have not succeeded. When a movement realizes that its tactics have failed, it is forced to evolve new tactics. As for racism in reverse, the hatred and bitterness to which this phrase has reference is felt most deeply by those who consider themselves helpless, who see no way of changing their condition. Also, it is worth pointing out, this racism in reverse, unlike the other, is absolutely impotent, and does not bother white people at all--until, of course, the ghetto explodes and they once again uneasily wonder, What does the Negro want? But when people have a sense that they can change their situation, and are really trying to do so, the need for hatred, which is always, after all, a more or less disguised self-hatred, is very sharply reduced.

The panic is really caused by the fact that, as some of us have always known, a change in the Negro situation implies a radical change in the country. It is not a matter of placing a few well-scrubbed darkies in a few strategically located windows. It is not a matter of so many black clerks or so many black cops. It is not a matter of supplying sprinklers for the ghetto streets. It is a matter of altering all our institutions in the direction of a greater freedom, recognizing that the Negro is an integral part of this nation, has also paid for it with his blood, and is here to stay. He can't go back to wherever he came from any more than anyone else can. And this demands--which is as difficult as it is obvious--that we begin to look at ourselves in another way; as part of the human race, in fact; and evolve a new ethic, an ethic which will transcend, for example, the profit motive which has made chaos of our cities and made bewildered rebels or demoralized monsters of our children.

The Negro assault impresses itself on the American mind as anarchy; whereas, in fact, anarchy lies on the road one takes in flight from this assault. For let us also face the fact that the Negro's experience, his untapped vitality--and I think that you can bear witness to this--is absolutely indispensable for this transformation and, in many ways, in many areas, will be the only hope of this transformation. If we can release ourselves from the deeply held concept of a master race, we will no longer need an inferior one. Without an inferior race, racism in reverse cannot exist. But those people who are already weeping about racism in reverse may very well help create the evil they decry. The Negro simply wants to be dealt with as another human being. No more. And no less.

If we are not able to accept this, if we are not able to change, then the lives we lead in America will become so unbearable that we will surrender any remote attempt to become responsible for our lives, and at that moment anarchy and tyranny have come. We really must conquer our tremendous delusion that what has happened to others cannot happen to us. This presupposes that Americans are not capable of the evil which others have done. But there are witnesses, above and below the ground, whose testimony denies this.

We are trapped in massive moral contradiction. We will perish if we cannot resolve it. I cannot believe that we are fighting in Vietnam for freedom, for example. There are many, many reasons that I find myself unable to believe this, but, to get down to the nitty-gritty, I don't believe it because freedom, it seems to me, is precisely what Americans fear most. It is preposterous, at least, to suppose that a nation which cannot give me free elections, and which has not yet learned to live with me, even though we speak the same language, live in the same cities, read the same books, and even though I am toilet trained and know how to use a shower, is, by some miracle of transcendence, able to free millions of exotic peasants. And one of the things that has happened, and which will continue to happen, to the real horror of the American Government and the anger of the American people, is that many Negroes, especially the young, are aware of this and consider the struggle they are waging in America to be analogous to, indissoluble from, the struggle of the dispossessed all over the world. Even if the economy had the wherewith-al--which it doesn't--to buy the American Negro, multitudes of Negroes would refuse the bargain. A prominent Negro is reported as having said that he wanted a U.S. victory in Vietnam because otherwise the U.S. would be weakened, and he wanted to be part of a great nation. Well, in this hard world, one must make choices, and I prefer to be part of a just nation.

Schulberg: Jimmy, the hour is late, both literally and figuratively. I agree that you and I, as abstractions, as symbols, either become responsible for this country or we let it go by default. And we cannot build an honest definition of America until we accept the "ferocious complexity" as its foundation. But once we accept this precondition, "ferocious complexity," can you still accuse all Americans of fearing freedom? That's much too sweeping--I can't agree. But tell me that "too many Americans fear freedom" and I would give you my ferociously complex assent. A revolution that we began in the 18th Century, we seem too selfish, too corrupted or too timid to fight through to its logical conclusion.

Baldwin: If your "logical conclusion" includes the slogan "black power," I hate to think what those words do to the wholesome, simple, pious, go-getting American family who have always been terrified of Negroes anyway. But why should the word "power" when coupled with the word "black" strike such panic in the American breast? No one seems to be frightened of the white power which, after all, rules the country and is responsible for a corruption as stunning in its extent as it is deadly in its effects, which has already murdered millions of Negroes and which, at this very moment, hangs like the most menacing of clouds over the lives of all black men and women and all black boys and girls.

Schulberg: Jimmy, if we fail to turn ourselves inside out, if we are unable to live with and not merely wax rhetorical about liberty and justice for all, if we fail to resolve our massive contradictions, then I agree with you that we could go under. But before we go our fatal, separate ways, I think we must try once and for all the unprecedented social experiment of living together. The clock is ticking.