Word: gwaltney
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...Gwaltney, following the lead of interviewers like Studs Terkel, lets dozens of average people talk into his tape recorder. He didn't seek out activists or politicians; he seemed, instead, to meet many of the sort of people respected for living quiet, aboveboard lives; the they hate, so much and with so much fire, is what makes this book so scary...
...United States works. The continued separation, the way white Americans have always thought, will come at a price--continued bitterness, continued hatred, an unhealing, festering, open wound. But it's a price white America has paid since its birth, and one it will likely continue to pay. Gwaltney quotes Harriet Jones, a 10-year-old: "I think white people would wreck everything if they thought the only way they could save the country was to be as nice to us as we have been to them." She's probably right...
Racial oppression, an anthropologist reading this collection would conclude, has played a major role in shaping the ideas, and, of course, the day-to-day lives of Black Americans. Almost everyone who talks about Black American to Gwaltney defines it in contrast to white America. "I get tired of that one-nation-under-God boogie-joogie. We are ourselves. We are our own nation or country or whatever you want to call it. . . That man has got his country, and we are our country," one man insists. If their days are dominated by a single theme--the fraud of white...
...have led, a suspicious people. We are the children of suspicious people, as were our grandparents and their grandparents. This has been so with us even back to those people most of call foreparents. Now, if we think otherwise, we would probably all be white or dead!" one of Gwaltney's subjects declares...
Overcoming that suspicion will take more than gestures; indeed, the knowledge that many whites pat themselves on the back for being good liberals without being willing to give up any of the privileges of race or class infuriates many of those interviewed by Gwaltney. And it won't be simply a matter of handing out money, as many good liberals once assumed. "Any fool knows that if you are on your ass, what you need is lots of money and a way to make some money" one man tells Gwaltney. But instead, welfare created a dependence that couldn...