Afterword: other Americas.

AuthorHarris, Angela P.
PositionSymposium: Representing Race

George Washington and George Washington's slaves lived different realities. And if we extend that insight to all the dimensions of white American history, we will realize that blacks lived a different time and a different reality in this country. And the terrifying implications of all this . . . is that there is another time, another reality, another America . . . .

-- Lerone Bennett, Jr.(1)

It's a black thing; you wouldn't understand.

-- Slogan on t-shirt, popular in the late 1980s

I.

In an article published by Harper's Magazine in July 1991, James Traub, a white journalist, reported that participants on "The Gary Byrd Show," a New York City-based black radio talk show, insisted on attributing nearly every event adversely affecting African Americans to racist conspiracies.(2) Traub titled his article "A Counter-Reality Grows in Harlem," and he was clearly shocked and dismayed by what he saw as the widespread irrationalism, even paranoia, of Harlem's black residents. His article suggested that the emergence of this counterreality was a measure of the dangerous isolation of certain segments of African America from the rest of America: Harlem as hothouse.

Fast forward to the fall of 1996: the CIA is accused of flooding urban African-American communities with crack. This time it is not black talk radio but the San Jose Mercury News that breaks the story.(3) While whites are shocked and dismayed by the allegations, African Americans are far more willing to believe them; the suspicion that the United States Government introduced crack cocaine to black communities in order to pacify or destroy them has been circulating for years.(4)

Another America. Poll takers routinely find statistically significant gaps between the views and opinions of African Americans and those of whites, particularly when it comes to issues of race.(5) The gaps reflect a chasm of experience and perspective -- an epistemological chasm that divides white from nonwhite, and especially white from black. From Traub's perspective, this other America is a counterreality, a paranoid fantasy. From another perspective, it is a folk expression of the long tradition of interpreting social events in the context of persistent American racism.(6) As Richard Delgado has put it:

One structural feature of human experience separates people of color

from our white friends, accounting in large part for our differing

perceptions

in matters of race. This structural feature, which dwarfs almost

everything else, is simply stated: white people rarely see acts of

blatant or subtle racism, while minority people experience them all

the time.(7)

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, critical race theory introduced another America to the American legal academy. But while people on the streets of New York City and Los Angeles spoke of shadowy conspiracies, critical race theorists took a different approach: they aimed to undermine the reigning America, using logic and, above all, subversive stories. Critical race theory can be understood as a rigorous, formal alternative to occasional journalistic reports of a counterreality: an attempt to give "colorblind" whites the gift of Dubois's second sight.(8) But the race-crits' perception of a fundamental epistemological gap between whites and people of color -- and their assumption that it is whites, not people of color, who need to be educated -- have, not surprisingly, been strenuously resisted. Ralph Ellison credits Richard Wright as saying, "[T]here is in progress between black and white Americans a struggle over the nature of reality."(9) The bitter fights over the existence of a "voice of color" and the worth of storytelling are not just academic turf wars, but reflections on the struggle over whose America this is: who is blind and who can see; whether the talk shows and barber shops of the other America ring with truth, paranoia, or a complex mixture of both.

II.

The terrain of paranoia and conspiracy is a familiar one in American life, of course, and one often mapped by novelists. At the center of Thomas Pynchon's 1966 novel The Crying of Lot 49, for example, is a huge and shapeless conspiracy called the Tristero. The Tristero appears to be, among other things, a secret postal network operating in defiance of the U.S. government that connects dispossessed people from all walks of life: communities marginalized and persecuted by society; social movements left in the dustbin of history; misfits, anarchists, and fetishists. The entry point for this secret postal network is a series of cans all over America that say WASTE. Looking closer, one notices that the word is actually an acronym that stands for We Await Silent Tristero's Empire.

Or, maybe not. The deeper subject of Pynchon's novel is paranoia. Oedipa Maas, the protagonist of the story, has stumbled on the Tristero while attempting to carry out her duties as executor of the estate of Pierce Inverarity, an eccentric California real estate mogul who used to be her lover. As she continues to find the signs of the...

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