And crown thy Good, with
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Norman Podhoretz, so often assailed by the liberal left, happened to have mulled on the problem of race and sex far earlier than most of the mainstream has. Podhoretz wrote in 1964: [The American Negro's] past is a stigma, his color is a stigma, and his vision of the future is the hope of erasing the stigma by making color irrelevant, by making it disappear as a fact of consciousness. I share this hope, but I cannot see how it will ever be realized unless color does in fact disappear: and that means not integration, it means assimilation, it means -- let the brutal word come out -- miscegenation. The Black Muslims, like their racist counterparts in the white world, accuse the "so-called Negro leaders" of secretly pursuing miscegenation as a goal. The racists are wrong, but I wish they were right, for I believe that the wholesale merger of the two races is the most desirable alternative or everyone concerned. See this modest proposal. I am not claiming that this alternative can be pursued programmatically or that it is immediately feasible as a solution; obviously there are even greater barriers to its achievement than to the achievement of integration. What I am saying, however, is that in my opinion the Negro problem can be solved in this country in no other way. Surely Podhoretz is wrong that the black man's past is all stigma. One may start in ancient times, learn of the grand exploits, and monumental sufferings of such (almost certainly) black heroes as Osiris, as Nimrod, as Krishna. The creation of the human race occured in Africa. Is it logical that there exists no record of the achievements of black races? Clearly the story is only begun to be told. The half cannot be fancied, this side the golden shore. Even our own Bible, now distorted by Euro-centric myopia, originated not in Europe, but in Africa and the middle east, lands of Cush, Mizraim, and Ham. Moses was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians. And the child Jesus spent (some? much?) of his hidden years in Africa -- possibly Alexandria. |
| LION BOOKS. J. Vernon Shea (editor), 1955. Stories by Thomas Wolfe; Frank Yerby; Wm. Faulkner; Richard Wright; Mark Schorer; John Dos Passos; Ann Petry; and others. |
