|
The psychological failure of the good-hearted weakling and the overbearing and condescending directiveness of the liberal are illustrated in Joyce Y. Rogers An Image of Cooperation: White Volunteers in the Civil Rights Freedom Summers Project. Rogers's research is particularly fascinating because it focuses on transcribed interviews from Stanford University's KZSU radio station, which sent interviewers to over fifty cities in the South where white Northern college students had gone to help in the fight for voting rights and voter registration of blacks. In 1965, more than 200 interviews were conducted with the volunteers. Five hundred students, according to Rogers, went to the South as part of the Freedom Summers movement in 1964; there were 750 student volunteers in 1965 ( 1982, 8). The importance of Rogers's research cannot be overstated. One major goal of the Freedom Summers was to project an image of interracial cooperation in the struggle for racial progress; therefore, the strong elements of racism among what some might expect to be the most progressive whites--young, educated people from such universities as Stanford and Yale who would risk personal injury in order to advance racial progress--are evidence of a marked strain of bigotry in the white imagination with notions of racial enlightenment. Strikingly, however, Rogers argued that this dichotomy was inevitable: "Ironically, the Freedom Summers volunteers were the best and brightest products of the system that had oppressed the black race for so many centuries, therefore, it is not surprising that many of these volunteers displayed an ethnocentrism that proved inimical to the more idealistic goals of the Freedom Summers" (10). Moreover, echoing a duality that exists in many of Hughes's portrayals of whites in The Ways of White Folks, Rogers points out the main styles of bigotry that existed in the psychology of many of the white students: living among blacks, "many white volunteers dealt with differences by assuming the natural superiority of their own way of life. Conversely, some 'radical' white students tried to close the gap by completely adopting what they perceived as 'Negro culture,' exhibiting a 'Negrophilia' that was . . . devastating to the ideals of the summers" (11). For brevity, only a few interviews, representative of many others in Rogers's study, are considered here. The glorification of blacks to a status beyond human--and, therefore, dehumanizing--is exposed by Langston Hughes in his story "Slave on the Block." That it finds its equivalent in the attitudes shown by some of the white volunteers makes it frighteningly evident that many ostensibly progressive whites hold onto a sickeningly sentimental image of blacks as the noble savage or the child of nature (to borrow Albert Schweitzer's characterization of Africans in On the Edge of the Primeval Forest ) which also tried to pass for enlightenment in the "romantic racism" in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin ( 1852). The continuity of this mentality is evident when Rogers cites this sickeningly sentimental view in many examples from the Freedom Summers. One white student volunteer states, We have . . . been astonished by the number of fantastic personalities who have risen out of the morass and to whom every obstacle is just a challenge, among whom are many leaders of the community and many others, many young people, many old women, who have risen out and have acquired for themselves more dignity than is possible for any white person in this society to ever acquire, by triumphing over every obstacle, fantastic women, fantastic old men, and men who know the world this way and that way, and men who are stern and upright and powerful in their dignity.
Although many readers might find these views extremely complimentary to blacks, such attitudes show that whites of this ideology do not accept blacks as humans who are flawed and have both strengths and weaknesses. Moreover, such romanticized bigotry often exiles blacks who cannot be slavered over by whites in awestruck admiration, which is the case in Stowe Uncle Tom's Cabin when Stowe sends the righteously angry George to live in Africa at the end of the book. There is no place for George in her imaginative America (or, I should say, in her good-hearted but weak imagination) because, although George might be right in his anger at racial oppression, he represents the kind of black person who cannot be controlled. As Rogers points out, "The glorification of the majority of oppressed peoples and their warmth and laughter in the midst of want and sorrow" (20) is a white rejection of blacks who cannot be viewed as simple and wondrous beings, innocent children, or the embodiment of absolute greatness, the only forms of black identity that many good-hearted weaklings can accept. Such acceptance of blacks as pronounced by this student shows that the weakness in those who hold such attitudes precludes their seeing blacks as equal, fellow human beings--an attitude that reaffirms Baldwin and Mead's assertion in Rap on Race that "benevolent" whites often refute aspects of blacks that do not conform to their image of what blacks should be ( Baldwin and Mead 1971, 10). In sum, history confirms the view of such writers as Baldwin and Hughes that many whites' ostensible acceptance of blacks is conditional and superficial. This aspect of Rogers's study also helps explain Lomax's idea in The White Liberal that many blacks doubt the sincerity of whites' liberalism and question their ability to follow through on their progressive sentiments with actions ( Lomax 1966, 44-45). Lomax asserts that blacks' suspicion of liberals' dishonesty arises from the fact that it seems that many liberals accept only blacks whom they can deem extraordinary but reject ordinary blacks. Lomax concludes that, if one cannot be accepted unless as "an exception to the rule," then the rejection of and prejudice toward blacks in general remains in place . These ideas help illuminate one of the problems that seems to have plagued the Freedom Summers and contributed to the breakdown of the black-white coalition. Rogers's study analyzes these points. While Rogers makes a complete distinction between those white college students who exhibit romantic racism and those who came to believe in white superiority, it can be argued, in fact, that the closet supremacist is the ego identity off split of the sentimental racist. This connection is especially troubling for race relations. Rogers's discussion shows the ways in which many students interviewed came to have revulsion for blacks after living in the midst of poverty and the results of discrimination. This attitude is best exemplified in the following statement: I think that spending a summer in a Negro community can induce some sort of . . . sympathy for the southerners' stand. . . . [W]e have run into many disappointing things and personality traits in the Negro community which of course can be laid to the system. And I . . . have seen apathy, terrific apathy, tremendous apathy, unbelievable apathy. . . . Often we can have some sympathy for the white southerner who does not want his child to go to school with somebody who has this disease or whose morals are like this or that. This student concludes that it is absurd to argue for racial equality between people who possess such great differences in class, education, and morals . These perceptions clearly bear out the idea that prejudice is manifested in cognitive distortions which reduce the details of the actual character and behavior of the objects of bigotry to a blur of negative characteristics. Yet, it is fascinating in this case that the prejudice exists side by side with a belief in helping blacks and in one's own racial progressiveness. For instance, this student does not merely want to write off blacks as inferiors, as would be a logical inference from many of his stated perceptions of blacks. These negative feelings coexist with a desire to ameliorate them. The student tries to soften these vast generalizations and exaggerations by saying that "of course, this pertains only to about sixty per cent of the cases or seventy per cent" . This statement seems the opposite side of the same coin as the excessive admiration of blacks: both attitudes reduce blacks to simple stereotypes rather than human beings who do not look to whites for identity approval. Furthermore, my interpretation of Rogers's research is that this revulsion exists side by side with the directiveness that characterizes the white liberal. A motif in the interviews is the desire of some whites to control the struggle for black rights and thus to control the blacks with whom they are supposedly working for equality. As one white student comments, I mean northern white kids have been running shows since they were in grammar school, even earlier, and they were encouraged to do that all along the line, while the Negroes North and South have not had that encouragement. And it's important for them, for their self image, that they can hold themselves on their own strength, you know. [White students should] hold back that knowledge, hold back that go-gettedness and doingness and be willing to be a foot soldier. Then I think there's a future. If they insist on usurping that kind of show, then there's going to be problems. . . . And if northern white volunteers can make their peace with that kind of thing, then they will be able to work in the South, and work effectively and be of assistance. (33) Indeed, another student recalls that one of his main motivations in becoming a volunteer was "being able to direct things" in dealing with the blacks' struggle for civil rights . Once again, history confirms the controlling and narcissistic attitudes and behavior of white identity found in many black writers' images of whites. The failure--moral, psychological, and practical--of the demeaning directiveness of liberalism is revealed by one of the white students' critiques of this very ideology: [B]eing a northern student, all I can say is I've seen a lot of northern students come down here and screw everything up . . . there's the type of person who comes down to help raise the poor Negro, and they're the superior Great White Father carrying the white man's burden and they come down and just cause all sorts of trouble. They have this kind of superior attitude: well, I'm here to help you all and I'm white and I know what's right. CONCLUSION The works discussed in this section make it clear that if more whites could be so analytical of their good intentions toward blacks and how they often undermine them by a sort of unintentional white supremacy, the strain that has marked race relations throughout American history would be less prevalent. By examining the interviews of the white Freedom Summers volunteers, one can see that the guardianship so abhorrent to blacks in the white liberal and the good-hearted weakling are part of a continuum of how blacks have understood whites, as presented in the typology of images in the black imagination. In reflecting on the images discussed in this chapter, one should think about the source of the distrust for whites among many blacks: many if not most whites have not faced how their identities have been understood and interpreted by blacks and thus, as Baldwin argues in The Fire Next Time, fail to be released from "the tyranny of [their] mirror." |
