Foreword

But when like me you come from Europe and have, for instance, never seen a pistol, you receive a shock you will never forget the first time you hear the tone of this language. After only a few days in this new country, I was held up by gunmen - a type of character I had never met. The fear I felt was a fear I had never experienced before: the fear of another human being.

Book pages 28-29

In the tobacco fields too I saw that it is the white man who owns everything and therefore directs everything, while the blacks have to trail along after him - both in the spring, while the tobacco is being planted, when the women are unemployed and must sit in their shacks looking on, and in August, when the tobacco is being picked. "It's real nigger-work," I heard the whites say. "They're already black so the tar doesn't stick as much on them as on whites." It has been established by law that they must earn the minimum wage, which is only a couple of dollars per hour. But since tobacco picking is seasonal work and there is not much work to find the rest of the year, it is indeed a meager yearly income they scrape together.

Later in the summer the tobacco is dried and sold at auction. There are not many places where the master/ slave relationship is being carved so forcibly into the black mind as at the tobacco auctions. Wherever I went I saw the white buyers from the tobacco companies walking in front giving quick, discreet signals with pointed fingers and wagging heads, while the blacks rushed behind them as fast as they could packing the tobacco bundles. The whites drive right into the auction hall in big flashy cars, and at noon they eat huge plate-size steaks inside, while the blacks have to eat their bag lunches outside. These people, who could gain human equality and freedom if they received just a couple of cents per packet of cigarettes sold, I saw working with expressions on their faces that only a slave could wear.

The sugar fields

Book pages 32-33
 

Book pages 34-38

As a result, it was almost impossible to get to stay with the sugar workers around there as they were afraid of reprisals from the whites. When I finally managed to find a place and had gone to bed, I discovered that the rumor about me had already swept like lightning through town, for suddenly the door was torn open and a madman stuck the barrel of a gun in my stomach and chased me out into the cold winter night. Later that night a poor widow, Virginia Pate, took pity on me and I was allowed to share a bed with five of her children in a shack far out in the swamps. It always gets cold in the morning when the stove goes out and since the children pulled the covers over themselves, I had to freeze the first night. So the next morning the mother set to work repairing old quilts. Never will I forget her, (and many times later I came back to visit her). She was willing to defy the whites although, admittedly, she dared not sleep under the same roof as I, but slept in her sister's shack. Together with her oldest son I went hunting in the swamps for armadillos and other edible things. Drinking water we got from the roof gutter.

In Florida the Attorney General directly accused such plantations of practicing slavery. Here they work, in heat, dust and soot with razor-sharp machetes. Fingers and toes are often chopped off. After an exhausting day's work the men are driven in trucks like cattle to camps often enclosed by barbed wire and "No Trespassing" signs. Just before my visit two such trucks tipped over, killing one and injuring 125. Instead of receiving compensation, the men were fired. Inside the camps, with often over 100 to a room, only one dared talk with me, hidden in a bathroom, as they are immediately fired for talking to whites. Though these slave camps are owned by Gulf & Western, the real slave holder is the government and the taxpayers, who pay up to half the operating cost to avoid cheap imported sugar.

Book pages 40-41

The prevalence of slave camps seems to be spreading in the 1980's. In North Carolina I now found bars where "slave catchers" come to kidnap drunks and winos for their camps. These camps separate and destroy the black family just as slavery has always done. Wives and children are not permitted in the camps. Several men I talked to had not seen their families for up to eight months - and were nervous about what the situation would be like when they saw them again. In other places I saw migrant camps where entire families can live together, but there they are so dependent on each other's wages that they cannot afford to let the children leave the fields to go to school. While the children in Louisiana perhaps had only one orange a year, in Florida I saw them virtually drowning in oranges. Although it was formally abolished in 1911, it is nevertheless a fact that the present affluence of America was built not only on slavery and artificially low minimum wages, but also on child labor. Even today one fourth of America's fruit is picked by children under sixteen years of age. It is worth remembering as we in Northern Europe are bombarded with cheap American fruit products, that these are not only products of minimum wages usually less than half ours in Scandinavia, but also the "grapes of wrath" of farm workers who in the off season have no social safety net like ours (unemployment benefits of 90% of normal salary for 2 1/2 years, free health care and education, rent subsidies, family allowances, nurseries, kindergartens, etc.). The cheap fruit we are enjoying is virtually the product of slavery.

By accident one day I discovered the name Coca-Cola on some of the trucks that drive orange juice from the migrant camps to the North, and found out that Coca-Cola, under the name of Minute Maid, owns quite a few of these slave camps. Coca-Cola's slave camps are probably not among the worst in Florida, although many of the children suffer from universal deficiency diseases such as anemia which makes them exhausted and emaciated.
(When this book first came out in Denmark, I got a letter from Coca-Cola admitting how terrible conditions had been, but adding that now they had started big reforms in the camps. However, when I came back the only visible change was a change of name on some chimneys.)

Book pages 42-43

It was a happy surprise to find here a poor white who did not indirectly blame the blacks for her misfortune, as it is very common among the poor whites to make them scapegoats. Her town, Immokalee, had more slave camps than any other town and it was here that some of the white owners were imprisoned by Florida's attorney general. But conditions are still the same and there are now armed guards in the camps who shoot at all intruders. When an NBC-TV crew arrived in town, they were beaten up and shot at and they did not manage to film anything. Even white rednecks of the violent type, who certainly knew how to defend themselves, warned me not to go to that town and did not even dare to drive me there in daylight. I ended up living there for a week with some poor migrant workers, but to this very day I am amazed that I escaped with my life. Somehow I managed to make friends with one of the armed black guards, who gave me a little food and followed me at a distance in the streets to protect me.

The police chief told me that 25 dead bodies had been found in the streets in the last half year in this town of only 3,000 inhabitants. Every single night I could hear gunshots. I saw more blood there than in any other place in America. This Mexican was stabbed in the stomach while I was sitting next to him (and calmly asked the bartender to call the sheriff, when it was his turn to be served). Every morning there was a row of shabby individuals along the road who had been knocked down and robbed of everything the night before and now tried to hitch-hike out of town. But many will never get out of this slave camp. What soon came to interest me most was not the dead bodies, but the live ones – people in whom everything was extinct. The whites seemed to have much less resistance than the blacks. These exhausted wretches, who earlier had managed to survive by working hard seven days a week like the other slave workers, had slowly succumbed and were now just lying and waiting to die. At night they slept in the streets. Often they never woke up again. One of them is squeezed in between the Pepsi- and the Coca-Cola machines.

Book pages 47-48

It wasn't long till I had so many death threats against me as a result of my photography, which by the way I had tried to conceal, that I decided to move out to the Indians on the outskirts of town, where I stayed with a young Seminole woman.
I felt it was very romantic to live in such palm-leaf huts, but the romance was not destined to last for long. After just a couple of days, those in town found out where I was and one night someone shouted to me ordering me out of the hut. I had no choice and stepped right out into the headlights from a pickup truck, from which some men with guns shouted to me in Mexican accents: "You be out of town before sunrise. If not, you will never see another sunrise!" Then I knew they were deadly serious and the woman did not dare to have me living there any longer, so I slipped out of town like a shadow.

One of the few times I shed my role as vagabond in order to take destiny into my own hands was when I decided to fight together with the Indians at Wounded Knee. What I had already seen of the Indians' conditions had made me disillusioned and depressed. The heavy shadow of tragedy which pervades the Indians was so overwhelming to me that even when we got drunk together the sense of utter hopelessness remained. Being with them naturally made me question the relationship I had previously had in Denmark to Greenlanders. Their semi-colonial situation there seems so similar to that of the Indians in America and our excuse that we don't personally have any contact with them due to their tiny numbers I now, on the Indian reservations, realized was totally invalid considering the enormous psychological influence our white cultures have on these minorities. I sensed more sympathy movement of white youth going to Wounded Knee, it (though often of a romanticized type) in America turned out that all their sympathy amounted to toward Indians than I ever sensed in Denmark toward nothing more than the empty words of their Greenlanders. Therefore I was disappointed that at the first chance in this century to help Indians fight for their rights, when I had expected to see a mass movement of white youth going to Wounded Knee, it turned out that all their sympathy amounted to nothing more than the empty words of their government's many broken treaties with the Indians.

Book pages 49-51
 

Defeat at Wounded Knee?


The Native American uprising in Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in 1973 became a turning point for me. We on the American left had constantly romanticized the use of armed force. Many of us were tired of demonstrations, so the leap to armed struggle was not great.

But Wounded Knee was a depressing experience. In our romantic intoxication we had not given much thought to all the psychological problems one is exposed to when lying in trenches in snow and sleet for weeks. I saw so much discord and infighting among the Indians that I don't feel much inclined to talk about it. Also, they treated us white helpers almost as slaves.

We helped them smuggle weapons and ammunition into the supply camp for the rebels, who at night carried it on to the trenches around the occupied village of Wounded Knee - an operation that took many hours since the FBI frequently sent flares up. We helpers were not very used to shootings, and it took a toll on many when the bullets flew over their heads. On one trip I lost my bag with both passport and camera, and a car was made available so that I could go and try to recover my things. As it was now daylight, I knew I would be discovered by the FBI and on the way back I was duly chased by an FBI car at a hundred miles an hour.

I managed to elude them in the village of Porcupine when I hid myself in a funeral procession for an Indian who had been killed during the struggle. Later, on another occasion, I was arrested by the FBI; I had a short-hair wig on, because the day before I had been arrested by them and thrown off the reservation. I had hoped that they wouldn't recognize me. When I was transferred to an Indian jail, I managed to persuade the Indian policeman to release me by giving him a bad conscience about his working for the government.

Well, I don't think these external experiences were the reason I felt defeated, rather, it was my more intimate experiences. I had become particularly good friends with one of the leaders in Wounded Knee, a Sioux Indian whom I will call X. I had driven with him and a white lawyer from Rapid City. When we got to the reservation, they did not stop the car and we were shot at by the "goon squad". I was shocked, but later found out we had been carrying an arms consignment in the trunk. We dropped the lawyer off at the camp where the Indians were in the process of negotiating with Washington the handing-over of the now half-rotten body of one of the Indians killed at Wounded Knee. We then drove to the Rosebud Reservation, where X suggested that we stay overnight with his aunt. She let us sleep on a mattress in her kitchen, and I began to stretch out a blanket on the floor so that X could have the narrow mattress. But he said we should share the mattress and gave me a long explanation on how, according to Indian custom, it was impolite to refuse an invitation. As we lay there on the mattress he whispered mysteriously to me about the spirits, and the prairie wind moaning in the eaves added extra atmosphere. He gradually fell into an ecstasy and couldn't understand why I was not able to see the spirits in the darkness. He started shivering violently and held me tighter and tighter. After a while his trembling lessened a bit and he began kissing me - big wet kisses.

Only then did it dawn on me that he was homosexual, but a kind of homosexual I had not met before. Although he had a hard-on, he wasn't after sex and didn't take his clothes off. He just wanted to make love on a "higher plane" and spiced it all with spirits and demons in such a way that even today I still ask myself if he was really on the level with me that night.

The next day he took me with him to the supply camp where we spent the following week. Here I saw a completely different side of him as one of the camp leaders, and he never in any way showed that he liked me, so I soon concluded that Indian culture strongly suppresses homosexuality. But he treated me better than the other whites were treated and as his friend I soon got special assignments. Thus it was he and I who would drive the truck with Eastlake's coffin and Rosemary, Eastlake's eight-months-pregnant widow. We had sat up all night in the house of the medicine man Crow Dog, holding a wake over the body. Both he and X had offered long Indian prayers by the coffin. The tears streamed down X's cheeks all the while and that which I had perceived on that other night as hypocrisy now seemed quite different. We took a green medicine that had a powerful effect and I let myself be carried away and stood up, like several others, to make a speech by Eastlake's coffin. I compared Nixon's slaughter of the Indians in Guatemala during the Eisenhower regime with his present genocide here in Wounded Knee. I was the first one who tried to put Eastlake's death into an international context, and it made a certain impression, I was later told.

Because of the many telegrams coming in from all over the world (even China and Russia), we had felt the whole time that we were in the midst of something of historical importance. But the next day, as we stood out there, in the desolate hills where only a few scattered firs grew, lowering the coffin into the hole, we nevertheless felt strangely forsaken. I felt an immense emptiness and for a moment all historical significance vanished. I caught the eyes of a young Tipoix Indian woman who had hitched to Wounded Knee from Minnesota in red clogs in order to fight. She was extremely beautiful and we started flirting with each other as our eyes met over the coffin. No sooner had we all smoked the peace pipe and scattered the ashes over the casket, as is the custom, than Bobby and I began spending all our time together. We tried to keep our relationship secret, as it was not acceptable for a red woman to be seen with a white man.

All the same, X soon got wind of it and was furious; however he was totally incapable of looking me straight in the eye and therefore dressed me down indirectly. He called the whole camp together and made a long speech about the promiscuity flourishing in the camp and how we had to respect the Indian traditions and be in mourning with dignity after Eastlake's death, etc., etc. He then called all the Indians together to discuss whether or not the whites ought to be expelled. I later found out that there had been a majority for it, but that X had then backed down and demanded that we stay. The long and short of it was that X had fallen deeply in love with me and I am absolutely sure that that was the only reason the whites were allowed to remain in the camp. Slowly I began to realize how in love with me X was. As he was inordinately jealous of Bobby, I got orders to sleep in the tent of honor in the future, along with himself and Rosemary, who was in mourning. I was very, very moved that I would be sharing the tent of the widow of one of the first Indians to be killed in the first Indian insurrection of modern times. In my revolutionary intoxication I felt that I had landed right in the middle of a historic focal point. I had already become good friends with Rosemary because of the speech I had made over her husband's body, and I had very strong feelings for her - eight months pregnant as she was. But from there to actually living with her and the leader in the tent of honor was nevertheless a leap. Naturally I felt a certain pride toward the other whites about being "promoted" to Rosemary's teepee.

With this historical consciousness of my own situation I was not at all prepared for what happened in that very tent. Rosemary lay in the tent's only bed, chatting with me in the glow of the lamp, while I lay on the ground. She became more and more lively and seemed more and more overwhelming. Then all at once she asked if it was okay if she lay down beside me. I was completely taken aback, and before I could answer, she had climbed down to me and laid herself up close to me in my sleeping bag. I didn't know what in the world to do and lay completely stiff. I have often run into similar situations, but this was some-thing very different, and to even think about sex in this situation was out of the question. It was only two days after her husband's funeral - the husband whose child she lay with there against my stomach. I was shaken and shocked. All my romantic and revolutionary ideals fell with a crash. (I have since been told that this behavior is not abnormal for a person who has just lost a husband or wife.) I was thinking of all the telegrams of condolence pouring in to us from all over the world, and I don't know how I should have managed the situation if X had not come back from a meeting just then. X became my rescuer. When we heard him coming, Rosemary got up in her bed again. X blew out the light and lay down beside me, just like the first night at his aunt's house. Since then he had not dared to show me any sign of affection. Although ordinarily I greatly prefer sex with women, I must admit that when be began to kiss me that night, I felt as if he had just saved me from a very, very embarrassing situation.

A few days later the warriors sneaked out of Wounded Knee and the rebellion was over - but not for me. Many of the weapons were buried in the hills around the camp, after which the Indians fled and spread out all over the U.S. and Canada. Two of them stole all the money in Crow Dog's camp and took off for Oklahoma with it. Bobby had to leave before we got a chance to say goodbye. X was watching me day and night, and suddenly I again found myself in a crazy situation. He was so much in love with me that he wouldn't let me leave; but he dared not show it and therefore gave orders to the guards around the camp that I was not allowed to leave it for "security reasons." He said to me that I had taken pictures that could fall into the hands of the FBI, but to the guards he only mentioned the unspecified "security reasons," and suddenly I sensed hateful and suspicious eyes every-where, and every time I came close to the perimeter of the camp I immediately had a couple of rifle barrels pointed at me. My situation became more and more desperate, as I couldn't explain the actual reason to any-one in the camp. I didn't want to compromise X, and any-way, if I had told people that their great leader wouldn't let me leave because he was in love with me, they would not have believed me. I was a prisoner of the Indians without anyone knowing why. It became unbearable, and some days later I managed to escape through the reservation and hitch-hike the two hundred miles back to Rapid City.

In Rapid City I again stayed with the Indian woman who had first brought me into contact with AIM (American Indian Movement) before I went out to Wounded Knee. She had nothing but contempt left for the rebels and in the evening she took me to a big fancy steakhouse, where I had the best and most civilized steak I have had for a long time. Oh, how I enjoyed being back in America! But the violence followed in my path, and one night our neighbor was murdered in the apartment downstairs as an act of revenge after the rebellion. For several days we sat together with his mother and got drunk while staring at the pool of blood on the floor, which she refused to wipe up because it was the only thing she had left of her son.

The inner violence which increasingly characterizes Third World people as a result of their long oppression is, however, usually not turned outward among the Indians as with the blacks, but turned inward in the form of suicide. Perhaps our enemies, after all, saw the Wounded Knee insurrection as just another suicide attempt? And maybe we ourselves were influenced to such a degree by our enemy's view that we couldn't all live up to the harsh human demands the rebellion made on us. For my own part I had had enough of armed struggle and "armed love" and thereafter gave myself fully to the role of vagabond. To be a vagabond is just an attempt to give oneself fully to the individual person. But to be a revolutionary is an attempt to give oneself fully to all of humanity. No human being is able to combine these two attitudes, and for my own part I suffered a defeat at Wounded Knee, just as many of the Indians did. Human beings are so infinitely weak and small that if they are ever to become fully human they must combine these two sides. Although almost all of us suffered defeat in Wounded Knee, Wounded Knee was nevertheless a victory, because it was such an attempt.

Excerpts of letters

Book pages 52

Later, whenever I lived with Indians, I realized that Wounded Knee had' become a symbol of pride for the Indians. It was the start of a strong nationalism for this oppressed minority just as the armed revolt of the blacks in the ghettos had led them into a nationalist movement with black power and black beauty as symbols of pride. I learned that such a nationalist period, in which all the values of the oppressor culture are rejected, is necessary and inevitable for all who attempt to free themselves from the self-contempt and self-destruction induced by centuries of oppression. But I also learned that this demonstrative phase is the easiest and that the struggle which comes afterwards is far longer and more difficult - the struggle to create equality in the minds and the hearts of whites as well as of the colored minorities.

How complex this struggle is is shown by the Mexican Americans and the refugees from the U.S.-supported dictatorships in Central America who are an example of oppression's Chinese box. Though poor, they often represent the master-race in oppression of the Indian cultures in their home countries, and are now suddenly themselves exposed to a similar discrimination as an American minority group, making them a peripheral part of the economy not unlike the Latin American Indians. Having fled hunger, poverty, and bloody fascism, they are now being exploited as migrant workers because they fear being sent back if they stand up for their rights.

I remember how shocked we were in Europe seeing in the news the many attempts to crush Cesar Chavez' efforts to organize the Farm workers Union, and I therefore tried to work with the farm workers wherever I could. It was in such demonstrations for human rights that young Americans taught me to see the intimate connection between the oppression of American minorities and the oppression of other Third World people. In our groping efforts to understand the government's ongoing brutality against the poor in Vietnam, Cambodia, Chile, Nicaragua and El Salvador, the concept of "the system" began to explain the origin of the suffering we are inflicting. And so the death of 3 million Vietnamese also was that which made me set myself outside the system and begin questioning it.

Why do we call them the enemy this struggling nation
we've been bombing across the sea?
Why do we want these people to die?
Why do we say North and South?
Oh, why, oh why, oh why?

That's just a lie
one of the many and we've had plenty.
I don't want more of the same,
No more genocide in my name!

Oh, why are our history books
so/nil of lies
when no word is spoken of
why the Indian dies
or why the Chicanos love
the California land?
Do all books say it was discovered
by the white men?

That's just a lie
one of the many and we've had plenty.
I don't want more of the same,
no more genocide in my name!

Oh, why are the weapons of the war so young,
and why are there only older men
around when it's done?
Why are so many of our soldiers black or brown?
Do we say it's because they're good
at cutting yellow people down?

That's just a lie
one of the many and we've had plenty,
I don't want more of the same,
no more genocide in my name!

Restimulating slavery patterns

Book pages 60-61

My travels through the slavery-like conditions of the South resembled more and more a journey in internal colonialism. In Scandinavia, democracy and unions are traditionally seen as inextricably connected. Though it is well known that the U.S. gives military support for bloody repression of unions in Central America, it nevertheless came as a shock for me to find hardly any unions in the South. Not least in the lumber industry did I see how the rough work traditionally has been done by the blacks, while the white man gives orders in the best colonial style. This worker received no compensation when the saw cut his fingers off, and had to be back at work two days later, for as he was told, "there are a lot of hungry niggers outside waiting to get work."

In a society which makes such violent inroads on life while spending almost no money on research and prevention of work-related diseases and accidents –
and where European concepts such as workers' management and Economic Democracy are light years away in the worker's consciousness the time-clock easily becomes the new whip of the slave master, a symbol of the constant and persistent violence of the system. Traveling in the world of black Americans inevitably becomes a journey into the soul and the history of every person you meet. In such a journey you begin to understand the traits and tendencies which were impressed on the souls and entire consciousness of black people by slavery and how ever since the system has perpetuated and even intensified these traits.
 

Poor slave

Book pages 62-63

Poor slave, take the shackles off your body,
poor slave, put the shackles on your mind.
Please listen to me carefully
and if I'm wrong then correct me.
But if I'm right my song do praise,
now lets see if we agree:
The definition of a slave means one not free entirely
so a slave is still a slave
if he can't think independently.

A tree is still a tree
though it sheds its leaves when winter comes.
But it blooms again in spring
for it did not lose its roots at all.
But a slave remains a slave
without the knowledge of his roots
until he's taught the past
not just some, but all the truth.

There was a brother the other day
telling me he's feeling high
but I just sadly had to sigh
for drugs and booze ain't glory,
and if I had the chance to get high
I would tell the truth and not a lie,
for the highest high a man can get
is from wisdom, knowledge and understanding.
Poor slave, ease the pressure off your body,
poor slave, put it on your mind...
 

Shacks

Book pages 62-63

Slavery, just like the ghetto, is not always physically concrete. Nevertheless you can get an impression of the common psychological character of the two from their physical expression. When I lived under the conditions which are typical for the underclass, I easily understood how the physical shackles also became mental shackles. For I know from my own experience that these shacks, in which black people have lived since abolition and to which millions are still confined, are completely inhuman and that one in no way has the feeling of freedom - the possibility of expanding intellectually and creatively. For some people conditions have even gone backwards since abolition and today they live in miserable shacks even smaller than this original slave cabin. I feel frustrated about photographing shacks, for I experience them as far, far worse than they appear in photographs. In such pictures you cannot see the wind which whistles through the many cracks making it impossible to keep warm in winter. You can't see the sagging rotten floors with cracks wide enough for snakes and various vermin to crawl right into the living room. Nor do the pictures show the absence of running water, not to speak of bathrooms and showers, or even electricity. Thousands upon thousands of Americans live by the glow of the kerosene lamp at least those who can afford to buy kerosene. And it is extremely difficult to give a photographic description of the peculiar sensation you have on suddenly being transferred to a condition we in Denmark have not known for the last hundred years - although it is delightful after all the stifling noise characterizing American homes suddenly to stand in the silence of no TV or radio. Liberal whites with no fear of the lights being turned off sometimes maintain to me that the poor blacks ought to feel happy for this reason. With their romanticism they reveal a terrifying insensitivity toward the psychology of involuntary poverty. And even if you are perhaps free from the invasion of the commercials of affluent society inside your shack, you nevertheless have your prospect destroyed by the omnipresent aggressive billboards right outside.

The powerlessness I felt as a photographer towards these stifling sensations mirrored the powerlessness they impose on the trapped poor. Even if I could have afforded a wide angle lens to record the narrowness, such psychic sensations simply can't be photographed for an outside observer who doesn't already know them. In the same way I felt it almost impossible to photograph America's rich upper class. I could only photograph one room at a time which in no way shows the true dimensions of their mansions. Furthermore, upper class habits have changed so that the rich no longer surround themselves with sumptuous splendor like the rich of the 1890's. It is more difficult to photograph an abundance which allows expensive trips to foreign countries and possession of several mansions or ranches in several states. Although the gap between rich and poor is not very big in photographs, the psychic leaps that I so often took from shack to plantation home or urban ghetto to millionaire home were so shockingly violent that each time I felt as if I had taken a trip from Earth to the moon.
 

On hitch-hiking and psychic leaps

Hitch-hiking in America is a perpetual attempt to try to overcome people's fear and make it a positive experience for them to pick you up. When you see the thrilling red brake lights and rush up in the dark and tear open the car door only to look into the barrel of a frightened driver's gun you know that it is to your mutual advantage and security that you should be forced to show the contents of your pockets or passport in this way. Trust can be promoted with a nice elaborate sign. I experiment with all kinds of slogans such as "Saving fuel for you" and "Bible belt - and no Good Samaritan?", but sad to say the only thing which gives people real trust is advertising that I am not American. Trust is essential for demographic hitch-hiking. Rides with women is among hitch-hikers regarded as a special psychic encouragement and security after all the aggressions of so-called "rednecks" and "perverts." But women are a problem, too. Since American women are very open and unlike female drivers in Europe often invite you home, they make themselves extremely vulnerable. On the one hand it is important always to let the woman set the boundaries of the new friendship if you have even a hope of avoiding the sexism inevitably imposed on you as a man by a society which has never given you the choice of whether or not to become a sexist or racist, but only of trying to counter-act the negative acts such suffering causes. Without an awareness of your suffering you are bound to hurt the oppressed with your "master-vibrations." On the other hand you cannot just - as with male drivers - float along into any situation, as you can then easily cause hurt feelings. Even the most competent vagabond makes mistakes here, not least because you yourself are so vulnerable and the immense hardships on the road often make you fall in love with types you would never otherwise open up to. I had a striking experience of giving such injurious signals when a driver offered me the so-called "love drug" MDA which makes you unbelievably in love with all people. But the next ride I had was with a stiff 80 year old woman who due to my ungovernable love couldn't help being affected and in the course of the next hours began to behave like an amorous teenager. So we were both left a bit crestfallen when the intoxication disappeared. Among the most beautiful things you experience as a vagabond are, however, such relationships with old people whom you one way or another manage to evade in normal life. They are the most harmonious group for the hitch-hiker as they - unlike working people - live on the same time level as the vagabond and furthermore can give your journey its important fourth dimension: the historical perspective. When you hear statements from them like "What this country needs is another great depression to bring us all together again" you experience the enormous alienation which makes being together with the vagabond so important for these people. But the hyperactive ones can kill you with their psychic leaps! In Florida a 72-year old rich man picked me up and when he heard that I photographed he made me his private photographer. He wanted me to expose the "filthy rich" on Palm Beach and took me to the most exclusive parties, where we wallowed in champagne, women and multimillionaires, immediately afterward taking both me and luxurious gifts over to the black slums in West Palm Beach or the slave camps outside the city, and the next moment driving around to report these "criminal" conditions to police, courts and city councils. From six in the morning to two at night he stormed and raged over the injustices. If we were lost, he would stop anywhere to ask directions. One night it was outside a full suburban church. He ran in, stopped the service, presented me as a minister's son from Denmark, then delivered a thunderous indignant sermon after which he conducted the choir. After half an hour the congregation lay in fits of ringing laughter and he suddenly remembered his real mission and sent church-goers to their cars to get maps, after which a large circle lay on the church floor to find "Indian Road". Every day he had new projects. One day he learned from some young people about "organic farming" and got so inspired that we got started right away on procuring four truckloads of manure from the Everglades in order to fly it over to his estate in the Bahamas. After a week like this I was totally defeated from lack of sleep and proportion and had to leave. Oh, how I enjoyed the freedom on the highway again! But the next ride was with an 82-year old woman who was so hyper-active that she only napped while I was actually driving. If she had not sent me up to Philadelphia a few days later to get one of her cars and let me use her credit card to invite my poor friends from the cotton and tobacco fields as well as passing drifters and hitch-hikers to the finest restaurants on the way back to Florida, she might very well have worn me out completely.

Letter to Mog, an American friend.
 

Book pages 72-73

One reason I never can get tired of traveling in America is that it is the only country I know in which you can take such psychic leaps almost daily. Sometimes when I lived with, for instance, a poor welfare mother in a northern ghetto, in order not to burden her food budget I would go out hitch-hiking up north of the city where the rich people live. Often I was picked up by a well-off businessman and when I entertained him with my travel stories I would occasionally be invited home for dinner in his big home with central air conditioning. During dinner I would then tell about how the mother with three children in the ghetto rarely could afford decent food. If I was with a conservative family they would usually then sooner or later say that I certainly was welcome to come and live with them, so that I didn't have to return to those conditions. But liberal families would normally load me up with expensive food items from the freezer and drive me all the way to the border of the ghetto and give me money for a taxi the rest of the way. "Here comes Robin Hood," I would laugh proudly when I came home. Being a good vagabond, I had learned, is certainly a matter of give and take. One doctor in Skokie gave me eight pot roasts for a welfare mother in South Chicago and a businessman in North Philadelphia gave me a big bag of tokens, so the son in my family in South Phillie wouldn't have to walk to Temple University.
In the South I rarely found the same effusive compassion for the poor, but the psychic leaps I experienced there too. One morning I was cutting firewood for this 104 year old woman in South Carolina. She and her 77 year old daughter usually had to cut all their firewood themselves. Their shack resembled the medieval houses in the Open Air Museum in Copenhagen, but it did have a well though many others do not. The daughter's husband was 97 years old and all three slept in the same bed to keep warm when the fireplace turned cold in the morning. Their house was owned by the white landlord (living behind the trees in the rear) whom they paid $30 a month. Later that day, although I had torn a big hole in my pants while cutting wood and wasn't wearing my short wig, as I usually did on such occasions, I managed to get into a press conference with Julie Nixon in Charleston. Nixon's daughter, who was visiting a home for handicapped children, walked around shaking hands with crippled children. Afterwards the press asked her friendly questions. I managed to spoil the entire press meeting by quite simply asking her whether she didn't think it was hypocritical to visit these handicapped children after Nixon had just vetoed a bill to aid the handicapped. Julie Nixon became so embarrassed that she was unable to answer and the manager of the institution interrupted the performance with all possible diplomatic speed. At night when the visit was broadcast on TV my question had been censored out.
 

Book pages 74-75

To switch environments so fast can be a shocking experience, especially when the physical distance is usually only a few miles apart. But when you roam about for a long time you realize that such psychic vagabonding is of absolute necessity if you are going to survive. Coming from a middle-class environment as I do I found it overwhelming to live entirely in ghetto homes for an extended period and experience the overcrowding, persistent noise, and psychic oppression. After a while I found it necessary to search out into more affluent homes where I could spend some days in my own room to recover my peace of mind. But I usually soon became bored to death in such homes and I sought again for what I perceived to be more real human contacts in the ghetto homes, although I do not wish to romanticize them. In Washington, North Carolina, I first lived in four black homes in town, three of which were without electricity and running water. When I stayed with the young woman pictured by the kerosene lamp I had to sleep all night in an armchair as she was sleeping on a couch with a baby. There was no more room in the house. My situation was even worse the next night in a shotgun shack where the mother screamed all night in a piercing soprano at her son, because he had brought a white guy home to share his bed. I hid his pistol in a stack of clothes for fear that they would use it against each other. In another shack I was kicked out by an angry neighbor who hated whites. The conditions in these homes were so miserable that in the end I walked around with a constant headache from hunger and lack of sleep. Late one evening I felt so sick and defeated by tiredness that I went towards the jail hoping to get permission to spend the night there - an escape I had never sought before. But always when I was most depressed the most fantastic things happened: just before I reached the jail, a young white woman picked me up and invited me to her home which turned out to be one of the most sumptuous I had been in for a long time. There were private tennis courts and golf courses as large as half the ghetto in that town, a private indoor swimming pool - even airplanes and sailboats. In the ghetto homes I had been able to hear all outside and private sounds through paper-thin walls. Here we had to have an intercom to communicate between the different sections of the house. There was even an indoor fishpond as big as some of the pools in the shacks when it rained. Where had all this abundance come from? The answer is not always so simple, but people later told me that the woman's father, a lawyer, owned many of the dilapidated ghetto shacks in the town, a town where 60% live below the poverty level. I wondered how I had ended up here in his home just when the misery he had helped create in the ghetto had practically driven me to prison.

Others were not quite so lucky and at that moment a black woman whose family I had come to know was in the city jail. She ought to be mentioned here because she was raped by the white jailer - and later became world famous. While the rape of blacks by whites is not unusual in southern jails, it created a sensation because she, Joanne Little, had the courage to kill the white rapist. If the women's movement in America had not established a strong defense for her (to which I was lucky to be able to supply photos of her background situation) she would doubtless have been sentenced to death in this state where even burglary is punishable by death. Her acquittal was a great victory as it showed that the traditional legal proceedings in a southern state could be changed - even in a state which at first had declared Joanne Little an outlaw, which means that every citizen of the state had a right to kill her. The psychic leaps I had taken in Joanne Little's home town had accidentally given me an insight into the economic preconditions of white supremacy. Such contrasting experiences are necessary in order to see society clearly. I find it, for instance, nearly impossible to stay very long in white homes in the South before I start looking with their eyes upon "Negroes" as inferior human beings. I always allowed myself to be open to such brainwashing, for if you do not try to enter into their way of thinking, then you have no hope of either comprehending or liking them. Without understanding their deeper motivations and frustrations I could not understand society itself. But as a vagabond, I could in time break out of this brainwashing and move back to the black community and its different kind of influences.
 

Credo

Book pages 76-83

Dear Angela,
I've finally gotten to a home with a typewriter, which gives me a chance to tell you a little bit about what has happened since we were together last. I have ended up living with two young white women here in Greensboro. They are treating me as if I had gone to heaven, which has an overwhelming effect on me after the last couple of weeks of a helter-skelter existence. One of them, Diane, is a model and a criminologist of the leftist kind, and likes my pictures so much that she will do everything in her power to get me money to buy more film. She has very good connections and with her charm and her looks it is easy for her to conjure up money for good causes. For example, she has just collected over $3,000 to get a lawyer for a Vietnam deserter who is in prison. Since she can't go around to the same affluent homes right after she has just tapped them, I'll have to wait at least half a year, but she has promised that by then she will collect some money for me by telling people that it is to be used for a home for handicapped children or something. I think it sounds a little unsavory, but she says that may be it will teach them that it is the government's job to provide such human rights, and not something which should be left to private charity. Well, I doubt that she will really be able to collect anything for me.

Every time I have had that kind of small hope I have been disappointed. I guess I still have to be content with selling blood and with the small gifts of money I get on the road by entertaining people with my pictures and experiences. Last week I had an income of nine dollars, which is the best ever: five dollars from an interested salesman who picked me up, two dollars from a black woman in Tony's father's grill, and two dollars from a guy in West Virginia who found my picture of the junkies with the Capital in the background interesting and bought it. Included in the deal was his lunch bag which contained three chicken legs. Now, since I have had these prints made, it makes me so happy every time I experience that kind of positive reaction. But it also scares me a little sometimes. In one place a woman started crying when she saw my pictures, and I didn't know what in the world to do. It is strange with Americans. They have lived in the midst of this suffering all their lives without giving it a thought, and then suddenly, when they see it frozen in a photograph, they can begin crying. Some accuse me of beautifying the blacks, though if anything most people here in the South probably admire my pictures for that reason. I just don't understand it; I photograph them exactly the way I see them, and a photograph doesn't lie, does it? But the more I ponder over it, the more I come to realize that this parallax shift in the way we see blacks must be due to the fact that they have lived in this master-slave relationship for such a long time that they simply are not capable of seeing blacks as human beings, but can only see those sides in them which confirm their "slave nature." But when Southern whites nevertheless react positively to my pictures, I believe it is because in reality they are unhappy about seeing with these "master"-eyes. They are longing to become human, and the moment I can "prove" to them that blacks are human and not slaves, eternal children, or subhuman (or what have you), this makes them themselves human and no longer masters or super-humans or whatever. If I don't interpret it this way, how then should I explain that even the worst racists down here give me money once in a while, although mumbling something or other about how they think "it is funny how I run around photographing niggers." I have to admit that it often seems difficult when I try to depict the master-slave relationship as an institution not to end up depicting it as if people in this system really have this "nature."

Often I feel that my own view becomes contaminated by this sneaking poison in the South, because I put great emphasis on respecting the dignity of these people, especially the older people. They have lived in this master-slave tradition all their lives, and both for the blacks and for the whites I feel that it would do violence to them to try to tear them out of this tradition (though the coming generations absolutely must avoid this crippling of the mind). I, therefore, never try to impose my views on them, but try to understand theirs and to learn from them. Precisely because from the beginning I respect their dignity, I often build up such strong friendships with them that through these friendships I can get them to respect and to learn from my point of view. As a vagabond in the South it is absolutely essential to be able to communicate through friendship instead of inciting hostility and confrontation. But if you are able to do that - and even receive constant love and admiration, as I am fortunate enough to, or almost daily hear sentences like "I envy you" or "Do you know that you are a very lucky person?" - then you are walking a thin line where you easily get mired down in the mud. This gap between my utopian reality and my actual reality (which we have talked about before) is just as difficult to bridge as a river that constantly grows wider and wider, so that you slowly lose sight of the other bank, while you little by little drown in mud on your own bank. However, it seems that if you interpret "the mud" on this side of the river correctly (that is, if you dig down to people's deepest longings, even if they still do not see the connections between it all), then they will allow you to build an ivory tower so tall and beautiful that you can sit up there and tell people down on the bank below you how nice the other bank looks. But since you yourself do not have any personal contact with the other shore - a contact which could have changed your own character and entire soul - there is no way you can communicate your vision to the people below, since they see no evidence that you yourself have actually been "touched" or changed. Besides, they are busy enough just trying to keep their heads above the mud. They therefore soon forget the message of your story, but find the story itself so interesting, that they allow you to build the ivory tower even higher and to reinforce it and beautify it. In frustration and depression at not being able to communicate your message down to them, you get more and more insecure and have a greater need for recognition and admiration of the ivory tower you have built - even more than for their recognition of why you originally wanted to build it. Finally you become so confused and insecure that only their recognition of the tower itself, its beauty and form, counts for you. And you build it higher and higher, until you get up to those cynical heights where you can no longer really see either your own or the opposite bank, and they begin to look alike. Moreover, you have now reached such a height that you lose touch with the people on your own bank as well and decide to send your ivory tower out in book form so people have something to entertain them-selves with there in the mud. Though what you really started out to do was build a bridge to the opposite bank, you end up building a tower on your own bank. Instead of helping people out of the mud, you are in reality making their situation worse in that you have now given them something either to be happy about or to cry over right where they are and thus reinforced this muddy river bank. Moreover, your ivory tower is morally reprehensible precisely because it is built on a foundation of mud: your artwork is the direct result of the exploitation of the people you originally had it in mind to help, and the higher your tower becomes, the further you remove yourself from their suffering. It is thoughts like these which have made me increasingly depressed in the last months. I constantly hear people saying, "How I envy you that you can travel among the blacks like that," or the like, and I realize that I have already distanced myself so far from the mud puddle. And it is when I realize, in spite of this yearning, the impossibility of fashioning a bridge, that I can become so desperate that I feel that the gun ought to be my real weapon rather than the camera. But immediately then the question arises as to which direction I would shoot, since I - as you know - feel that everyone is equally mired in this river bank. Where is the rainmaker who created the mud puddle? And therefore I keep on wading here in the mud, trying only to keep my camera clean enough that it can register the victims - without really believing myself that it will ever be of any use.
 

Well, but what I really wanted to tell you was a little about what has happened since we parted. One of the first people, who picked me up was a well-off Jewish businessman (Jews are always picking me up to thank me because Denmark saved a number of Jews during the war, though I wasn't even born at that time and though I increasingly feel myself just as much American as Danish). He did not really feel like taking me home, since he was completely knocked out, partly because his business was going badly and partly because his brother was dying of cancer. He was strongly under the influence of tranquilizers, but he realized that he needed someone to talk to and therefore took me home to his wife. It was a very powerful experience for me. Completely shaken, they waited from moment to moment for a call from the hospital saying that the brother was dead, and against this gloomy background my pictures made an enormously strong impression on them. When I took off the next morning, they thanked me very much and he tried to give expression to the experience with tears running down his cheeks by quoting "I used to cry because I had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet." Before I left, he gave me a bag with 15 rolls of film.

From Philadelphia I then went to Norfolk to stay overnight on my way south. I walked around the ghetto looking for a place to stay and talked with some of the old women who were going around with their little handcarts to collect firewood in the ghetto's ruins. One of them told me that she could now afford only four pig's tails a day instead of five because of inflation. It was strange to hear that in the shadow of the world's largest naval base. I ended up staying with a 32-year-old single black mother. She was not the type who normally invites me in, but her uncle had taken me to her apartment to show me how her ceiling was leaking, in the hope that I was a journalist who could get the city to repair it.

When he left, I got on with the woman so well that she let me stay. She had just had her first child and it was a wonderful experience to see her spend almost every minute tending it. I sat for hours watching. She was also deeply religious, and when the baby was sleeping, we sat praying together or she would read aloud to me from the Bible while she held my hand. She would sit there for a long time staring up at a picture of Jesus right under the dripping ceiling with a look so intense and full of love that I was very moved. After a couple of days in town, I went down to Washington, North Carolina, arriving just after nightfall. I walked around all evening looking for shelter for the night, but everyone was scared of me, thinking that I was a "bustman" (plainclothes cop). First a man said I could stay in his uncle's house on the sofa. He took me to an old red-painted shack which was filthy and without light. His uncle came out with an oil lamp in his hand and was extremely angry and used his stick to demonstrate it with, but we managed to get in and I got some old chicken legs on a dirty plate in that corner of the shack which served as the kitchen, although there was no running water. But the old man was still mad and it got worse and worse, and finally he threw me out with his stick. He wasn't going to have any whites in his house, he thundered. Then he took big boards and planks and nailed them up in front of the windows and doors for fear that I would break in, and walked off into the darkness, still screaming and yelling. He had no trust in whites. Further down the street a woman called from a porch, offering to share a can of beer. Later, while I was sitting trying to converse with her sick husband, who was in a wheelchair and was not able to talk, I noticed her gazing at a picture of Christ on the wall. A while later she indicated that I should come into the incredibly messy bedroom in the back. I wondered what the husband was thinking about that, unable to make a move. In there she first embraced me, staring at me with big watery eyes. Then suddenly she fell down at my feet, and while she held my ankles she kissed my dirty shoes, whispering, "Jesus, Jesus."

I have, as you know, often been "mistaken" for Jesus among Southern blacks because of my hair (which is one reason I keep my silly braided beard), but in most cases their sense of humor allows us to laugh together at their Jesus-identification. You will probably see it as yet another example of the "slave's" identification with or even direct infatuation with the "master." Whatever is behind it, it is probably of some help to me in breaking through the race barrier. But in such a shocking situation as this, I simply had no idea of what to say, as I didn't know if it would be wrong to shake her out of her religious experience. I searched for a fitting Bible quote... the futility of the Samaritan woman drinking from Jacob's well... but I couldn't get a word to my lips. I stood there for more than an hour before I had the courage (cruelty) to break her trance. It was such a strong experience that I didn't feel I could stay there for the night.

As I wandered around the streets again, I met around ten o'clock a young black woman who must have been a little drunk, for she asked right off if we couldn't be friends (unusual from my experience of black women in the South). She said that if l could find a place to stay that evening, she would come stay with me. I doubted it would work, but we walked into one of those Southern "joints" (speakeasies) and talked to her cousin about possible places. All of a sudden she started kissing me wildly all over and asked sweetly, "Are you a hippie?" I said no, but she didn't get it. Actually, this joint was not the safest place to hang out. Around us in the dark we could dimly see 15 to 20 "superflies." A couple of them came over and warned me in a friendly tone that it was a dangerous place, but I answered with conviction, "I ain't scared of nothing," which usually impresses them, since they themselves are scared of their own shadow in these joints.
But then all hell broke loose. Someone must have told the guy the woman was "shacked up with" about our project, for suddenly he came running in with a big knife and went first for his woman. Luckily he didn't use the knife, but he beat the poor woman to pieces, hit her in the face and gave her a real beating, worse than I have seen in months. I must have been pretty cold-blooded that evening, now that I think of it, because I immediately pulled out my camera and tried to attach the flash, but just then two guys came running over and grabbed me:

"You better get the hell out of here. When he's done with her, he's gonna go after you." And they practically carried me out of the place. I never saw the woman again. Though I have seen this kind of thing so often, I was a little shocked, because in some way I myself had been the cause of it. It is as if you can't attain deep human relationships without always becoming either victim or executioner. For the most part I am of course a victim, but since I always try to go all out with people, it happens now and then that I cross the invisible line separating the victim from the executioner. This I hate, because I am then forced to take matters into my own hands instead of letting other people direct things. I didn't get that far on this night, though, and I'm beginning to fear that I have gradually become so hardened that I have lost my own will power. Perhaps it was this thought that nagged me, and made me react differently than usual later that night. For when I had walked around for yet another couple of hours, I finally managed to get a roof over my head with two old bums. They were drunk as hell, and there was an incredible mess. They couldn't even afford kerosene, so there was no light. We were all three supposed to sleep in one bed. There were inches of dirt underneath it and every 25 minutes one of us had to get up to put wood on the stove, since it was very cold. At first I was sleeping between them, but then I realized they were both homosexual. So I moved over next to the wall so I would only have one to fight off, but he turned out to be the most horny. In that kind of situation I usually resign myself to whatever happens, but this night I didn't feel like it, perhaps because of the earlier experience in that joint.

He was what you might call a "dirty old man" with stubble and slobber, but that was not the reason. I have been through far worse things than that. I had probably just gotten to the point where I was tired of being used by homosexual men. I hate to hurt people, but I suppose that this night I was trying to prove to myself that I had at least some willpower left. So I lay on my side with my face to the wall. But he was clawing and tearing so hard at my pants that I was afraid they were going to rip, and since it is the only pair I have, I couldn't afford to sacrifice them. So I turned around with my face toward him, but he kept at it and pressed his big hard-on against my ribs and began to kiss me all over – kisses that stunk of Boone's Farm apple wine. The worst was that he kept whispering things in my ear like, "I love you. I love you. Oh, how I love you." Well that was maybe true enough at that moment, but it drove me crazy to listen to it. As you know, I feel that especially among black men this word has been overused. I don't think it is something you can say the first night you go to bed with someone. The only thing missing was him saying, "Oh, you just don't like me because I am black." But luckily I was spared that one. Well, he finally got his pacifier, hut that did not satisfy him, as he was the kind of homosexual who goes for the stern. He just became more and more excited and finally became so horny that I felt really guilty, but still I didn't give another inch. He tried and tried. Finally he destroyed the beautiful leather belt you gave me that time when I couldn't keep my pants up anymore. It made me so damned mad that I grabbed his big cannon with both hands and turned it hard toward the other guy who was snoring like a steamship. "Why don't you two have fun with each other and leave me in peace. I want to sleep." But it didn't help, so the struggle continued all night with me every five minutes turning the cannon in the other direction (about four times between each new load of firewood). Finally the guy left around eight o'clock and I got a couple of hours of sleep. Later in the day I met him in the local coffee bar. He came over and asked if I was mad at him. I said, "Of course not, we are still good friends. I was just so damn tired last night." He was so glad that he began to dance around, making everybody there laugh at him. He was one of those who are outcast among both blacks and whites. I was very sad, because I felt that I had destroyed something inside myself. I felt a deep irritation that I had not been able to give him love. In his eyes, I was a kind of big-shot and it would have made him happy if I had given myself fully. There was just something or other inside me that went "click" that night, so the whole next day I felt a deep loathing of myself. I am constantly finding many shortcomings in my relationships with people, but the worst thing is when my shortcomings hurt such people, who are already hurt and destroyed in every possible way by the society surrounding them.

If I could not constantly give such losers a little love, I simply would not be able to stand traveling as long as I have.
The only thing that has any meaning for me in my journey is being together with these lonesome and ship-wrecked souls. My photographic hobby is really, when all is said and done, nothing more than an exploitation of the suffering, which will probably never come to contribute to an alleviation of it. But still I can't stop registering it, because in some way or other it must get out to the outside world.

That strength I get by being together with these extreme losers, and the love I often receive from them, is what in spite of everything gives me a slender hope that my pictures will be able to speak even to society's winners. That I nevertheless reacted so negatively that night may also stem from the fact that I recently had a similar experience which hurt me deeply. It was the same day that I left you in Plainfield. One of the first ones who picked me up on the road in New Jersey was a white guy in his fifties or sixties. He immediately began talking about how he had always been the black sheep in the family and even used the expression "dirty old man" about himself. Such self-hatred I meet so often among older homosexuals. He asked me to go home with him and talk with him, and I couldn't say no, although I did have in mind to get to North Carolina the same day. After we had talked all day, he took me in the evening to the movie theater where he was the projectionist. He was running a John Wayne movie of the usual kind. In the middle of the film he began to stroke my thighs. It didn't really surprise me, but I found it so ironic that the whole time he stood there commenting on the film, especially the two-fisted scenes, cheering John Wayne on: "Give it to 'em, knock 'em out" etc. How could he identify to such a degree with John Wayne's frightening universe of male chauvinism and macho oppression, which more than anything else had oppressed him throughout his life and given him this violent self-hatred? During the intermission I walked around in the large shopping center where the cinema was located. No matter where I went, sales-stimulating plastic music from the loudspeakers followed me, and I suddenly felt a terrible disgust with America, which I erroneously equated with my John Wayne experience. But in the midst of this disgust I felt that even though these people are to such an extent their own oppressors, it had to be possible to get through to them and tear them loose from this sadomasochistic pattern. In the evening, when I came home to him, I tried to see all the beauty in him. It was not easy, for he was indeed of that type whom society has condemned as repulsive and obscene, but with all the energy I had just received from my stay with you, I had such a surplus that night, that I really believe that I felt glimmerings of love for him. But then the thing happened which was to defeat me. In the heat of the night in bed my wig slipped off, and out fell my long hair. I could clearly see his astonishment and distaste, but he tried to hold it back and mumbled something in the way of: "Well, at least you aren't a dirty hippie." But from that moment our relationship was smashed to pieces, and I was not able to get him to open up again. He would probably have preferred to kick me out right there and then, but I was allowed to stay since it was pouring that night. Although he was short and had short, stumpy legs, he was so fat that I had to sleep all the way out on the edge of the bed and could only keep from falling off by supporting myself all night with one hand on the floor. I therefore couldn't sleep, hut just lay there thinking about how strange it is that people can have such strong prejudices that they even take them to bed with them. Since it was still pouring the next morning, I wondered if I should stay another day and try to break through the ice, but that was obviously not what he had in mind. Almost without mumbling a word he drove me out to the main road near Milltown, where I stood in the pouring rain for the next seven hours, since, as you know, people will never pick you up when you need it most. You must be crazy standing out in the rain, they think. It was then that the Jewish businessman at long last fished me up. As you can understand, I was almost as far down as he was, though I didn't tell him about my depressing experience.

Well, I will tell you more about Washington, N.C., in a later letter and just finish off by saying that I am now on the way out of the depression I was in over you back then, though the memory of you still hangs like a heavy dark cloud over my journey. It is still a mystery to me how I could be so hurt by our relationship, and why it took the direction it did. Although you are younger than me, it nevertheless developed into something of a mother-son relationship, which I in no way could have imagined at the beginning of my love for you. Your strength and wisdom did not let you be seduced into a relationship as unrealistic as ours would have become. You belong to the black bourgeoisie, and though I loved to fling myself in your luxurious upholstered furniture, I ought to have realized right away that it wasn't my world. You were fascinated by my vagabond life and supported me in my project from a feeling of black pride, but your pride was nevertheless threatened by the world I represented. Right hack from when your ancestors were given an education by the slave master, your family has kept up this class difference, and I can't help feeling that this mile-wide psychological gap you have been brought up to feel between yourself and that ghetto I normally move around in, was what actually destroyed our relationship. But no matter how I analyze it and try to understand it, it is hard for me to accept that it should end like that between us. The suffering I went through in your house, I never wish to experience again, but as a vagabond, I have nevertheless become so much of a fatalist that I believe it has been good for something, and that it will make it easier for me to identify with and become one with other people's suffering, though of course the suffering I see around me in this society is of a far more violent nature than what I experienced with you. Even so, I will still use the word "suffering" to describe the process I went through with you. Without this suffering you couldn't have knocked me so much off balance. From the moment you realized that we weren't right for each other, and your love cooled down to a certain aloofness, I experienced a growing desperation in myself. I am by nature not very aggressive, as you know, and not even very self-protective, but confronted with your beginning rejection, I experienced an increasing aggression which became more and more unbearable. With all your psychological insight, you probably sensed it. At any rate, it blazed up that night when I moved into your bed without being invited, thereby breaking my fixed principle of traveling: never violate people's hospitality. But if I am really to illustrate the psychological desperation I felt over you in my love, a desperation stronger than any I have ever felt toward a woman, then I can't do it better than by letting W.E.B. Dubois' well-known quotation describe my frame of mind:

It is difficult to let others see the full psychological meaning of caste segregation. It is as though one, looking out from a dark cave in a side of an impending mountain, sees the world passing and speaks to it; speaks courteously and persuasively, showing them how these entombed souls are hindered in their natural movement, expression, and development; and how their loosening from prison would be a matter not simply of courtesy, sympathy, and help to them, but aid to all the world. One talks on evenly and logically in this way but notices that the passing throng does not even turn its head, or if it does, glances curiously and walks on. It gradually penetrates the minds of the prisoners that the people passing do not hear; that some thick sheet of invisible but horribly tangible plate glass is between them and the world. They get excited; they talk louder; they gesticulate. Some of the passing world stop in curiosity; these gesticulations seem so pointless; they laugh and pass on. They still either do not hear at all, or hear but dimly, and even what they hear, they do not understand. Then the people within may become hysterical. They may scream and hurl themselves against the barriers, hardly realizing in their bewilderment that they are screaming in a vacuum unheard and that their antics may actually seem funny to those outside looking in. They may even, here and there, break through in blood and disfigurement, and find themselves faced by a horrified, implacable, and quite overwhelming mob of people frightened for their own very existence."

I don't think that this picture of my state of mind during hose days is very much exaggerated, so insane was my infatuation. But it amazes me that at such an early stage you could see how lopsided our relationship was. A marriage between us, when all is said and done, would have ad this invisible glass barrier between us, with me inside the cave, which I have devoted so much of my life to, and with you on the outside. With all your upper-class nature you could never have lived the life I lead in the cave, and which I try to show to the outside world with my pictures. I know that in my mind in one way or another I will always be inside the cave, while you know as well as I do that you will always be on the outside in spite of a certain insight into the cave. Every time I dug myself too deeply into the cave and felt lost, you could always with your wisdom and deep human insight explain it to me and put everything into perspective. It was therefore not surprising that you more and more became a kind of mother for me in spite of all my resistance. The thing I am afraid of is that in spite of your understanding of the cave you have still been so marked by your class that at the critical point when the glass barrier is broken, when all is said and done, you will be found among the horrified and implacable mob. To avoid that, we have to keep working together. If a marriage between us was unrealistic, and for me in the cave inevitably destructive, it is at any rate not unrealistic that there be a deep friendship between us. If you will continue to support and advise me, we can in such a friendship gradually break down that glass barrier and build up a relationship of such strength and value as our two races will have in post-racial America, when our common struggle is over. Through our continued friendship I can thus build the bridge over the river, so that my work will not just become one white man's ivory tower. My love for you still has the character of infatuation more than of friendship. Your beauty and soft, big afro, your gentle deep (and motherly) voice and your sweet lips that used to kiss me awake in the morning still torment me in my thoughts. But as soon as I am out of this cave-like state of mind, perhaps in only a few months, I will be back in Plainfield, and we can begin to build up our friendship - a friendship without which we will never succeed in breaking down the glass barriers and building a bridge to a new and beautiful America. Until then, you remain my beloved, but distant and unattainable, Angela.

With love Jacob

Banker and sharecroppers

Book pages 84-85

In Alabama I lived with the rich owner of several banks which he had built up himself. This banker was one of the more liberal in Alabama and had hired "niggers" as cashiers in his bank, although he called them Negroes whenever he was in their company. Often in my journey - as the poor tramp - I periodically got a strong desire to get an education in order to have a career and get to the top in society, but whenever I, as here, got a chance to live the so-called good life, it usually made me so sick that I quickly fled out again to the highway. For where did all the gold, which the banker used for his luxury home outside the city, come from? Well, he told me that he had made his fortune by giving bank loans to poor black sharecroppers so that they could buy themselves a mule or move from the rotten shack into a streamlined plastic trailer to join the new plastic proletariat of more than 30 million Americans. But many sharecroppers in the South cannot even afford such cheap dwellings. They have enough problems making payments for the mule and are in constant debt not only to the bank, but also to the white landowner who owns the fields and to whom they often must pay the greater share of their harvest, just as we in feudal Europe paid the church and the squire. The system started at the end of the civil war when neither the planters nor the freed slaves had any money. Driven by hunger to work for little or nothing, the destitute blacks made agreements with their former slave-owners to borrow land as well as housing and seed. In theory, they would share the profit when the harvest was sold. But debt and dishonest bookkeeping usually brought the sharecroppers into a situation materially worse than under slavery, in which the master had at least an interest in feeding them. The system has continued from generation to generation and on top of the eternal debt to the landlord came the debt to the commissary store and later the bank, all helping to create a white upper class. This banker in Alabama had feathered his nest so well that he could take me on a trip in his private airplane to look at his niggers from above.
 

Sharecropping or debt slavery?

Book pages 86-89

Later I visited this tenant farmer living close by. Both he and his wife were 78 years old and should have stopped working years ago. But he said to me: "I have to work until I drop dead in the fields. Last year my wife got heart trouble so now I must do the work by myself."

Twice a year he walked to the local store to buy a bit of flour and a little sugar. That's all he ever bought. I asked what they got to eat for breakfast. He answered: "A glass of tea and a little turnip greens." What then for lunch, I asked. "Just turnip greens," he answered. – And what then for supper? "Mostly turnip greens" was the reply.

My attempts to find out about conditions for these sharecroppers ran into an almost impenetrable wall of fear and intimidation. I had imagined that this fear was entirely historically conditioned until one night after a visit to such a sharecropper, on my 10-mile walk down a dead end road to my shack, I was suddenly "ambushed" by a pickup truck with headlights turned on me and guns sticking out. I managed to talk my way out of this situation, but little by little I realized that such intimidation was deeply rooted in the violent system of peonage, which traditionally has prevented sharecroppers and farm workers from fleeing their "debt" by the use of beatings, jailings, and murder.

During World War II (in which the U.S.A. was hailed as the Land of Liberty) the U.S. Justice Department admitted that "there are more Negroes held by these debt slavers than were actually owned as slaves before the Civil War."

Yet the Justice Department did nothing to prosecute these slave owners, who even traded and sold the peons to each other. Although there were an increasing number of peonage cases in the 1970's, it is only a few that end up in court; and only the most cruel, such as a case in 1980 where a planter chained his workers to prevent their escape, reach the press (and the American public).

The more I began to penetrate this undercurrent of dread and terror, the more I began to feel that the first part of this century has had a far more violent influence on the black psyche than the probably more paternalistic antebellum slavery.

I began to feel poles apart from the common white ignorance which seems forever unable to understand why their own white ancestors could "make it" in a short time while the blacks in 100 years of "freedom" had been "incapable of making it."

This banker, who is a recent beneficiary of this violent ignorance, had unknowingly fit one more piece for me into the pattern of hunger and dread I saw in the rural underclass.

In most places in the Western world the economic system is so complicated that its inner dynamics are hard to grasp. But in a few places the system is so simplified in its process of exploitation that it is easy to see where, for instance, this banker's mink fur is coming from.

The only thing the bank man could not buy for money was real happiness. I saw again and again that the upper class is compelled to substitute whiskey and tranquilizers for happiness.

Hunger

Book pages 90-92

The hunger - and the reasons for it - which I had seen around the bankman were not unique. The prevailing American philosophy insists that if a man goes hungry he has only himself to blame because he will not work. But why then do the hungry often work harder and longer than those people who are causing their hunger? It is the children such a social cynicism hurts most. The map above shows the counties which a citizens' board of inquiry has declared emergency hunger districts. In many areas the mortality rate of black children between 1 and 12 months old is 8 to 10 times higher than the white one. In comparison, the black infant mortality rate was only twice as high as the white one during chattel slavery (just as it is nationwide today). In other words, more than 6,000 black babies are dying yearly because they do not have access to white health and nutritional care. Or even worse: more than 8,000 black babies would not die each year if they had access to the free national health care, with cash benefits, maternity aid, and weekly home visits by nurses both before and after birth, which we take for granted in a capitalist country like Denmark.

But when I looked at the official statistics to find out how many actually die from hunger, I did not find many, which at first surprised me as I had seen listless, anemic children everywhere. But malnutrition reduces the body's resistance to disease. Death from hunger will therefore on a death certificate be explained away as, for instance, pneumonia. Everywhere in the South I saw these little epitaphs hidden away in the fields. Actual death represents only the sad visible tip of the iceberg. Millions of black children have been exposed to the danger of irreversible brain damage from prenatal and childhood hunger, which also results in indolence, apathy, alienation, and unemployability - a vicious circle that afflicts depressed people also in the Third World. Usually it is difficult to get close to such sullen, withdrawn children, since they are unbelievably fearful of strangers. Photographing hunger is also difficult, since only a few are visibly emaciated. Most of the malnourished become overweight instead, because they have to eat a lot of carbohydrates in order to get enough protein.

Malnutrition and dirt eating

Book pages 93-96

Over and over again in poor shacks I ate cornbread, grits, and baked beans with a few lumps of fat. In better off homes I had more traditional soul food: ham knuckles, hog maw, chitterlings, pigs' ears, feet, and tails, and similar fat crumbs from the white man's table.

But hundreds of thousands today get even less than the 3½ pounds of pork and bacon a field hand received weekly under chattel slavery. Such a diet makes people lethargic and leaves them open to all kinds of diseases, which is one reason why life expectancy for blacks is seven years shorter than for whites.

Senate hearings on malnutrition in the early 70's stated repeatedly that "this tragedy cannot be permitted to continue." However, that was in the good years: soon afterward, Americans voted for Reaganomics to expand the silent army of 10 million hungry Americans. The problem is that most Americans are unable to see the hunger. During the years I traveled I found them increasingly blaming the victims for their lethargic behavior, rather than Federal lethargy. The worst hunger is still found on remote back roads and among urban old people.

A hungry dog is a good sign that there are hungry people nearby. The worst time is winter, when in the South you can see blacks digging up roots in white-owned fields. Starvation also drives many to eat dirt.

Throughout Alabama, Mississippi, and North Carolina many black women – often close to 50% – eat clay. This woman, listless and exhausted from anemia, led me to the slope where she usually dug for the "food" which she shared with her son.

Do you ever eat dirt?
Sometimes...
Does it taste good?
Yes. (With surprise) Have you never eaten it?
No, but I would like to try. What do you call it?
We call it sweet dirt...
I thought it was called Mississippi mud. That's what they call it up north. Do you ever eat laundry starch? Sometimes.
Who else eats dirt around here?
My mother and my aunt up in the white house. Everybody, I think.

Human cost of the wolf philosophy

Book pages 97-99

The personal encounter with the constant whining, restlessness, and snotty noses of those children who cry incessantly because they go to bed hungry, seems almost a relief and infinitely preferable to the empty eyes and dead silence of those children whom hunger has made so apathetic that they are no longer able to cry. I wonder if anyone can really imagine how such a hunger throughout history has been stamped into the mind of black America. What effect does it have upon the soul of a people who must look on all the time as mothers relinquish their children to the grave? Or see mothers die at a brutal rate: 13,600 black women yearly die in childbirth. Only 3,481 would die if they had access to white health care and fewer than 2,000 if they had Scandinavian health care. And what shall the rest of the world think of a society which spends billions of dollars on rolling steel gadgets while condemning its children to rank only 15th lowest in child mortality, letting 17,686 babies die unnecessarily in 1977? What doesn't it reveal about the priorities of that society, that it has fenced in the automobile cemetery in the background, but not the human cemetery in the foreground? Priorities that for instance permitted General Motors to buy up and destroy the electric trolley systems in American cities in 1936 in order to sell more cars — a conspiracy for which GM's chairman was only fined $1.00 (one!) by a federal court, though it trapped Americans forever in concrete spaghetti mazes, like that of Los Angeles, which eventually caused 500 deaths a year from its annual 460,000 tons of car pollutants.

Invisible for most people, the laws of our system constantly manipulate the individual. We get in the incessant Horatio Alger propaganda, with stories about Rockefeller and "the self-made man," a lesson in the possibility of success. The enormous amount of poverty and suffering necessary to create a Rockefeller is left out of the picture. The road to success is portrayed as a road with obstacles which a determined man with the necessary qualities can overcome. The reward is waiting in the distance. The road is lonesome and in order to achieve success one must adopt qualities like a wolf: eat or be eaten, for one can only succeed at the cost of the failure of others.
 

Health care for profit

Book pages 102-103

How such a wolf-philosophy manifests itself in practice is not difficult to see. Gigantic money-palaces in the middle of black slums are just one of the more hideous aspects of this philosophy's pathological nature. In areas infested with rats and dirt and violence you can walk right into banks built like marble castles with huge gold-decorated safety vaults. Yes, there is plenty of money in the banks and insurance companies and among those who own them. But why, I ask – with the morality of the street and the vagabond – why then is there no money for my crippled friend Lee who must sit outside in the street every day and beg for pennies? Lee told me that when he went to university in his youth as a law student he suddenly had to interrupt his studies because he got polio. He still studies, and I got several books for him on the topic which interested him most, namely business law, which he still believed would be a means of pulling himself up by his bootstraps. Lee, like so many others, was not only a victim of that philosophy he himself accepted but moreover suffers because this same social disease determines that doctors shall make so much money that the poor cannot afford them. Why should they earn from 3 to 8 times as much as doctors in any other country, thereby encouraging weak characters to flee to America for the obscene reason that there they can enrich themselves more readily on the sufferings of others? Why should their combined cartel, the A.M.A., earn more than AT & T ($40 billion) thereby making $37 billion more than the minimum wages of hospital workers (AT & T profit: $5 billion)? Why should the middle class pay less than 4% of their income on health care while the poor must pay more than 15% (for dilatory third and fourth class care) with the result that the most affluent part of white America is as healthy as Denmark, but poor (black) health is comparable to many underdeveloped countries? Why are there fewer doctors per capita in black ghettos than even in Central Africa and why don't they ever pay home visits there? In the Norfolk ghetto I spent a whole day comforting a grief-stricken lonesome man, whose wife had died the night before because he was unable to get her to the doctor, and I suddenly couldn't help feeling a deep guilt, like the boy who cried wolf, recalling the many mornings in my youth when the doctor was called for my "stomach ache" because I had not done my homework for school. Few can afford to cry wolf in the midst of the wolf-society, where health care for profit is a deadly business indeed: 24,000 blacks die annually from lack of "white medical care"; 39,500 American women die annually in childbirth for lack of "Scandinavian health care," while American men's life expectancy ranks only 35th among U.N. member nations.
 

Apathy

Book pages 104-105

Death statistics represent only the surface. This man sits hunched up all day long in an armchair staring blankly at the two men who had once given him so much hope, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. His wife is lying in bed, sick and debilitated from hunger. She can't afford special diabetic food as they only receive $72 a month. They are lonesome and forsaken, forgotten by society in a world of emptiness only interrupted by the cheerless dripping of rain through the ceiling. The most pernicious of poverty's diseases is, without a doubt, apathy, the state of mind into which millions of people are thrown when they realize they cannot hold their own in a world of the upward climbing optimism of the wolf-philosophy - and therefore give up the struggle. The needy in the United States are a minority and see the contrasts of affluence everywhere they look. As a result, the solidarity and pride often characterizing rural communities in the Third World are absent, so that poverty becomes more cruel and much more destructive psychologically than in any other place in the world. In America you are constantly told that it is your own fault if you are poor, and thus you fall into a state of violent self-hatred - a morbid state I find unequalled anywhere else in the world. That state of mind helps to kill love in society, the invisible threads of mutual interdependence and trust which ought to flow between people in a wholesome society. The destruction of love sows an increasing distrust and fear. Although fear seems to direct everyone in such a society it is first and foremost the poor it paralyzes.
 

Love and apartheid

Book pages 106-107

One of the things I find most difficult getting used to in America is this ubiquitous fear - and its resulting reactions. Not only the primitive fear of other people, but more frightingly the institutionalized fear of old age, sickness and insecurity, which seem to darken the adult lives of most people and makes them think and act in ways you feel are totally irrational and self-defeating when you yourself have been shaped by a "cradle-to-grave" welfare security. White supremacy is one of the resulting distress patterns in the victims of such fear. This in turn has made blacks fear whites such as this woman who first fled me:
- Are you scared of whites around here?
- Man, see, I don't mess up with whites no kind of way. - What is wrong with the whites?
- Them whites, they mess you up, man. They make you lose your home, make you lose your man, make you lose your husband if you got one. They make you do everything that ain't right... I am talking about these around here... What is you?
- I am not southern white...
I always felt that blacks exaggerated a bit when they told me such things. I have always had a rather naive faith in the goodness of people, probably because I have not grown up in poverty and insecurity. Without this faith I could not have traveled the way I did, as my faith usually directly helped to encourage the good sides of people. Consequently I got along well with southern whites who I am more fond of because of their warmth and honesty than the perhaps more liberal, but less warm and direct whites in the North.

The bitter truth, however, was finally brought home to me on a special occasion. I lived with a single mother, Mary, far out in the back roads of Alabama in a shack with no plumbing, but at least with a TV and an old refrigerator which looked good against the cardboard walls. Mary and I romanticized our relationship in these harsh surroundings, but her trust in people around her was not like mine and she had three pistols and a shot-gun under the bed to defend herself. Those were happy and relaxed days that I spent with her and her son despite the fact that I lost some of my local white friends because of the relationship. I found it strange that Mary, like many other blacks in Alabama, voted for the racist George Wallace, but I had already seen many other examples of how propaganda can often make people vote against their own deeper interests. When I decided to go away for some time to observe a Ku Klux Klan meeting in Kentucky, Mary gave me a silver cross to protect me. But it soon appeared that Mary could have had more use for the silver cross than I. Apparently for no other reason than that a white man had lived in her house, three white men threw a firebomb into her kitchen in the dead of night and the entire house went up in flames in seconds. She managed to get her son out, but though she ran back three times to try to reach him, her brother, who had been asleep, perished in the flames. "I couldn't get him out... They had to pull me away before I got burned... I was sick and in shock." My own immediate reaction was both shock and strong outrage against this barbarian system as well as a sense of pity for those whites directly responsible. Only later, under influence of society's de facto apartheid-morality, was I made aware that I could in fact myself have been responsible for the tragedy and thrown into a recurrent moral dilemma: To what degree could I as an outsider have fully developed human relationships with those who have been condemned as pariahs? A society wishing to maintain such castes will always condemn such relationships. I had believed that bombings belonged to the 60's, but even if Mary or I had realized the danger, should it have altered our belief in our right to change a crippling taboo system on the personal level? With the dangers it involves for oneself and others? For Mary it was a hard year. Her mother died from disease as her father had the previous year. And just before her brother fell victim to apartheid, her sister was murdered in Georgia.

 

Southern Man

Book pages 108-109

Recording of a white man (top left) who picked me up close to Mary's place in Alabama:
- What do you think about integration?
- I don't go for it at all. Let them be on their own and go ahead. Hell, I don't believe in mingling up with them, going to school with them, going to church with them. I've never had anything against niggers. They can't help being a nigger any more than I can help being a white. They are a different race of people and let them be different...
- You always voted for Wallace?
- I sure have... but he ain't... he has got nothing against niggers as far as them being niggers is concerned... There is a lot of niggers who vote for him... he gets lots of nigger votes...
- What did you think of Martin Luther King?
- Who... Martin Luther King?... Why - (spitting out the window) he wasn't nothing but a troublemaker... a communist agitator...

When I listened to such whites I knew I heard the voice of history. Growing up under white supremacy had never really given them any choice. The hurt, which had been imposed on them as children from the distress patterns of their parents and surroundings, had in the end killed their own ability to think freely. The bombing of Mary's house was the extreme, but logical consequence of this oppression. I knew that if they as children had grown up in the North, they would not necessarily have ended up thinking and acting so evil. And perhaps even less if they had grown up in Scandinavia: when I one day showed my pictures - among them the one of Mary in bed - to one such southern white, the extent of my crime against this apartheid system dawned on me. As a "neutral" Scandinavian, I felt that Mary was extremely beautiful and attractive and therefore got quite a shock when I saw the disgust and deep distaste this white man expressed at the thought of being with this "dirty, dark, repulsive skin." Little by little I realized that this negative view was rooted in white supremacy and had ended up becoming an internalized yet deeply held honest conviction which had infected not only the whites all over America, but also the blacks' own view of dark-skinned beauty.
 

Poor whites

Book pages 110-111

Vagabonds and blacks have a special relationship to poor whites, who barely exist for the rest of society. With their guns hanging inside pick-up trucks as symbols of power, they are the ones who shoot at hitch-hikers late Friday nights, throw beer bottles at you other nights and try to run you over at all hours. While the better-off whites create the climate it is the poor who exercise much of the direct physical oppression of black people, who in turn contemptuously call them "poor white trash." It was they who were given the brutal and sadistic roles of slave overseers and catchers. Like poor whites in today's America, the overseers sensed that they were held in contempt by plantation society and took out their insecurities and hostilities on the blacks in relentless cruelty. It was they who killed more than 5000 blacks in official lynchings and thousands more in unofficial violence. It was to them that demagogic Jim Crow politicians addressed themselves, but when blacks got voting rights and swung the political pendulum towards more liberal politicians, the poor whites had much of their policing role reduced. But they still cling to the overseer role and I sometimes heard them talking about "shooting up nigger town." Like the blacks, they suffer from self-hatred and therefore react violently against their surroundings by for instance throwing trash all over. When I went hunting with them I often saw them display unnecessary cruelty towards animals. They too are starving, and often have a low intelligence as a result, and are almost more fearful than the blacks.

When I approached their shacks they usually became frightened and ran inside and locked the doors. Poorly educated, their suffering is partly caused by having been indoctrinated with the caste feeling that "no nigger can ever attain the status of even the lowest white," and they therefore feel left behind when they see many blacks living better and having better jobs than themselves. They feel that "niggers have gotten too many rights." They do not understand the inner dynamics of the system which often leaves them unemployed and instead blame someone who is a little different - just as a similar exposed group of people in Denmark use Arab and Turkish foreign workers as scapegoats. If they seem less desperate and hopeless there it may be because of the greater economic equality and security created for exactly this population group by the cradle-to-grave welfare society. With our tragic European experiences with fascism, this security seems indispensable, especially in times of high unemployment, so people can have peace of mind, trust themselves and their surroundings, and stop blaming their own misery on different groups of people. When I lived with poor American whites I began to understand how this lack of security, linked up with the constant insensitive propaganda against them as "red-necks" and "crackers" has led this unhappy and bitter minority into right wing (fascist) behavior, creating a devastating psychological inferno for blacks.

Hate crimes

Book pages 114-115

The lynchings still continue. Derrick Johnson, whose parents I came to know, was only 15 years old when he walked into a poor white neighborhood in New York, a city known for being liberal. White parents watching from their doorways incited their children, shouting "Get the nigger" and "Kill the bastard," and the children went for him with baseball bats in full daylight. When police questioned people in this poor neighborhood, no one would give any information. From European experiences we know that such poor embittered whites can move either in a fascist or a socialist direction, but unfortunately their narrow-mindedness and authoritarian outlook often leads them to embrace the right-wing system which created them in the first place.

This young Nazi told me he previously belonged to the Communist Party, but when he realized that communists want black equality, he went right into the opposite camp of the Nazis who say whites are superior to blacks and that they will "send all niggers back to Africa." While the Nazis thus adhere to the general Northern desire of making the Negro invisible, the Ku Klux Klan with its strong southern basis does not want to get rid of the blacks, only to keep them in their place. In the South I saw how they cooperated with the police, who disarmed all blacks in the area of a Klan meeting, but not the Klan members carrying pistols and sub-machine guns. Dressed in a white robe-like coat I managed one night to sneak into one of their religious cross burning ceremonies where I taped this speech:

Ku Klux Klan

Book pages 116-121

"Yes, the conspiracy is deeper than that, friends. A lot of you didn't want the Panama Canal given away or Bibles and prayers taken out of schools, did you? Did that start in Russia? No, it started all in this country. My friends, this nation is the biggest promoter of communism than any nation under the sun. A whole lot to think about... and most of you are just thinking about them monkeys running around pulling their own tails. You are still aggravated and agitated by all them_ little monkeys running around yelling: "I'm discriminated against, I want that policeman fired, that mayor thrown out... "and all that kind of junk. And it incites you to want to do something. But friends, the conspiracy is deeper than a bunch of wild jungle-infested Ubangi-lipped niggers. And there's three things you can't give them! Absolutely only three things: You can't give a nigger a fat lip, a black eye and a job! (applause) ... On another occasion we ran these four niggers down and was ready to... to... (indicating rope-lynching) (applause). We caught them in a hayfield, and just when we were ready to launch our missiles towards their burr-head, somebody behind us said, "Hold it, we have them and we thank you for catching them." So they took them down and locked them up. And the next morning the mayor came to our official and said: "Sir, we are sorry, but we had to let them go, because I don't want my town torn up." And these niggers jumped up laughing "Ha, Ha, Ha," and just getting hysterical like monkeys jumping'n pulling their tails. (laughter) Friends, some years ago the Klan was called to Washington to go before the investigating committee - believe it or not - on the assassination of King. They turned this committee over to two, not blacks, I am going to refer to them as niggers, because they squandered five million of your hard-earned tax dollars to come up with an answer to the assassination of King! Well, first of all: You can't assassinate a nigger! (applause) You assassinate a statesman. You assassinate a man of renowned character and ability. You don't assassinate trash!"

Individually, these lonesome and despairing losers often were just as afraid of me as I was of them. In spite of all my prejudice I could not help but like them as individuals. Human beings who are ready to murder what they call trash are people whom society has perpetually indoctrinated with the basic feeling that they are themselves trash. Because of their insecurity and self contempt they have a strange categorical need to hate other people both at the top and the bottom of society. The Klan alone would not be so dangerous if it were not an infernal symbol of the common rancorous racism among whites, which becomes so destructive when linked up with the more paternalistic racism of liberals for whom the Klan is a moral safety valve. Abominable as the Klan ideology is, and so openly turned against the American Creed, it is easy for most Americans to feel morally elevated in comparison and thereby either not question—or directly justify their own racism which in its insidious but massive innocence is far more dangerous for blacks than the Klan's. Later the Klan was to do a great service for the American image abroad when Klansmen on TV killed five people in Greensboro in 1979. For it thus revealed once again that there is no justice for blacks in America. Although the entire world had seen the Klansmen shoot, they were all acquitted in a federal court and the American people either passively accepted it or didn't hear about it. But an old friend of mine, Willina Cannon, who had organized the demonstration against the Klan, was instead put on trial for "murder" based on a peculiar law which makes it a crime to "help create an atmosphere" in which an actual crime takes place. Willina and I had become friends when we found out that we had nearly identical ideas on almost everything. But she refused to invite me home as she had a deep-rooted distrust of anyone white. I didn't understand her then. Today I do.
 

Paternalistic racism

Book pages 122-123

In Georgia where I lived with the Barnett family in one of the old plantation homes, I learned about a different kind of racism, one not based on hatred, but on a historically conditioned paternalistic love for the blacks. Mrs. Barnett spent days taking me around to families her family had once owned - apparently a very short time ago in her imagination (and, as I found, in the black consciousness as well).
Mrs. Barnett: This is the bill of sale to my great, grandfather from Mr. Cadman for Lucinda, her children and her increase forever. The price was $1,400. Mrs. Hill (her friend from another plantation home): But you see, when they came here they were savages, and I think instead of blaming the South like the North blamed us, I think we deserve a bit of credit. They sold them to us and they knew they were selling us savages. But they just kept sending them. And then they began talking about our harsh treatment, but you know when you had people working for you, you would do every-thing for them, feed them up, give them clothes and housing and take care of them.
Mrs. Barnett: The white people would do anything for the niggers except get off their back, as they say. (laughter) One thing is sure. We still miss them. Mrs. Hill: Yeah, we do miss them.
When a "house slave" came in with afternoon tea, the talk, as always in the Southern aristocracy, turned to the follies of their servants-away for them to maintain their paternalistic attitude toward the blacks and thus give themselves the social distinction of previous times.

Today Mrs. Barnett has only a few servants left, who earn so little - just enough for food and a few clothes - that their situation is very similar to that of slaves. What Mrs. Barnett misses, however, is not slaves as a work force or as property, but the former symbiotic dependence of slave and master. The fact that one could lose a slave worth more than $1,400 through sickness instilled in the white upper class a paternal concern and responsibility for the slaves. The upper class became dependent on this responsibility as a kind of love. In Mrs. Barnett's case this love shows itself best in her great work on behalf of black prisoners with life sentences in the local penitentiary,  - in other words, in a need to express love for a group of blacks who, like the slaves, are not free.

Gone with the wind

Book pages 124-125

In the South I had experienced two completely opposite white reactions towards blacks: hatred and love. Value judgments such as good and evil began to disintegrate inside me the more I saw these peculiar white reactions as being products of a centuries-old system. I could no longer hate these whites in spite of their trail of destruction. From this moment, I could show them respect and understanding, and doors began to open everywhere: the doors of Southern hospitality. When I later traveled among South African whites, I met an even more overwhelming hospitality which seemed directly proportional to a greater class difference between blacks and whites. Just as in South Africa, blacks in the South receive the traditional friendliness as long as they have underclass status. They are not paid mainly for their work, but rather for their servility and humility, for knowing their place and being dependent. Their passive resistance to this subjugation is seen as "irresponsibility" and "shiftlessness" which further confirms the "necessity" of the paternal relationship, thereby increasing white status. This artificially high status adds to the psychic surplus displayed, for instance, in an overwhelming hospitality and friendliness towards the individual but not the group, such as "Negroes," "Yankees," "communists." I had arrived in one plantation home with my wig on, but as the hostess had increasingly fallen in love with me, one night I surprised the dinner party by suddenly displaying all my hair. The hostess burst out "I know you are a communist, but I like you anyway." This hospitable class may not participate in white terrorist acts, but it benefits directly from such policing. None of the plantation homes I lived in were locked although they were filled with gold, silver, and expensive paintings right next to some of the poorest people on earth, whom I often saw commit violent crimes towards each other. One reason I could move around in even the most dangerous black milieus in the South without fear for my life was thus my realization that the slavery of the 1970's held its protective umbrella over me everywhere. And when you are up against a system so deeply ingrained that your "Scandinavian blue-eyed idealism" is not even understood, you easily give up and become a participant. Thus I soon learned the self-crippling and basically uncomfortable art of having black maids serve me breakfast in the canopied bed (in a separate room from the hostess) and not committing the crime of making my own bed. In Mississippi I saw the servants spend days dressing up the white "belles" in antebellum gowns so we could continue the old balls of the Confederacy, where blacks are only present in the form of a white woman in blackface acting as
"mammy." I loved these seemingly stand-offish yet incredibly warm, open, and charming belles. Yet I had to laugh the last time I was back in Natchez in 1978 and found the town extremely upset about an article in the New York Times describing the plantation homes as "decadent and promiscuous," having experienced exactly that myself.
 

On saying yes

Book pages 126-127

The greatest freedom I know is to be able to say yes; the freedom to throw yourself into the arms of every single person you meet. Especially as a vagabond you have the freedom, energy, and time to be fully human toward every individual you meet. The most fantastic lottery I can think of is hitch-hiking. There is a prize every time. Every single person can teach you something. I have never said no to a ride - even if there were pistols lying on the front seat, or four sinister-looking men wearing sun-glasses sitting in the car. Every person is like a window through which the larger society can he glimpsed. A man in New York asked me to drive a U-Haul trailer down to Florida. He wouldn't say what was inside. We agreed that I was to get sixty dollars for doing it, but I never got the money. Through various sources I found out that it was the Mafia I had worked for - they preferred to use a naive foreigner for such illegal transport of narcotics, etc. Or maybe it was weapons for the Cuban exiles in Miami? Another time, in Alabama, a poor old woman of 87 asked me to drive her to Phoenix, Arizona. She wanted to go there to die. I helped her board up the windows in her dilapidated shack outside Tuskegee, because although she knew very well she would never return, she still didn't want the local blacks moving into it. She sat the whole way out there with a pistol in her hand. She was scared stiff of me because of my long hair and beard, but she had no other way of getting to Arizona. She was so weak that I had to carry her whenever she had to leave the car, but in spite of this she continued to cling to her gun. The car was so old that we could only drive at thirty miles an hour, so the trip took us four days. She had saved for years in order to have enough money for gas, but she had no money for food, so I had to get out several times and steal carrots and other edible things along the road. For most of the journey she talked about Governor Wallace and how she hoped he would become President before she died. I learned more about Alabama on that trip than I could have learned by reading for a lifetime. In Florida, two young women picked me up and offered me a brownie. As I was very hungry and sitting in the back seat, I seized the opportunity and ate four whole brownies. I always eat what people offer me, even if it's pills, or dirt, or worse. And every time it gives me a certain insight into society. And so it was on this day. It turned out they were hash brownies and I had eaten far too many. I got stoned out of my mind and could not hitchhike any more that day, as I was incapable of communicating with the drivers. I walked into Jacksonville and sat in a park waiting for the high to wear off. Two harmless bums came over and sat next to me, but suddenly I became tremendously frightened of them and rushed into the bus station. I did not dare to be out on the street, even in daylight. (The hash made me extremely paranoid, and it's exactly when you send out vibrations of fear to other people that you get jumped). That day I understood the agonizing fear the majority of Americans carry around and can't do anything about. Since that day I have had more understanding of people's reactions in America. Sometimes I, too, feel afraid of other people. One night in New York I heard a voice calling to me from a dark alley down in the sinister area near Ninth Avenue. I was absolutely convinced that if I went into the alley I would be attacked. But I was more afraid that if I didn't do it, it would set a precedent, and then I would be paralyzed, like so many others in America. I forced myself to go in there. Of course it turned out to be only a worn-out five-dollar streetwalker. I gained insight into a kind of suffering I had never encountered before, which proved to me once again that it never hurts to say yes. As a rule, you are directly rewarded for it. In Detroit, a five-year-old boy asked me over and over if I didn't want to go home with him and take some pictures of his mother. I really did not have time that day, but I decided to go with him anyway. When we got to his home, I saw that his mother was sick in bed and four of his seven brothers and sisters had big rat-bites on their backs and legs. I'd often heard blacks talking about rats as big as cats. This incredible revelation taught me once again to trust such rumors in the underclass, as well as the individual person.
In the beginning I perceived not being able to say no to people as a weakness, since I have always been very yielding. But now I have become convinced that it is a strength, and have therefore made it a habit wherever I go. This has been at the cost of my ability to choose; it has gotten to the point where I almost can't choose any more. Almost every day when I hitch-hike, at some point I get invited into a restaurant by a driver. I get the menu but it is impossible for me to choose. After an embarrassingly long pause the driver usually suggests something, and I immediately say yes. I couldn't care less what they serve me. Food is just a means to keep going. I have discovered that even the inability to choose has its advantages when you travel.

The day I left the big plantation homes in Mississippi after several weeks' stay, I ended up staying that same evening with a black pimp in Greenville, in the poverty-stricken Delta area. We became good friends, and he said that be-cause of our friendship he would give me one of his prostitutes. I didn't say anything. He took me to a bar in which four of his "girls" were standing around. "Choose what-ever pussy you want. You can have it for free," he said. I didn't know what in the world to do. I have come to love such black prostitutes with their fantastic mixture of violent brutality and intense tenderness. You can learn more about society from a black prostitute in one day than from ten university lectures. But it was just impossible for me to choose.*) Then Ed, as he was called, took me home again. From then on he became more open and it turned out that he had put me to a test. He was very interested in the things I had told him, but he had never met a white he could trust, and he had wanted to see if I was like the other whites in Mississippi. That night be-came one of the most intense experiences I had ever had. We both lay in the bed he normally used for his business and all night he told me about his childhood. It all came as a revelation to me. It was the first time I had ever been in Mississippi, and it probably had a particularly strong effect on me because I'd just spent two weeks living in huge plantation homes with those enormous antebellum gowns and gold and glitter everywhere. He told me about the hunger, about how he had had to pick cotton ever since he was five years old for two dollars a day, about how he had never really gone to school because he had to pick cotton, and about all the humiliations he had constantly had to put up with from the whites. Now he just wouldn't take it any more. "Hell no," he repeated again and again. He wanted out of that cotton hell. So he had become a pimp. Both he and his girls agreed that it was better to prostitute themselves in this way than to prostitute themselves in the cotton fields. It is the white man who reaps the profit in both cases, but they made more money this way: fifteen dollars a night per girl. He had studied the white man all his life, every single gesture and thought. He felt that he knew the white man better than he knew himself– and yet he didn't understand him. But his experiences had made him a good pimp, though he was only nineteen years old. He knew precisely how to get white men in contact with his girls. But it hurt him to do it. It left a deep wound. He felt he was selling both his race and his pride; but that he had no choice. He hated the white man with all his heart, but he never dared to show it. That night I came to realize that if many blacks in Mississippi felt like Ed, there would come a day when things wouldn't look good for the whites. I was so shook up after that night that for the next few days I was unable to look whites in the eye. I had been lucky that day in that someone had given me batteries for my tape recorder. I was therefore able to record a lot of what he said that night.
Now when I travel around among the whites in Mississippi and live with them I often play that tape for myself in the evening. I want to avoid identifying too strongly with their point of view. With their charming accents and great human warmth, it is hard not to let yourself be seduced. The trick is to keep a cool head in the midst of the boiling witch's-cauldron of the South. I saw it as a coincidence that Ed opened himself up to me, for I had really felt more like being with the prostitutes. But now I'm beginning to believe it was not just chance. It is as if there is always something that leads me into the right situations.
Letter to an American friend

* (I have since found that these unsophisticated sentences from this original letter about my love for prostitutes as an oppressed group in the U.S. and especially Britain, are almost always understood in a sexual rather than a political way. The uproar these sentences caused among Anglo-American spectators of my show made me again realize the differences that exist between our cultures. For a clearer understanding of my relationship to prostitutes, see page 240-241).

Sex and family destruction

Book pages 130-133

I had found that one of the most peculiar aspects of Southern hospitality is the desire to immediately "give" the male visitor a very attractive "girl." Not only in the old aristocracy, but also among the "up-and-coming" millionaires, seldom more than a day had passed before they had supplied me with a "date" from the same class (or more often one aspiring to become a member of that class), often without even having asked me. When I was living with some relatives of arch-conservative Senator Stennis in Mississippi I was given a list of possible belles to choose from, while the banker in Alabama absolutely insisted on giving me Senator Allan's personal secretary for the night. Their attitude towards "white womanhood" seems little better than their historical relationship to black womanhood, yet this sacred white womanhood is used as one of the many excuses for violent suppression of blacks, and to instill fear in whites. In such a destructive and irrational climate it is perhaps as hard for real love to thrive under the crystal chandeliers as among those confined to "shacking together" in the glow of the kerosene lamp.

No whites, I feel, can fully comprehend the enormous psychological pressure of the constant bombardment with the theme that blacks are worth less than whites. The consequences of systematically banishing the black family to a permanent existence in the shadow of white society are inexpressible. In such exile it is no wonder if the underclass marriage cannot survive. Even where love has been killed poor white couples must often stay together because the woman alone can seldom earn enough to support her children. But for blacks this dependency pattern of keeping the greatest earning ability in the hands of men is broken by the white desire to keep blacks out of good jobs. So, while black women might still find work, mainly in the old non-threatening service roles where they earn far less than employed black men, "men's work" is scarce, and often seasonal at low pay. Therefore the black man's earnings may never be great enough to recreate the type of dependent family constantly held up as the only respectable model. A sense of hopelessness and failure is then added to the force of pure economic desperation to drive families apart.
 

Grandmothers

Book pages 134-137

Whether the white attitude is hateful, a reflection of the poor white's fear and own self-hatred, or the benevolent condescension of better-off whites who feel more secure - whether it comes in a more sophisticated conservative or liberal package, it always results in a blaming of the victim rather than society. And the victim is not only the black family, but to an ever increasing degree the child. Millions of black children have grown up without fathers and in the 1980's more than half of all black children will grow up fatherless. But countless children have also grown up without their mothers when their mothers could not find work to provide for the children and their grandmothers had to take care of them. The concept of the grandmother is therefore central in black consciousness.

Grandma's hands
clapped in church on Sunday morning.
Grandma's hands
played the tambourine so well.
Grandma's hands used to issue out a warning,
she'd say, Billy don't you run so fast,
might fall on a piece of glass -
might be snakes there in that grass.
Grandmas hands
soothed the local unwed mothers...
 

The perception of continued slavery

Book pages 138-139

Even under the most hopeless oppression people have an unconquerable ability to survive and so the concept of the extended family as a survival unit has often become the black family's means of overcoming the impact of an oppressive society. But where the concept in Africa meant a closely connected family living together in the same compound, it has in America meant the brutal uprooting and forcible separation of family members over great physical distances.
When liberals excuse the destruction of the black family by sympathetically talking about its "inheritance from slavery"- as if the family alone, and for no reason, should have carried this inheritance on from generation to generation - it is in order to blame an evil system which existed 100 years ago so that they can feel themselves free of responsibility today. What I saw again and again was not a black inheritance from slavery, but society's inheritance from slavery. When the whole system they live in today is hardly distinguishable from (and even perceived as) slavery, it is hardly surprising that the inheritance from slavery is also in fact being forced upon the black family. Many of these children's missing fathers have over the years built the southern highways in chain gangs. Today there are no chains, as bloodhounds and sub-machineguns are far more effective. By following one of the prison trucks I discovered that among other things the prison workers clean up around the mansions and on the private beaches of the richest people in the world in Palm Beach. The work here under the guns of white overseers can hardly be perceived by the black consciousness as anything but a direct continuation of the slave work formerly carried out around the large white plantation homes. Just as the slaves in those days found it justifiable to steal in order to survive the hardships that had been forced upon them, many of today's unhappy prisoners also feel forced into crime to survive the poverty which these white millionaires are guilty of causing. When blacks everywhere in America get much harder and longer sentences than whites for similar offenses, the perception of slavery becomes a concrete reality. Many blacks have received a life sentence for criminal charges of which whites would have been acquitted. The thousands who suffer from this inheritance from slavery can therefore rightfully be called political prisoners.
 

Beggars and billionaires

Book page 140

But the rich in Palm Beach and Miami Beach indeed have money! Here the wealthiest families in America have their vacation homes - the Rockefellers, Duponts, Kennedys, and Fords. It is also here that until a few years ago blacks apart from servants were not allowed to set foot - although in practice they are often still arrested, if they do. Once in a while, however, a beggar does get in and gets a penny from the multimillionaires. It is also here that America's presidents play golf on some of the finest courses in the world - and use black caddies whom they pay less than three dollars an hour. And it is here that these black slave workers can see white millionaires getting out of their Rolls Royces to read the latest quotations from Wall Street.

Nevertheless I also found here a leftist millionaire, who gave me some amusing days and let me borrow his car. Hidden in the car I could follow the prison slaves in the midst of this money hell. And if prisoners work for you, you naturally also must have the police at your side. When you have killed love and trust in society, all the TV cameras and electronic surveillance equipment in the world are not enough. It would be very unfortunate to have your little children kidnapped. It would be better to lock them up in the cold, isolated world such as the one in which Tania and her little sister live. And it might be wiser to turn them into slaves of color TV than to let them see the world outside - out there, where only a few miles away Linda and her family live.

Linda's world

Book pages 141-143

Linda lived not too far from Disney World, but that I should not mention too loudly, for she has never had money to go there. So poor were they at Linda's that they rarely had light before I moved in with them. I had a little millionaire money with me so I could buy kerosene for their old lamp. It was a day of rejoicing for the family. Linda's father worked from early morning to late night taking care of cows for a white landowner and, after a three mile walk, often on bare feet, he did not get home before 10 o'clock at night. But this evening we wanted to delight him with a surprise, and when we saw him coming in the darkness, Linda ran out and leaped into his arms shouting: "Dad, Dad, we got a present... see, see, light... we got light!"
Afterwards, Linda and her brother danced outside in the glow of the lamp. There was such joy over that light that it warmed me immensely, especially right after my experience of a succession of cold millionaire homes. For the most part though, I did not find much to be happy about. Food always had to be cooked outside on a fire and Linda's mother could normally only sit quietly all day in the same chair because of the painful disease she suffered from. Linda had to do her homework before sunset, but sometimes I saw her reading in just the moonlight. Often I would spend hours with her reading to me on the bed.

For me Linda was without comparison my brightest and most encouraging experience in America. I came to her family at a time when I was deeply depressed and discouraged after months of traveling through the black poverty of the South, which I felt was more destructive and dehumanizing than any other poverty in the world. I looked at Linda and wondered why it was that she had not been subdued in spirit and body as had so many other poor black children I had met in the South. What was it that enabled her family to stay together in the midst of this inhuman existence? And why did they in addition have a deeper love for each other than I had found in any other home I had been to in America? To be in Linda's home was like stepping into a Hollywood movie romanticizing poverty. While poverty everywhere in America is hideous and gives both people and their surroundings a repulsive face, it had here been capable of letting love survive. That experience - in the midst of the world of ugliness - to find love itself was so indescribable and shocking for me that I was totally overwhelmed.

Now that we found love

Book pages 144-145

Now that we found love
what are we gonna do with it?
Let's give it a chance
let it control our destiny.
We owe it to ourselves
to live happy eternally.

Oh, love is what we've been looking for,
and love is what we've been searching for.
Now that I've got it
right here in my hand,
I'm gonna spread it
all over the land.

Now that we found love
what are we gonna do with it?
Let's forgive and forget
let no thought be your enemy.
I never felt so good,
I'm as happy, happy,
happy as a man could be.
Love is what we've been waiting for,
love is what we've been hoping for.
Now that I've got it right here in my hand
I'm gonna spread it all over the land...

Ideological blinders

(or Deuteronomy 15: 7-11)

Book pages 146-147

Everywhere I go I meet a shocking lack of understanding among people toward the suffering which is all around them. People in the North talk about the poverty in the South, but are unable to see the poverty in their own ghettos. People in the East talk about the Indian poverty in the West without seeing their own black poverty; people in the West talk about the blacks' poverty in the East, but don't see the Indians' poverty on their own doorstep. And in the South they don't talk about poverty at all.

I saw the most striking example of this blindness in Mississippi when I got a lift with a representative of the usual optimistic type. He talked on and on about how this was a country with opportunities for all. Everyone can be successful, if only they want to. Anyone can become a millionaire in ten years. If you have the strength and desire you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps. I hear the same phrases so often while riding down a road with shacks on both sides, that I probably wouldn't have paid any attention to it if we had not on that particular day been passing through a completely flooded stretch of the delta. It was in the poorest part of Mississippi, where you see almost nothing but tin-roofed shacks inhabited by poor tenant farmers, whose only property is often just a mule and a couple of pigs. The Mississippi River had recently overflowed its banks and a lot of drowned mules and pigs were lying along the road. People sat on the roofs of their shacks, and in some places only the chimney stuck up above water. Others rowed around their houses in boats trying to save their drowning mules. After we had driven through these surroundings for about an hour, I asked him if he knew the expression "to let people paddle their own canoe," after which I asked to be let off even though I knew it could be days before I got another ride in that part of Mississippi.

One day I was strolling down the street in Detroit with a black woman who had been a Black Panther when she was sixteen, but who was now a Trotskyite and a feminist. We were on our way to a Trotskyite meeting, so it must have been on a Friday. I always go to such meetings on Fridays in the big cities, as they usually serve free coffee and cake. On Sundays and Wednesdays I usually go to coffee get-togethers in the churches. At a church it normally takes only an hour before you get your coffee, but with the Trotskyites you really have to go through hell before you get your final reward. Often you have to sit through a stiff three-hour sermon about saving the "masses," but then on the other hand you throw yourself upon the cake with that much more joy afterward. Well, on this Friday, when we were on our way to our cake-for-the-masses meeting, we passed a beggar on the street standing with outstretched hand. Then the thing I least expected happened: the woman totally spurned the beggar, knocking his hand away. I was rather shocked and asked her why she had not given him any money, since I knew she had some. "That kind of nonsense has to wait until after the revolution," she replied. I thought it over a bit and then asked slightly provocatively, "Well, but what if the revolution doesn't come in his lifetime?" There was no more talk on the subject.

In contrast to the middle class, from which these two instances come, people in the upper class are often touchingly helpful toward the poor and their sufferings, if they accidentally catch sight of them. I encountered a stirring example of this in Gainesville, Florida, when I lived with a rich man who owned an insurance company. One day I went with him when he was out helping a tenant farmer pull his only mule out of a mud hole it had fallen into. The tenant farmer was standing down in the mud hole in water up to his neck, struggling to keep the mule's head above water, while the rich man sat up in his helicopter trying to hoist the mule out. The situation was so much like a cartoon in a communist newspaper that I couldn't help laughing, but neither the proletarian nor the capitalist could see the fun in it. It would be perfect if the rich man himself fell into the mud hole, I was thinking. My pious hope in fact came true, for shortly after, when he landed and approached the water hole, he slipped in the mud and unluckily broke his leg. Since he would have to stay in bed for some time, I was allowed to borrow his Mercedes, and it was during one of my drives in it that I found Linda's shack far out on a deserted back road.

Letter to an American friend

Moon rocket and no light

Book pages 148-149

I: Do you think the black man is free today?
Ex-slave Charles Smith: No, he ain't never been free. As America's oldest citizen, Charles Smith was invited to be guest of honor at the launch of a moon rocket, but declined as he refused to believe a man could reach the moon. One morning, close to his home, in an area where I still on occasion hitch rides with mule drawn wagons, I saw the launching of a rocket through the cracks of a shack I had stayed in. But this old man, Cape Canaveral's closest neighbor, did not notice as the rocket slowly ascended over his dilapidated shack. He had no electricity nor radio to inform him of this billion-dollar project. Even if he had been told, he was too sick from malnutrition and disease to lift his head and watch the rocket.
 

Rats....... and whitey on the moon

Book pages 150-151

A rat done bit my sister Nell
with whitey on the moon
her face and arms began to swell
and whitey's on the moon.
I can't pay no doctor bills
when whitey's on the moon
ten years from now I will be paying still
while whitey's on the moon,
You know, the man just upped my rent last night
because whitey's on the moon.
No hot water, no toilet, no light
'cause whitey's on the moon.
I wonder why he's upping me
because whitey's on the moon?
Well, I was already paying him 50 a week
and now whitey's on the moon.
Taxes taking my whole damn check,
the junkies making me a nervous wreck,
the price of food is going up
and if all this crap wasn't enough,
a rat done bit my sister Nell
with whitey on the moon,
her face and arms began to swell
and whitey's on the moon.
With all that money I made last year
for whitey on the moon,
how come I don't got any here?
Hm, whitey's on the moon ...
You know, I just about had my fill
of whitey on the moon,
I think I'll send these doctor bills
airmail special...
... to whitey on the moon!

The media of the West have done everything to make us admire the way the US has sent a man to the moon, but nothing at all to tell us about the even greater human achievement of a poor underdeveloped country within a few years after its revolution bringing its infant mortality so far down that it is lower than that of American blacks. As an internal colony in the US, black America strikingly resembles the old Cuba in its technical and human underdevelopment. In Chicago 600 black babies died from rat bites and malnutrition during the year a flag was planted on the moon. In Detroit I stayed with a family where four of the children were bitten by rats while sleeping. Their weeping was only drowned out by the motorists tearing along on the highway right outside the house.

Highways over the ghetto

Book pages 152-153

The vagabond wandering on foot below the busy highways will see society in quite a different way than the motorist inside the system. Coming up from the South on a late winter night you are frightened by the speed of the traffic. You see it passing above you on the elevated highways and realize that your only chance of succeeding is to get up there into all that speed. You try to climb up the ice-covered slopes, but keep slipping back. Your southern dream of leaving the sweltering heat of injustice and oppression turns into a nightmare as you realize you are on the icy slopes between valleys even less exalted and hills and mountains made even less low. Finally you give up the Sisyphusian climb and wander on foot underneath the roadways in the shadow of dark pillars. You have not yet learned that you may be there to stay - though the pillars seem like the same old Greek plantation pillars already confining you to a new ghetto and eventually may look like bars - for you still have hope. You have not yet realized that you are in the process of entering a divided world which is a ghastly realization of H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, populated with Eloi and Morlocks. The Eloi are creatures of the light for whom life is a picnic, except at night, when the beings from the underworld come up to eat them. The Morlocks live underground, run all the machinery and cannot bear light. Neither the Morlocks nor the Eloi are real people, but only aspects of humanity which the conditions they live under have fostered in a special direction. As a vagabond you will see this terrifying vision of the US today - the forced ghettoization of millions of blacks going North since World War II- in different and perhaps more human terms than the sociologist. The vagabond has the advantage of standing outside and being able to quickly move between the different milieus. Furthermore these milieus are not just numbers and statistics for him, for you can only survive among Eloi and Morlocks if you manage to believe that it is the human being which is their real identity, in spite of the nature of things around you which constantly seems to contradict this fact. Though these elevated highways symbolize your struggle against an inhuman system, they are equally significant of the powerlessness of those who ride them, over increasingly misanthropic and deserted cities wherein they as a result of such distorted priorities no longer dare move on foot. Trapped by their own system, these lonesome whites must speed down the superhighway to get safely from the protected suburbs to their work downtown without being confronted by the rats, the misery, and the violence in the poor neighborhoods. Once in a while, however, upon their highways they do get shot at from the ghettos below such as I heard it happened in East St. Louis. In these barren, anxiety-ridden, and seemingly "neutron-bombed" landscapes it becomes a deadly necessity to have a car. The reasonable answer therefore is to create even more concrete spaghetti and human sterility while there is not enough money for public transportation for the poor.
 

White flight - black ghettoization

Book pages 154-155

Though society cannot afford this forced private consumption, its inhabitants are being more and more caught in a vicious circle. They are forced into decisions which seem reasonable from their concrete horizon - such as military threats against the Third World demanding more and cheaper oil. Five percent of the world's population has thus robbed the majority of the world's cheap oil reserves in a single century and destroyed every chance for the poor countries to ever embark on industrialization. Car radios pound sweet - music into people's consciousness with incessant messages about what to buy, - making them blind to the resulting pollution and environmental destruction. The vicious circle comes more and more to resemble an attempt at flight - a flight away from your own milieu, away from the poverty and suffering you have created through discrimination and flight from the urban tax base, a chaotic and impossible flight drowning in music and messages about means for this flight, means creating needs for more flight - a flight away from yourself and everything you have built up, a flight into yourself and into loneliness. These well-off fleeing whites spend more every weekend on skiing and hotels than the poor blacks they leave behind in the cities make in a week. But although they are exploiters in one sense, they are just as ensnared by the system as the blacks and are often fundamentally just as unhappy.

For God's sake,
you've got to give more power to the people!
There's some people up there hogging everything,
telling lies, giving alibis,
about the people's money and things.
And if they're going to throw it away
they might as well give some to me.
They don't care about the poor,
they have never had misery.
There's some people who are starving to death
whom they never knew, but only heard of
and they never had half enough.
If you don't have enough to eat,
how can you think of love?
You don't have time to care
what crimes you're guilty of
For God's sake,
why don't you give more power to the people?
 

Guns or butter


Book pages 156-157

The capture of people by the vicious circle of their own selfish consumption creates in turn more artificial needs. The poor whom we have forgotten both at home and out in the world, must be fought off so that they will not take our heaped-up goods. Now when the wretched of the earth are beginning to realize that they will never obtain a share of the world's cheap energy and so are unable to industrialize while being forced to deforest their land to obtain fuel and will thus remain perpetually poor, the rich countries are forced to invest billions to fight the Third World – as well as to defend themselves against the domestic poor. Just one day of Reagan's arms race costs more than he spent in eight years improving conditions in Watts after rioting swept him into office as governor on a wave of white hysteria. In Norfolk, Virginia, one of the biggest ports in the world for warships, this starved woman tried to get to a hospital with chest pains, but had no money for an ambulance. Every morning from her bed she sees warships being built through her dirty windows. An aircraft carrier dimly seen in the background is her only entertainment all day long. For lack of electricity she often sits in the glow of the kerosene lamp, glimpsing through her window the world drama... warships burning up more energy in one second than her house would use in 100 years. In some shacks in the South I saw that the only heat they got was the exhaust from Air Force bombers exercising before being sent out against the poor in the Third World.

Statesmen are trying to see who's got
the power to kill the most.
When they are tired of power
the world is going to be a ghost. T
hey know we're not satisfied
the way they scream and holler.
They give us a promise
and throw in a few more dollars.
There's no price for happiness,
there's no price for love.
Up goes the price of living
and you're right back where you were.
Now we're going to get on up
and get some more of it.
For God's sake, give more power to the people...

Disposable society


Book pages 158-159

Whites say poor blacks throw their garbage into the backyard because they were used to throwing it through the kitchen window to the pigs in the South. I have come to see it as an impotent protest against a system which insists on preserving poverty while producing goods at such a rate that it takes the best brains to think up ways to sell them and the worst criminals to dump their chemical waste. One explanation has it that in such a system, it is impossible for workers to purchase what they are producing, thereby causing overproduction, resulting in layoffs. It is a fact that Western countries never have been able to give work to all our inhabitants and have had to dump surplus production in our "backyards," the poor countries, in the form of luxury items for the upper class - and arms against the lower class. Backyard dumping for profit has become such an essential element of the American system that without the biggest waste disposal agency of them all, the Pentagon, unemployment would be more than 36%. Although twice as many jobs could be created for the same dollars by investing in health care, the nature of the system resists planning the economy around producing human instead of material (or deadly) goods. The system thereby creates the frame of mind which forces us to make dumps of both the domestic ghettos and the Third World.

Disposable society has thrown away the best in me.
It's thrown away sincerity,
the keystone of integrity.
Disposable to throw away,
buy something new another day.
There is nothing made that's made to stay.
Planned obsolescence will make you pay:
paper plates, cardboard skates, plastic silverware,
automobiles with disposable wheels,
wigs instead of hair, that's how it is.
Disposable the way you love,
not exactly what you're thinking of
Dispose of me when you are through
for fear that I'll dispose of you.
Disposable your closest friend,
you're supposed to love right to the end.
Your rigid mind won't let you bend.
You're further gone than you pretend...

Christmas in New York

Book pages 160-164

Forcing people into urban ghettos

Book pages 165

In such a disposable society I began to understand the economic factors which created the ghetto. The ghettos both in the West and in the Third World are a direct reflection of the ghetto in our minds. When love is made a sales item, all our humanity is sold out. My vagabonding in the world's most advanced disposable system became an inward journey, in which I constantly tried to distinguish the human beings from the system in which they lived. Incessantly I had to ask myself whether the warmth and openness I received as a vagabond was a genuine American characteristic or whether the system had given the population a superficial hospitality - a need for a short non-committal disposable friendship. But to be disposed of after use was preferable to the human coldness I had known in Europe, which would never have given a vagabond a chance. I learned that where a system is most oppressive and most cruel (such as South Africa), you often find the greatest human warmth-a warmth which shouldn't be thrown away in the attempt to find more just systems. Though I found life in the Northern states more just than in the South, I always had to hitch-hike back to the humanness of the South in order to survive as an individual, just as many blacks search back. The more liberal North invited blacks to migrate up in the 40's and 50's because it needed their labor. But the Northern whites, unlike the whites in the South with their conservative interest in the individual, had no use for the blacks as human individuals and therefore isolated and abandoned them in huge overpopulated ghettos. Since Americans seem to he endowed with a peculiar craving for space, the effect of overpopulation in America is worse psychologically than in other countries. If all Americans lived as close together as in Harlem, all 227 million could live within three of New York City's five boroughs. "Disposable" society, backyard-dumping both things and human beings, has in this way killed love in society by isolating and alienating enormous population groups from each other. But it cannot strangulate the scream of pain and emptiness from those who are disposed of the scream from the underground which can be read everywhere in the ghetto and the subway:
 

I am, I cried

Book page 166

I am, I said, to no one there.
And no one heard at all...
I am, I cried!
And I am lost and I can't even say why
.. leaving me lonely still....
I've got an emptiness deep inside,
and I tried, but it won't let me go.
And I'm not a man who likes to swear,
but I've never cared for the sound of being alone...
I AM, I CRIED!
I AM, SAID I!
And I am lost and can't even say why...
Leaving me lonely still ......

Exalting the scream


Book pages 167

But as usual the system makes use of its repressive tolerance toward pressure from the lowest strata, strangulating the underground scream by exalting it and granting it acknowledgement for its artistic value. High society gives young blacks from the ghetto safe conduct to exhibit in the art galleries of life* York for rich liberal whites who talk sympathetically about the "problems of the ghetto" and deliver benevolent sermons on the problems of hunger and "overpopulation" in the Third World. They strangulate the people of the ghetto with all their high-flown talk of "changing the milieu" while they themselves flee to the suburbs, thereby causing further deterioration of the milieu. They are vociferous in their bragging about having a black friend here and a "radical" friend there, but they never wonder why blacks only rarely come to these art palaces, and accept without batting an eye that black waiters carry on the master-slave relationship at these functions. These are the buffer-troops of capitalism who can absorb any critique of the system and distort and avert it by consentingly raising it to the level of art. This is also what may happen with my photographs. These affluent liberals, whom I came to hate and love at the same time, will give me all possible support in publishing and exhibiting my critique of their society, shocked at the things I have seen in America and ashamed because I have crossed a threshold which they feel they ought to have crossed themselves. Such people exist in all societies, squawking about the necessity for change in order to help ghettos and underdeveloped countries "up." But when it comes to election day, all their promises wither away in the status-quo waste-basket with votes for the Democratic party (or, in Europe, various social democratic parties). Therefore I cannot avoid feeling that I too exploited blacks, for I know all too well that these pictures will not benefit them. Whites will feel a little upset realizing that the underclass must suffer like this. But they will do nothing to change their own lifestyle, to give up their camper, dishwasher, super stereo cabinet, video recorder, and to redistribute the goods of the earth. And so my pictures will only become a catharsis. Although I knew this beforehand and often was told so by the underclass blacks who had no illusions about trying to talk to the "inner goodness" in the white race, I nevertheless persisted and have thus betrayed both the blacks and the Third World, making this page the only one in the book almost all U.S. blacks can agree with. I have created an entertainment and emotional release for the oppressors and thereby strengthened an unjust system. I am just as hypocritical as these art snobs because I am playing by their rules. If my critique became too "radical" (by American standards; most of the world would still call it "modest"), they would just turn their backs on me. Therefore I am forced to water it down so my book risks becoming a tear-dripping and condescending "paternalistic" naive vagabond adventure story on the sufferings of the ghetto and the unfortunate shadow sides of society - such as the following sentimental journey into Harlem just a few blocks away from the stronghold of these liberals - the Museum of Modern Art.
 

If you take the train uptown

Book pages 168-172

If you take the train with me
uptown through the misery
of ghetto streets
in morning light
where it is always night:
Take a window seat,
put down your Times
you can read between the lines,
just read the faces
that you meet beyond the window pane: And it might begin to teach you
how to give a damn about your fellow man!

Everything in Harlem is black - except for the stores, which are owned by whites. The only stores that are not owned by whites, the street people will tell you, are the omnipresent funeral homes, since white undertakers will have nothing to do with black bodies. Being an undertaker is one of the surest ways of reaching middle-class status. For death is as ubiquitous in Harlem as the fear haunting everybody beneath the uneasy sporadic laughter. Yet I feel safer as a member of the ever-present invisible "Whitey" in Harlem than most blacks are, for as always in slavery, aggression is aimed towards fellow victims rather than towards the hated oppressor. This funeral home next to a drug rehabilitation center illustrates clearly the unremitting choice you have in Harlem - the choice between an instant death or an enslaved life under The Man. Thousands of addicts choose the door on the left. They know all too well that if they choose the door on the right, they will either become re-habilitated, which means a return to the previous condition in which they could not survive without using drugs - or else they become "up-habilitated" by learning how to live with the ghetto jungle through mind-crippling and killed sensitivity - thus subjugating themselves to the The Man's blame-the-victim slavery of changing the victims rather than their oppressive environment. This woman is a living illustration of the constant choice in Harlem. A mad attacker had broken into her apartment and tried to kill her with a big knife. She survived by jumping out a window on the third floor - and was crippled for life.
 

Children and junkies

Book pages 173-175

Or put your girl to sleep sometimes
with rats instead of nursery rhymes
with hunger and your other children by her side.
And wonder if you'll share your bed
with something else that must be fed
for fear may lie beside you
or it may sleep down the hall.
And it might begin to teach you
how to give a damn
about your fellow man!

The Americans I have the strongest feelings for are the addicts, who have been too sensitive and human to - survive the brutal American drive for success. They are not only victims of that violence, but are capable of hitting back with all the viciousness injected into them by the "American way of life." Often on the roofs of New York I helped tie up these bound souls. On certain street corners in Harlem you see thousands of addicts every day waiting for heroin. At night not even the police dare move in these neighborhoods from whose shooting galleries we sometimes could enjoy an incredible view of the "big needle" on the Empire State Building. These shooting galleries are condemned buildings taken over by junkies who are partly "shooting up" and partly "shooting down" anyone suspected of being a cop or a bustman. Since the penalty for being an addict and the criminal existence it leads to - or in other words a victim - is the same as for being a murderer, they have no real choice. They get a mandatory life sentence whether they act as victims or executioners. The shooting galleries are therefore extremely dangerous. This man, who had been an addict for 16 years, suffered from malnutrition and running sores all over his body. He was unable to find any more healthy spots to shoot up in and therefore had to take the foul-smelling bandage off his leg to find a vein. He suffered terribly and knew all too well that he had less than two years left to live. Therefore he had nothing to lose, and urged me to show the pictures to the world in order to frighten other young people so that they should never come to suffer like himself.

The suffering of children

Book pages 178-179

Come and see how well despair
is seasoned by the stifling air.
See your ghetto in the good old
sizzling summer time.
Suppose the streets were all on fire,
the flames like tempers leaping higher,
suppose you'd lived there all your life,
do you think that you would mind?

The most indescribable and distressing suffering I have met is that which befalls the children and which is helping to mold and cripple their minds and entire being for life. Not only those children who are forced to imitate begging dogs in order to survive the violence of the system - or those children who are trying to get a penny by polishing windows for white drivers at the stoplights; what impression does it make on children when they experience their sisters and brothers being shot and killed in the street? When I was teaching a school class in Harlem I discovered that there was not a single one of the pupils who had not experienced shoot-outs in the streets, where bullets hit even the most innocent child. They refused to believe that I came from a country with no guns. "How do people defend themselves?" they would ask. And what impression does it make on a young mother to have to say farewell to her four-year-old son in a world in which it is hard to tell the difference between a cradle and a coffin?
 

Our blaming of the victims

Book pages 178-179

Interview with a wino:
"I think everybody was born naked, so we're all human beings. But until I find someone that was born with clothes on I'm not going to think they're any more than me. That's the way I feel about it."

And it might begin to reach you
Why I give a damn about my fellow man,
And it might begin to teach you
How to give a damn about your fellow man.

This type of "Give a damn about your fellow man" - journey through Harlem illustrates in all its saccharine sentimentality the white liberal way of seeing the ghetto. From the paternal, almost loving care of blacks by the Southern plantation aristocracy there is a direct link to the endless talk about helping one's fellow man among Northern liberals. Many liberals do great and exhausting work in the ghettos, but whether they breastfeed or bottlefeed the underclass the result is the same: They are actually blaming the victims themselves by trying to adjust them to their unhappy casteless fate in an unjust caste society, instead of changing that society. They do not consider blacks inherently inferior as do the conservatives. Instead they see them as functionally inferior as a result of the injustice, slavery, and discrimination of a distant past. After having experienced this book they will ask with despair: "What can we do?" But they will do nothing which would threaten their own privileges and the present distribution of society's goods. Thereby the liberals in fact become the most important tools of racism and continued oppression. They help the underclass to adapt itself to an oppression which renders it functionally inferior enough to satisfy the liberal's own need to administer paternalistic care to the "untermensch" (subhuman).
The underclass blacks have no time to spare for the liberals' condescending attitude and constantly try to provoke forth their true conservative face. They refuse to see it as progress that the knife in their back is pulled back from four inches to only two inches and would rather stab the liberal back to the age-old "white backlash" where he belongs.
The blacks' own view of Harlem is directly opposite the white liberal one since they cannot see only the dismal in the ghetto without going insane. In order to survive you must look at the positive sides. For instance, they will not emphasize that 10% of Harlem's youth are bloody criminals terrorizing the streets. They will turn it upside down and be encouraged by the incredible fact that in spite of this criminal environment, 90% of the youth have not been in conflict with the law. They will look at the flourishing culture thriving in the midst of the oppression, be heartened by the fact that the
majority of Harlem's population are surviving - see the many roses that manage to grow up in this jungle.

Harlem's roses

Book pages 180

There is a rose in Spanish Harlem,
a rose in black and Spanish Harlem.
It is a special one,
it never sees the sun
it only comes out
when the moon is on the run
and all the stars are gleaming.
It's growing in the street
right up through the concrete
soft, sweet and dreaming.
With eyes as black as coal
they look down in my soul
and start a fire there
and then I lose control
I want to beg her pardon
I'm going to pick that rose
and watch her as she grows in my garden.

Why we oppressors love roses

Book pages 181

For me, such a rose was Merrilyn. When I first met her she was a heroin addict although her habit was not too serious. She was only shooting up a couple of times a week and could therefore kick the habit when she finally managed to get a job downtown. Her situation in the little one-room apartment was despairing and I admire her for being able to get out of it, for I myself sank deeper and deeper while I lived with her. Never in my life have I lived in such oppressive and annihilating conditions. I was able neither to think nor write in the apartment. The reason was not only the constant housebreakings; it was rather the fear of them and the fear of what might happen next time as well as the fear of walking out in the hallway or in the street, where you could be attacked by knife- and gunmen. Narrowness you can become accustomed to. You soon get used to a dinner table which also functions as a bathtub in the kitchen such as thousands of people in New York have. You can also get used to having a wire fence between the kitchen and the bedroom so that the rats will not get in and bite you in the face. And it very soon becomes a habit to brush all the dead cockroaches on which you have lain during the night out of the bed in the morning. Even the constant shootings and police sirens from the oppressive, misanthropic and violent American TV-empire knocking through the walls from adjacent apartments can be a pleasant relief from the similar sounds from the street. But the persistent fear of that moment when you yourself might get stabbed in the stomach - that you can never get used to. Even on Christmas Eve I was attacked by three gunmen. How I survived it, you must not ask me. It is a paradox that in the richest country in the world the word "survival" (which I had never even heard before coming to America except in connection with Darwin) has become a daily standard concept. But ask rather how Merrilyn survived it - not only in body, but also in mind. Not only did she survive, but she was even able to wrench herself out of the ghetto. Today she is an actress in San Francisco. Yes, she was a rose who managed to shoot up through the asphalt.
 

White flight, black anger in Detroit

Book pages 182

But Harlem is far from being the worst ghetto in New York. In the South Bronx, where European movie companies now shoot their footage on the destruction of Germany after WW II, there are districts where nine out of ten people die an unnatural death - from murder, hunger, overdose, rat bites, etc. In the Brownsville ghetto I saw two murders and heard of four others the same day. As a matter of fact I haven't been back there since.
Most whites have difficulty understanding what a ghetto is. There are, for instance, no walls around a ghetto, and its existence is not necessarily a result of bad housing. In Detroit, housing is far better than in Harlem. That the ghetto is not anything physically concrete like broken bottles and litter I experienced very strongly in Detroit where I was fortunate enough to get to live on both sides of the dividing line between the ghetto and the white areas -right out there where every white house is up for sale. Many things I can understand about white racism, but to this day it is for me-just as for other European visitors I have met - an absolute mystery why these whites are moving away from everything they have built up and come to love just because a black family moves into the neighborhood. For these better off blacks in every single respect live up to the square white middle-class demands of a well-cut lawn, a hedge, and rhododendrons. And this is what the neighborhood would continue to look like if the whites didn't flee. At the same time these blacks have a culture far more American than that of the European immigrants whom the whites immediately allow access to their so-called melting pot. When I lived on the white side of the embarrassing ghetto fence of For Sale signs they could usually not offer any logical arguments for moving except for the totally unacceptable one about "declining property values" which naturally only happens because they all sell out at once. Thus I experienced it as one great white American conspiracy to prevent blacks from getting access to the melting pot, with millions of petty governor Wallaces blocking every doorway, masterminded by the National Association of Real Estate Boards (a subversive organization which ought to be closed down by Civil Rights laws). For every white who moved I experienced on the other side of the fence a stab in the heart of the blacks. The older ones would do everything to please the whites, but the young ones were far more sensitive. The sudden sense that one is about to be forever isolated and shut off from the mainstream of society just when one is closer than ever before stirred up resentment, and the aching stab in the heart would change a few of these otherwise well-behaved young, into mischief-makers churning up hate for the remaining whites on the ghetto fringe, who then in turn would blame the victim and move. I am not dealing in this book with the problems of the middle class but I couldn't help seeing a direct link between the violence committed against the dignity and self-worth of these frontier people out on the edges of the ghetto and the violence I later experienced in the inner ghettos; between the white all-American stab in the heart of the black middle class and the frightening backstabbing in the underclass. Thus I understood that the ghetto is a white socially enforced continuation of chattel slavery's violent milieu. When this internalized white violence comes under direct pressure from societal violence such as unemployment, which is especially severe in Detroit, it explodes in physical violence. Just as the number of black divorces goes up and down with fluctuating unemployment, so do murder and violence against family members. Almost every time I came back to Detroit more of my black friends had been killed. This letter to my parents, written during my first few months in America, shows how it was possible to sense immediately the knife-hand of white racism behind the bleeding of a people on the cross.

Easter in Detroit
(or St. John 19, 31-37)
 

How we build ghettos

Book pages 186-187

American ghettos stretch out in thick belts five to ten miles wide around downtown business districts as seen here in Houston - unlike in the Third World where the rich live in the inner city (like the new gentry) and the poor in shantytowns on the outskirts. The underclass is constantly being squeezed and pushed around. Urban 'removal"-supposedly for its benefit - is everywhere being used to get rid of, concentrate, or hide the undesirables. It often made me cry to see how old historic European-looking "slum" neighborhoods are being plowed under and stood on end, as here in Baltimore's cozy and charming ghetto.
Stacked up, you feel even more confined, and accordingly the crime increases proportionately with the height of these vertical slums. In Philadelphia the street gangs have been replaced by floor gangs who now struggle with each other floor against floor, and it can mean death to get off the elevator on the wrong floor. More than 100 gang members aged 12 to 17 are killed there each year. I have several friends who have been held up at gunpoint by 10 or 11 year old kids. By giving them a sentence which often is twice as long as their age, whites hope to have removed a part of the ghetto... in the same futile fashion as when they tear down the houses in which the ghetto is contained - without removing the causes of the ghetto. Though five out of six housing code violations in slums are proven to be from the clear neglect of landlords and only one in six can be attributed to despairing tenants, nevertheless the popular blame-the-poor myth persists that "people cause slums." A couple of slumlords I lived with in huge mansions outside the cities were certainly helpful in spreading such ideas. Yet having lived for years in those old dilapidated apartments handed over to the poor when they are already worn out and used up, I never witnessed any tenant destruction of the type which makes a slum: leaking roofs, sagging floors and stairways, defective plumbing, sewer pipes, and wiring. But never will I forget the pain and anguish I went through with my best friends in the Fillmore ghetto, Viliana and Lance, when their daughter died falling through a rotten window which their slumlord for years had resisted bringing up to code standards.
 

Washington D.C.

Book pages 180

One of the great paradoxes in America is therefore that the majority of whites search for the reasons for the ghetto within the ghetto itself, when it is implied in the very concept of "ghetto" that the causes are to be found outside. Especially in the ring of affluent white suburbs encircling every city. They have trees, swimming pools and all the possibilities for expanding in the world. And they always make sure to live outside the city limits so that their children will not have to go to school with the underclass and so that they avoid paying taxes to the cities from which they derive their income. In this way the cities get poorer and poorer.
A typical city such as Washington D.C. in this way resembles the city we all live in, namely, the world city. In the middle of both cities there is an 80% colored slum and poverty, and on the outskirts we have placed the affluent white suburbs: Europe, North America, Australia, who own most of the industry and business inside the ghettos of Africa, Latin America, and Asia, but nevertheless refuse to pay taxes to this "city" although they take home huge profits from it. Therefore Washington, like the world ghetto, gets poorer and poorer and it becomes necessary to send foreign aid in order to give back a little of what has been taken out. In the 1970's, areas within the capital of this affluent country were treated as hunger emergency districts. Despite the fact that European countries give three to four times as much foreign aid as the US (Sweden, Norway and Holland give 0.92% of their GNP, the United States is at the bottom with 0.23% of GNP), most Americans feel that theirs is a generous country and therefore get offended by the anti-American anger of the Third World - just as they don't understand the anger of their own ghettos. The ignorance reflected in their elections of presidents who often stand alone against all other nations in not admitting the need to give back some of the super profits derived from uneven trade, loans, under-priced raw materials, etc, is like their ignorance about their own capital beyond the beautiful tourist areas. The crimes we fear from poor countries, such as kidnappings of ambassadors and public take-overs of our businesses, long ago became everyday life in Washington, which has close to 2,000% more armed robberies a year than similar cities in Europe and 50% more murders than all of Great Britain.

One out of ten inhabitants in black areas of the city was reported a drug addict one year by the Post. These two - addicts who first attacked me, but later invited me home, live only three blocks from Congress, whose white dome can be seen in the background. Although the members of Congress dare not go on foot to their homes after work, they continue to increase military expenditures in a paranoid fear of the rest of the world, but make cuts in social and welfare appropriations. Of what use is the bulletproof vest when death comes from the heart? A month before I lived with these addicts, a cop was shot in their hallway, and a woman was murdered in this very room - the last glimpse she got of this stronghold of democracy and freedom.

The grey ghetto

Book pages 190-195

I gradually began to understand why it is practically impossible to escape the black ghetto. Comparing it with another ghetto, the old people's or "grey" ghetto, deepened my understanding of this aspect. Although there are no visible walls around the grey ghetto either, old people in America with no savings seem to be forever imprisoned in hunger, poverty, and misery. Just as with the underclass, many of the elderly are so handicapped that they can't hold well paid meaningful jobs even if there were jobs to get, and therefore have no possibility of improving their economic situation. The feeling of having no power over your own situation and being completely dependent on the crumbs from the rich people's tables are part of the psychopathology of the ghetto, creating in the minds of many of the elderly authority figures resembling black psychology's "The Man." The grey ghetto is closely connected with the black ghetto as poverty forces the two groups into the same neighborhoods, where the old are at least as discriminated against and forgotten by disposable society as the blacks. Sometimes old people are found dead from hunger at home from fear of venturing out to buy food. This old woman with the "smile" sign in the window is the closest neighbor to Congress, which has condemned her to a pension 40% below the official poverty line. In the South I met old people who did not get social security at all. Thousands receive little more than the minimum of $117 monthly. (Minimum in Denmark $343 plus 85% of rent paid (to avoid ghettoization) and allowances for fuel bills, aids, care, etc. 1982 figures).

The Danish system of home helpers who three times daily, free of charge, come around to nurse, shop, cook and clean for the infirm and elderly makes the neglect of the elderly in America even more appalling in my eyes. It is an ironic fact that many of the elderly escape from this land of freedom to settle in communist countries like Poland, Yugoslavia, and Hungary, where they can live better on their Social Security. This old Jewish woman, who became one of my best friends in New York, had emigrated from Russia in 1905. Now she was starving, never had milk and meat, and had often been mugged. Nevertheless she had a deep love for the blacks in her neighborhood and found it terrible that they had to suffer like herself. Her greatest desire was that Congress should permit her to go back to Russia so she could live her final days in "freedom from hunger and freedom from fear" as she put it. But Congress will not let the elderly use their Social Security in Russia, and therefore this old woman, along with thousands of others, has to continue eating dog and cat food until she, in the most literal sense, has been knocked down by a system which has no use for her.

Welfare mothers

Book pages 196-199

But though Congress lets the old die alone and forgotten, it still has a whole network of spies to infiltrate the private lives of people on welfare. Throughout history the system has tried to destroy the black family. The tradition of "selling away" husbands and wives and children from each other in slavery continues, with the welfare department as both paternal caring master and infernal cruel overseer. Many black fathers have been forced to leave home so that their wives could get welfare since Congress ordered welfare for mothers cut off if a man was present. Millions of women thus live in loneliness and utter poverty, for although the law is no longer on the books it is still the brutal practice, shown in the fact that only one out of 20 welfare families include men although more than 50% of underclass men are unemployed. In this way has been created a special class called the black "welfare mother," who fares far from well in a vicious circle of poverty, dependence, fear and especially humiliation. Although most people on welfare are white she is blamed for getting on the welfare rolls by having been "promiscuous." An incredible charge since it was my clear observation as well as the conclusion of several studies that whites, among their other privileges, are far more "promiscuous" than blacks, with the higher number of illegitimate black children pointing out that much more strongly the ghetto's unequal access to contraception, abortion "shotgun" marriages (which would be futile with unemployed men) and adoptions.
Cruelty to these stigmatized mothers originates in politicians' hysterical speeches about "welfare loafers," speeches designed to distract attention from the way these same politicians hand out billions in welfare to billionaires for oil depletion, agribusiness subsidies, etc. They create a climate in which the poor have to run the gauntlet of elaborate, lengthy, demeaning investigations and follow-up harassment to get their few crumbs. Every sadistic trick is used to dehumanize them. In many places they must stand in line from four o'clock in the morning in frost and rain, then wait inside in a concentration camp atmosphere all day only to find out that "no more cases are being taken today." Welfare mothers often do not dare receive money from secret lovers and spend it on household goods, for the spies are constantly checking for evidence of a man. A new toaster or other gifts can cause their meager support instantly to be taken away. Every time I lived with such welfare mothers, I had to hide under the bed or in the closet whenever the spies arrived without notice. Many women have never known any other existence and are slowly being destroyed by this eternal home life, enslaved by stupefying TV programs. I don't think Americans really are aware how cruel they are to these people. We do of course also have public assistance in my country, with the difference that it is not only for mothers, but for everybody without a job or in need. However, the real difference between a genuine welfare society and disposable society is that in Denmark we don't try to get rid of people like garbage. In America it is a deliberate policy to push people out of society by refusing aid to those whose rent is too high. People getting assistance in Denmark in addition get their rent or mortgage paid, plus car loans, telephone, etc., up to a limit of $612, $1,200 for a couple, plus $60 per child. (Average U.S. aid is $99 per person, $288 per family - figures from 1980 before Reagan's cutbacks.) They are therefore totally integrated in society whereas American welfare mothers are usually put away in special poorhouses, often near garbage dumps or noisy freeways where land is cheap. Such "housing for the poor" is the official banishment of untouchables; every city has such dehumanizing "projects," ostracizing people in a pariah culture so destructive that in the end they become useless to society. By isolating the welfare mother almost as effectively as Germany isolated Jews in concentration camps, the same effect has been achieved: the population can continue blaming the victims without ever having to see what kind of suffering it is inflicting on them. In such isolation and with a sense of being society's garbage dump, children in the projects are easily pushed into crime. When I stayed with the woman on page 1981 found that she often didn't go to the welfare office or shopping for fear of having to walk through her own project.

Alphonso's family

Book pages 200-201

For those who attempt to escape the vicious circle of dependence and underclass pathology, the alternatives do not look bright. They are easily forced into a criminal existence like my friend Alphonso in Baltimore. Alphonso's wife had a job in a coffee shop which brought the family less than $50 a week, far below minimum wage. There is in America an entire underworld of millions of hotel and hospital workers, servants and hamburger sellers who are exploited mercilessly as Congress (pressed by a strong lobby) Will not legislate decent minimum wages for them. The U.S.A. thus has more menial service jobs than any other developed country.
Alphonso and his wife loved each other and their six children dearly, and it hurt him immensely that he was unable to find a job to support his family. It was my first year in America and I remember how shocked I was to learn that there was no aid to get in such a situation. In my country everybody can get at least a couple of hundred dollars monthly plus rent as soon as they are out of school in order not to be forced into crime until they are able to find a job. Families get full support. I was therefore very moved that in order to survive Alphonso simply had to rob in the street. I went with him to steal shoes for the children and he introduced me to Baltimore's criminal underworld. In this way he was capable of maintaining a nice home and could even rent a car a couple of times a year to drive his children on a picnic. However, when I returned a year later his children looked very sad, but they wouldn't tell me why. I found out that Alphonso was in prison and sentenced to more than six years' confinement. When I arrived at the penitentiary I discovered that his oldest son also was in prison with him. When the family had suddenly lost the income of the father, the son had attempted a bank robbery to help out the family. Here is Alphonso's wife seen on a visit to the prison. For the next six years she will not be able to touch her husband and can only hear him through noisy monitored telephones. Thousands of black marriages have been dissolved this way. Thus modern society has institutionalized the legacy from chattel slavery of destroying the black family. Today Alphonso's family is undergoing many hardships; the children are left to their own devices and everything is decaying in the house.

Our destruction of the underclass family

Book pages 202-203

These continuous economic attacks on the black family were constantly explained to me by liberal whites. The black family is unstable and pathological, according to their theory, because the black man was emasculated and robbed of his manhood "back in slavery" while the black woman became tough and domineering in order to survive. Black mothers bring up their children to repeat this pattern, resulting in a population unfit for success. In a society where the effects of continued oppression seemingly "confirms" this pattern - making the real human being invisible - such theories become so powerful that it is almost impossible not one way or another to adopt them. The white power structure's veiled at-tempts to justify itself by denying the black male, make him look stupid, inadequate and weak, are therefore easily internalized by blacks. Internalized racism causes lack of self-appreciation making the underclass male invalidate almost everything he does, give up job training programs etc. and in frustration and defense finally reject the identity as breadwinner - thus fueling the racist stereotype which victimized him. Even male radicals and psychiatrists who vocally reject the concept of the weak black man often seem to internalize the oppression by joining in demands that black women be more submissive and not usurp male authority. Thus they simply mirror the surrounding culture, where the women's rights struggle was met with a century of concerted efforts to present women as dangerous unless confined in their "place." By encouraging hostility of black men toward black women rather than toward white attempts at keeping them as society's cheap labor pool and by creating another violent social theory attempting to fix the blame for black poverty on some aspect of black psychology itself, the liberals are providing a dangerous moral defense and cover up for a system which robs blacks not of their "manhood" or "womanhood" but of their livelihood. When we as a result of the creation of such a slave force of segregated, underpaid and chronically unemployed underclass men and women witness one spouse murder after another in underclass homes, it is simply the system's coup-degrace to the black family. This 26 year old woman was shot by her unemployed husband during a quarrel, but it is not him we ought to indict!

What more than anything gives away these liberals as mere philosophers of a new master-slave system is when you occasionally hear them fantasize about black people's sexuality. While master-slave society has done its utmost to nurture a threatening sexual image of the black man originating in various white economic desires, it has spared no efforts in continuing the devaluation of the black woman started in chattel slavery. Probably no other nation has let a whole race of women go through centuries of systematic and often daily rape - and been so successful afterwards in putting the entire blame on the victim herself. Everything was done to dehumanize and "break" the black woman by selling and flogging her naked in a puritan society as a demonstration of contempt for her sexual integrity - a practice which I found as widespread today in stigmatizing white jokes. To abuse her as much as the white man has (with the white woman then attacking her for seducing her husband) it is necessary in order to avoid feeling guilt to develop an enormous disdain for her. As always with rape-victims, myths were fostered about her bad, morally loose character, while she was in addition given false credit for "animal-like" sexuality in order to justify the continuing attacks on black womanhood attacks which decreased in their most violent form in the 1950's, but which I often saw continuing in various forms under submissive relationships with white male bosses. The depreciation of the black woman has so permeated the psyches of white America that the stereotyping of her in various ways as a "low" woman in TV and media is not even noticed by whites. As in all oppression, blacks have internalized this systematic devaluation which represented a calculated method of social control by the white man. Whites, guilty about selling children away from mothers and forcing enormous devotion out of self-disdaining nannies for their white children, tried to justify their cruelty by stereotyping the black woman as inordinately strong, able to endure unusual amounts of hardship and pain to the point of being inhuman, - a white image reinforced by seeing the victim rear her own children with harshness. I didn't find it qualitatively more harsh than that of poor whites.

The little difference in degree stems from whites belonging not to an eternal underclass of rejects, but to a lower class with hope for upward mobility, which children are the first to feel. In Africa I only saw harsh parental discipline in areas with strong white penetration.
Chattel slavery's propaganda about the pure white feminine "lady" and the subsequent cult of sacred white womanhood continues in white advertising's equally destructive effect. In order to survive white capitalism's psychological terror, and even in some cases to "pass" as a white, the black woman began making herself white with skin-lightening crème and straightening her frizzy hair in a complicated and painful process.

In addition to the negative effect on the black woman's self-image, these white beauty ideals may have had a divisive impact on the family. The quarrels I so often heard in underclass homes let me feel that the black man has had his view of women effected by society's ideals. Black feminists even suggest that a government report's labeling of black women as "matriarchs," similar to "Aunt Jeminas" and "Amazons" of earlier times, may have increased black men's hostility towards black women. What depressed me most was not the one third of black families having only one parent present, but what I saw in many of those underclass homes still intact - and what this spells out for the future of the black family. Nothing hurt me more than hearing white society's "You ain't shit, nigger" constantly reverberating between these unhappy and powerless partners. The frightening aspect I constantly saw of unemployed black men "hitting on" "their" devalued women just as raping slave masters and Jim Crow whites have done for centuries, reflects the inevitable lack of love and respect in a whole society whose values must be such as to approve or ignore the existence of slavery within it. One of my privileges as a traveler in a society based on the biggest institutionalized gang rape in history, women constantly remind me, was being male. In black Africa I saw European women hitch-hiking everywhere - no one reporting any problems. Seeing no women hitch-hiking in American ghettos (and only rarely anywhere in America), I could not help feeling to what extent America has been molded by slavery - even though violence and sexism did not start with slavery.

Luke 7: 36-50

Book pages 208-209

The only time I managed to talk somebody out of a robbery was through a strange combination of circumstances in Greensboro, North Carolina. I was living with a black social worker, Tony, whose father owned one of the worst bars in the black ghetto. I used to hang out at the bar at night. One night I met two young black women of the criminal type there and we decided that I should go home with them. First we stole some wine in a store and dashed right out into a waiting taxi. When we were in the back seat and had started off, I asked them how they in-tended to pay the cab, as I knew they had no money. "Don't worry," they said, "just wait. Let us take care of it. When we get there, we'll just knock him down and take all his money." This took me a bit by surprise since I had never tried mugging a taxi driver before, but I kept quiet, which is one of the first things I learned to do in America.

Then suddenly the black driver turned around to ask something, and I realized that I knew him. He was the social worker's grandfather, who owned the biggest black taxi company in town. I very rarely take matters into my own hands in America, but I certainly did then. I shouted "Stop!" to the driver and said that he could get the fare the next day through his grandson. Then I tore the purse with the gun in it from the one woman's hands and pushed them both out the car door, while they gaped at me just like the taxi driver. Out on the street I shouted at them "That was Tony's grandfather, you idiots!" Though they knew Tony, this fact would naturally not have stopped them, but when they were out of the car and the taxi had driven off, they had at least no chance of hurting him.

Often the brutality of such women shocked me. I saw them time and again do the most revolting things to both men and women. For that very reason it was such an overwhelming experience when a relationship could arise between us, and I had an opportunity to get a glimpse of the warm humanity under the hard shell of viciousness and backstabbing which this violent system had given them. Human beings who are enslaved to such a degree by violence cherish a deep longing for freedom and a more human way of dealing with each other. But this yearning is never able to bloom as it is constantly stifled by the violent responses it encounters from the other prisoners of the ghetto. This yearning never makes contact with the whites or the better-off blacks with their "culture," since these "cultured" types have only contempt for the ghetto culture - a contempt which is constantly felt and perceived in the ghetto, and which seems to me to be directly responsible for the ghetto becoming more and more violent. That tenderness I so often found in our relation-ships, which could so easily have taken root under a more humane social system, had such an inexpressibly strong and painful effect on me precisely because I saw again and again how the system made it more natural for these women to behave in a pattern of viciousness rather than tenderness.

Another night in Jacksonville, Florida, I had met a nice black woman who promised to find me a place to stay. We went to see her friend who was a prostitute, but she was having problems with her boyfriend, so we couldn't stay there. We walked around all evening trying this possibility and that. The prostitute got more and more interested in trying to get us a place to stay. The two of them then agreed that she should "turn a trick" with a white taxi driver while I sat waiting in a cafe.

You can get it if you really want

Book pages 210-211

So we cripple the underclass, exclude it, stereotype it, degrade it - all to avoid the hurt of confronting our own Cain-creation and the rips it causes in the delicate fabric of our middleclass power and security.
Even though the barriers of discrimination we erect in our fear against the threat of the poor can only be maintained because the poor lack the power to threaten anyone at all, except each other, the underclass still makes us uncomfortable and anxious. And so we prefer to look down on the beggar from above, paying off our conscience with a coin. Most of us have become so crippled by this system that we are unable to sit down with him in the street and listen to how we once had use for him to build up our affluence in the Western World, how we sent him to Korea and Vietnam to struggle for the thing we called freedom. Dare we look him in the eye while he explains about what he lost in this struggle for our freedom - the freedom he never experienced --the freedom to make colored people overseas as dependent as himself- the freedom to give us the intoxication of power and self-satisfaction at our foreign aid or federal poverty programs - the paternalistic freedom he will suffer from the rest of his life - the freedom with which we daily bombard all poor people on Earth without letting them taste its goods - the freedom to forget our fellow man while tyrannizing him:
 

You can get it if you really want!
But you must try, try and try.
You'll succeed at last.
Persecution you must bear,
win or loose you got to get your share
but your mind set on a dream
the harder it seems now.
You can get it if you really want.
Rome wasn't built in a day,
opposition will come your way,
but the harder the battle seems,
the sweeter the victory.
You can get it if you really want,
but you must try, try and try,
you'll succeed at last....

When I traveled about in Florida's slave camps I discovered a great difference in the degree to which this psychological terror has oppressed the mind in different countries. One of the camps contained only blacks from Jamaica who astonished me by keeping their camps neat, for instance, while the Americans would throw trash all over in their camps. Liberal scholars explain these differences in character by going back to chattel slavery. Where the blacks in Latin America and the West Indies today are more integrated in society, it is because the Latin form of slavery was feudalistic and in its nature open. The church protected the slave families from being divided and there was possibility of upward mobility and freedom. In America, on the other hand, slavery was capitalistic; even the church defined the slave as a sales item rather than a human being, and there was no possibility of psychological escape. The capitalist type of slavery was a closed system, while the feudal kind was an open system and therefore not as destructive to the mind. Slavery in the U.S. has therefore been compared with German concentration camps, where it was possible to study the effect of a totally closed system on human beings. Diaries written in concentration camps by intellectuals show how, in a short time, they were degraded to sub-human status and began to develop a psyche much like the average slave in the States - including an almost loving attitude toward the camp guards (in any case not direct hatred) which led to total resignation and a budding sense of irresponsibility and infantilism in many prisoners.
No matter how tempting such theories are for liberals in trying to explain the separate character of the American underclass, they once again shift the blame onto something which happened more than a hundred years ago. Indirectly they are saying that the character blacks received "hack in slavery" makes it impossible "for us" to integrate them into white society. The victim is again being blamed for not being integrated. Yet any such distinct characteristics show, on the contrary, that slavery is alive and well today. For character traits are not passed down through generations, and when they persist it is shocking proof that the underclass is still locked up in a closed system.

The crippling of underclass children's minds always astonished me until I became aware of the closed ghetto system. Many of the young black girls I met were full of cheerfulness and freshness. But later they seemed to be exposed to a process of strangulation. They would easily become depressed and withdraw into a shell which seemed to be a form of protection. From the moment they begin to become aware of the closed system they also start to fall behind the whites in school. The vicious circle becomes self-reinforcing. But the strongest indication of slavery is without doubt the self-hatred. That self-hatred which makes underclass children tear the hair out of their black dolls, or which makes them draw themselves in the corner of the paper, while white kids usually place themselves in the middle. That self-hatred which makes people react violently against their surroundings by throwing trash everywhere, or which makes "backstabbing" a unique underclass term which again and again 1 saw applied both verbally and literally. All people suffer to some degree from self-contempt, but the self-disdain in the American underclass is so severe that it helps confer upon it one of the world's highest rates of crime and family disintegration as well as perhaps the smallest degree of mutual trust possessed by any colonized people in the world. Realizing how many survivors have been ruined for life after a short stay in concentration camps, I began to understand the agonies of American blacks going through their third century in a similar closed system, — the ghetto... or slavery here and now.
213

Brother, what a price I paid!
You stole my history,
destroyed my culture,
cut off my tongue so I can 't communicate.
Then you humiliate, then you separate,
hide my whole way of life
so myself I should hate!

Brother, what a price I paid!
You took away my name, put me to shame,
made me a disgrace
the world's laughing stock.
Made of me a show, to jeer and to mock,
but your time is at hand
so you better watch the clock!

Brother, what a price 1 paid!
From the shores of Africa, mainland of Asia,
The Caribbean and Mississippi Central and South America.
First you humiliate,
then you separate,
you hide my whole way of life so myself I should hate.
Brother, what a price 1 paid! Sister, what a price I paid!


Malcolm X: "The worst crime the white has ever
committed was to teach us to hate ourselves."

Tacit us: "It is human nature to hate the one whom you have hurt."
 

Mrs. Pabst

Book pages 218-219

During my journey in the world's most mobile country with its seemingly unlimited opportunities, the existence of a closed system was a recurrent paradox for me. I could not accept the explanations about blacks' inherent inferiority which all white Americans carry in their innermost hearts. "Our ancestors came over dirt poor and made it. Why can't they?" A veil was however lifted for me when I came close to two such "poor" immigrants: Lidy Manselles from Haiti and Mrs. Pabst from Russia. It is not at all a coincidence that Lidy became my first black girlfriend. At first, American-born black women seemed to me like untouchables locked up behind an invisible barrier. Lidy clearly belonged to another, freer world. Never did that strike me so much as one day when we stood talking to an alcoholic on a doorstep in Harlem when all of a sudden Lidy burst out with contempt and condescension: "Why don't you get a job?" - an insensitivity which immediately destroyed the conversation. Later she even said something like "I hate them. I hate these lazy animals." I immediately felt that this was a clash far deeper than between two nationalities: it was the disdain of a free culture towards a deeply immured slave culture. For Lidy - although jet black and catholic - represented better than anyone the "white protestant work ethic." And she was no exception among those blacks who have arrived without chains. Through Lidy I gained access to the tightly knit West Indian community in Brooklyn. Like earlier immigrants, they work fanatically hard, save money, take pride in education and owning their own home, and universally speak of the importance of a strong family. With their sacrifice and fierce determination they are staunchly opposed to welfare in total contrast to the surrounding black communities where 40% are on welfare. Their neighborhoods are as clean and racist toward native blacks as Italian and Irish neighborhoods. In less than one generation - faster than most white immigrants - their income has reached a staggering 94% of the average American family income even including the many poor still arriving. Since 1% of the American population own or control more than 30%, of the wealth, we may find that the West Indian immigrants are doing better than the majority of whites, even though they come from much poorer and more illiterate countries than most Europeans came from. In contrast, native blacks make only 56% of white income. Under Kennedy and Johnson they were allowed a rate of progress which perhaps in 500 years would have given them equality, but with the conservative policies of Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan they are today rapidly slipping backwards. Until the 1960's one third of all black professionals were in fact immigrants. Some of these were skilled when they arrived, but it is at any rate a tremendous indictment of American racism that these dirt poor islands, with far fewer blacks than America, can produce such a wealth of talent. Their chattel slavery was basically similar to the American and they are descended from the same tribes in Africa. So what makes the black immigrants twice as successful as native blacks? Why do travelers to post-slavery countries usually conclude that West Indian and Latin American blacks seem "proud and fiercely independent" in comparison with the "crushed," "broken," and "dependent" blacks in the American underclass? Why is fear and hatred still the basic ingredient of the relationship between blacks and whites in America while lynchings, cross burnings and race riots as well as defense organizations such as the NAACP and the Panthers are totally unknown in Brazil? There is no satisfactory answer other than once again concluding that slavery has not ended in America. The black immigrants have in other words become the new "free Negroes" that existed during chattel slavery. Their initiative and resourcefulness is not broken by slavery's psychologically devastating two-edged sword of liberal condescending benevolence and conservative racist cruelty - the dangerously intertwined paternalism and infernalism which define effective slavery. They are too proud to take the first and have not been trained for a century to be defeated by the second. Their psychology, unshaped by American racism, thus encourages them to resist, much the same way Jews in Europe often succeeded in spite of anti-Semitism.

Mrs. Pabst had arrived just like Lidy - broke, but not broken - with a background which sent her directly to the upper class. A member of the old Russian
aristocracy, she lost everything in the revolution except the most important thing: her upper class
acculturation. She could therefore marry into money (Pabst breweries) like the rest of the 2/3 of the richest 1% who were born into their wealth. Today they own several mansions around the world and I spent time with them vacationing on a $3 million farm in California. I liked Mrs. Pabst - intensely interested as she is in art and culture - and hoped she would give me some money to buy more film. So I showed her my photos such as this little boy in the muddy ditch. His world is so different from that of Mrs. Pabst's granddaughter whom the maid is serving, that if it didn't say Pabst on the beer cans we wouldn't know that they belong to the same world and that their lives are in some way connected with each other. When Mrs. Pabst, however, saw these photos of people defeated from apathy and alcoholism she repeatedly shouted: "I hate them, I hate these lazy animals. Why don't they want to work, why don't they take a job?" But where does Mrs. Pabst really get all that gold on her ears from and why do these "animals" not work?

The unemployed "sad young men"

Book pages 220-221
 

Sing a song of sad young men,
glasses full of rye.
All the news is bad again
kiss your dreams goodbye.
All the sad young men
sitting in the bars
drinking up the night
and missing all the stars.
All the sad young men
drifting through the town
drinking up the night
trying not to frown.
All the sad young men,
Singing in the cold
trying to forget
that they are growing old.
All the sad young men
choking on their youth,
trying to be gay
running from the truth.
Autumn turns the leaves to gold
slowly dies the heart.
Sad young men
are growing old,
that's the cruelest part.
Misbegotten noon
shines for a sad young man,
let your gentle light
guide them all again.
All the sad, sad, sad young men.
 

Staying with the Rockefellers

Book pages 224-225

It is by no means only the underclass and the unemployed who are driven into alcoholism. Time and again I experienced alcoholism and pill abuse in the same ghastly proportions in the upper class. I began to realize that wherever the master-slave relationship is found neither master nor slave is really happy. Neither role permits either to become fully human and therefore serves to cripple and paralyze their minds and behavior. Even when I got to stay with the Rockefellers, one of the most affluent families in the world, with a fortune equal to that of one million American families, I saw this pattern. I had seen a tear-dripping cover story in Life about the happy marriage between Jay Rockefeller and Senator Percy's daughter, Sharon. But overseas the Rockefellers and their EXXON oil empire have a reputation for being one of the most exploitative and murderous families in the world, killing 51 strikers in Colorado including women and children in 1914, or overthrowing governments with CIA help, most notoriously the installation of the murdering, torturing Shah of Iran to avoid nationalization of their oil wells. I was therefore quite surprised to find a big gap between their deeds and the warm, compassionate, and hospitable nature of Jay Rockefeller. The bottles immediately came out and I sat in the kitchen getting drunk with him. We got a call from his uncle, Nelson, who was just being installed as Vice President, spending $35,000 on a seven-foot mink-covered bed for his new suite in Washington. Nevertheless, this family has also been exposed to the system's (or the underclass's) counter violence. Sharon's twin sister had been killed a few years before in a brutal axe murder. But that upper-class violence against the underclass is of far more alarming proportions, I was reminded the next morning after the hangover, when Rockefeller called me up to his office. He had promised to look at the grant application I always carried in the hope that people would give me a little money for film. But I had completely forgotten a sentence in the application about "the Rockefeller clan's brutal slaughter of 41 prisoners in Attica." Needless to say I got neither "a dime for the bank nor a penny to spend." But when I wandered out the highway that morning I carried a new insight with me: the underclass syndrome of murder and alcoholism is but a mirror of the ruling class. Two days later I stayed with this woman in a shack smack up against an EXXON refinery. I don't know whether her son coughed  all the time from her lack of money for heating oil or from the constant fumes from the plant. But I do know that EXXON through such pollution made $4 billion in profit and gave only 28 million to tax-deductible "charities." If any of that "trickles down" to the underclass it is nothing but paternal infernalism.
 

The Kennedy incident has since brought me into more homes than anything else. When I am interested in staying with someone I am hitching with, I usually tell them about this and similar experiences. And the reaction is almost always the same: "Oh, so you know Kennedy? Don't you feel like coming home to stay with us to night?" Everybody wants to get closer to the Kennedys. For the Kennedys are the personification of the American trinity of money, power, and sex. Having "worked their way up" to enormous wealth, they have in addition reached the pinnacle of political power and - handsome and young - have used it to date women like Marilyn Monroe. They have reached the stars. But they have made one mistake. They have betrayed the American creed of success by - within the very limited American framework - working for the poor and the blacks. You don't get hung on the wall of every black home without having betrayed master-slave society at least to some extent. Thus, it becomes more imperative to vote against a man, not for his drinking, which is fairly accepted, but for the accidental death it caused, than to vote for a brilliant politician whose bills could save thousands of lives. Or even more sickening: to vote for a "sober, God-fearing" president responsible for killing and maiming millions of Vietnamese.

At the same time, all Americans are affected by the Kennedy mystique, so this experience helps me among both his enemies and his warmest supporters. Never have I had this demonstrated so clearly as in the last ten days by telling the same story in two widely different places. Two weeks ago I got to live with a banker in Alabama who invited me to be guest speaker at the local Lions Club, which he chaired. He wanted to shock his friends by con-fronting about 50 hard-core Wallace supporters with a long-haired "hippie." I had no idea what to say. I felt it was my duty to give my opinion as diplomatically as possible on their race policy, but as soon as I mentioned the word "black" the banker jumped up, saying that they didn't want to hear about that. Then I tried to talk about the Vietnam War by mentioning the German occupation of Denmark and the parallels to Vietnam, but they didn't want to hear that either. People sat with stiff faces and tight lips and radiated a hostility and hatred toward me which I had never felt with such force before. Then I suddenly got the idea to tell them my Kennedy experience — and the night was saved. People gave me thunderous applause and old ladies came up to me, warmly grabbed my arm, and said, "We knew Kennedy was really like that. That's what we've always said down here." And others added, "Well, now you must see why Wallace is the best man." Four different people came over and said that after my stay with the banker I was to be sure to come and stay with them. From that day the town opened up to me. It was as if a white tornado had cleansed it of the reserve and distrust I always meet in small-town Alabama. I can't help liking these people in the South. They remind me so much of the people in my village in Denmark. It is exactly the same reserve, the same skepticism and conservatism, the same sluggishness, that suddenly, when you push the right button, can change into an incredible human warmth.
A couple of days after that evening, I hitch-hiked straight to Boston. It takes only 24 hours and I make these contrast-journeys all the time in order to see things clearly. It is a real shock each time you leave the sedate, sober-minded South and come up here to wallow in cocktail parties at Cambridge with intellectuals from all over the world, famous neurologists and economists and Harvard professors and so on. They spend hours discussing the inner essence of nothingness — or so it seems when you've just arrived from the South. We often start foolish discussions where I passionately defend the South because I really love it despite its human oppression. But then yesterday something happened which took me by surprise. I was standing in a bar in Cambridge telling a half-drunk guy about my travel experiences. Suddenly he picked up his ears when I got to the Kennedy story. He listened carefully and asked one detailed question after another, as if to find out whether it was the real Kennedy. Then he took my hand and said, "That was really fantastic to hear. I'm Ted Kennedy's cousin. My name is John Fitzgerald and I live in Dedham. From now on, you're a welcome guest in our family. Do you want to come home and stay with us tonight?" He then told me that he had just received his annual check from Rose Kennedy, the clan's leader, so therefore I should just order whatever I wanted from the bar, for now we were going out to paint the town red together. I've just barely gotten over the hangover. It all seems so unbelievable to me, since it is only one week and three days ago that I told exactly the same story in Alabama — probably without changing a word — and was just as warmly received.

The only one in America my Kennedy experience apparently didn't make an impression on was Ted Kennedy. When I saw him at a meeting in New York this fall I went right past the bodyguards and said something like "Hey, you remember me from that night...?" But Ted just stared at me like he didn't know what I was talking about.

Letter to American friend

Kennedy supported the integration of black and white school children, which was one of the most significant results of the second reconstruction. That he like many other better-off liberals did not integrate his own children was one of the many things which sabotaged the intent of integration and created resentment among poor whites, who could not afford private schools. Seeing the conditions of American schools was perhaps the most shocking aspect of my journey. Never before had I been confronted with such a litter of brainwashing phrases, like "Men treasure freedom above all else," combined with an almost total omission of black history and culture. The totalitarian "pledging allegiance" to "one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all" stands in glaring contrast to the state of slavery which consciously or unconsciously is hammered into black children in these dilapidated plywood. windowed "ghetto schools" unlike any other schools in the world. The Jewish Star syndrome of the thirties flashed back to me when I saw the violent struggles everywhere in the cities as desperate blacks tried to break out of their forced segregation by sending their children by bus to schools in white neighborhoods, hoping to give them an equal education. In some places I saw soldiers on every bus to protect children against white parents. Furious rock throwing whites must he kept behind barricades to protect black children, who learn on their first day out in the white world that the Ku Klux Klan is in the heart of every white person.

228

Recorded conversation of ghetto school children:
- We should be friends to white people. Like Mary, she's my friend and she's white.
- Wait until you grow up and she'll be out of this world!
- How do you know she'll be out of this world?
- She won't be out of the world, but out of this country.
- Out of this country or out of this ghetto?
- Out of this country, ghetto, or anything...
- She will still be my friend.
- She might turn against you. They might brainwash
her.
- A white person is still a human being!
- But why... How come they treat a black person as if he an animal?
- We must have done something wrong!

I could only conclude when listening to such conversations of 7 and 8 year old children that many of them see not only their ghetto, but even their country
as a closed system – and worse – are blaming themselves for it. If so, it is not very surprising that many black parents are opposed to integrated schooling in spite of their knowledge that ghetto schools don't work. Being educationally deprived in your own ghetto schools is to be preferred for the illusion of belonging to mainstream society with the similar deprivation you meet here. For it is a sad fact that even integrated schools are killing the spirit and motivation in black children. Everywhere in the world, teachers are creating pupils to fit the image and the expectation they already have of them. If you take a random sample of a class and tell the teachers that these pupils are "potential academic spurters" then this group will after a year or two live up to the expectation as a result of the special treatment the teacher unconsciously gives it. In a master-slave society the one expected to become the slave will thus be given an inferior education, with black or white teachers or segregation or integration making no great difference, as can be seen among the two races in Malaysia or among European and Eastern Jews in Israel.

This "innocent" discrimination has disastrous consequences in America as it is the basis for dividing the pupils up into "slow" and "bright" tracks, which are naturally a reflection of class society outside. How damaging such a discrimination is for a child's self-concept was shown when a computer by mistake put all the so-called "slow" children into the "bright" lass and vice versa, with the result that a year later, when the mistake was discovered, they found that the slow pupils were behaving as though they were bright and the bright pupils were behaving as though they were stupid – the beginning of ghettoization. Constantly I met teachers and even principals who referred to their ghetto pupils as "animals." With such an attitude they are directly creating animals, to the point where I saw even young children thinking of themselves as rats. The image the teacher has of a child becomes the image this child adopts and later tries to live up to. This I felt clearly in my own school. I spoke a rural dialect, which sounded "dumb" and "non verbal" in the ears of teachers in the larger city, where they spoke "correct" Danish. As a result they unconsciously avoided me and little by little I became introverted with occasional sudden explosions of "dumb" behavior; I lost all desire for learning and consistently scored 30 to 50% lower than the other pupils. Finally I was forced to drop out, which eventually made me into a streetwise vagabond. Had I in addition been black in a society which for a century had tried to keep such "unteachables" out of sight till they became untouchables, I could easily have ended up not only "streetwise," but also a "criminal," "addict," "prostitute," "welfare-recipient" or any of the roles disposable society finds it fitting to mold its undesirables into.

231

To avoid the accusation of being master-slave society's whip-hand, teachers (who in America - from daycare workers to university professors - have much less prestige than in Europe) constantly find new ways of putting the blame on their pupils. The liberals say that the ghetto child's "lack of motivation" and "impaired learning ability" is due to being "culturally deprived" by coming from homes with no more books than could be found in slave cabins. Coming from a country with more bookstores than hamburger-joints and 15 times as many books in each home as in America, I would like to ask with the same logic: Could it be that the teachers them-selves have been "culturally deprived" by coming from homes almost without books and with information most-ly from racist one-sided TV without counter-balancing from other countries (such as we are used to in Danish TV with some Russian and East European programs alongside the American) ? Just as black students in the end fall one or two years behind whites in America, American exchange students are consistently placed one or two grades behind their age in European high schools. In America I met teachers for whom Africa is still a dark continent and college professors who had never heard of Marx. Could it be that the teachers them-selves have been caught in a closed system and thereby become such excellent oppressors? If this smells a hit of national chauvinism then remember it is a benign chauvinism, hurting no one, unlike the chauvinism I found among American teachers whose infernalism "Our schools are not inferior. We get inferior students" or paternalism "Poor little things" hurt and crush the children.
If there is any doubt left it is worth remembering that highly motivated and politically and socially aware teachers in the schools of the Black Panthers and the Black Muslims did bring their ghetto kids up to the national standards. In Los Angeles I saw a beautiful case of racial solidarity when West Indian immigrant children formed an organization to aid and try to motivate native blacks not to drop out of high school and college - a historical repetition of the underground railroad where free blacks helped people out of slavery. For if' a few underclass blacks manage to come out of elementary school "alive" and with some self-esteem left, master-slave society has designed more obstacles to put them back in the closed system. Coming from a country where all higher education is free and of an even standard, without Harvards and Howards, it was a shock for me to see the total lack of democracy and equality of opportunity in American higher education, which clearly is de-signed to make some into an elite and dispose of others as trash. If so many Third World countries were not
worse off, a U.N. human rights commission would long ago have indicted the American school system not only for apartheid, but even more for continuing slavery.

The USA therefore remains the most segregated society in the Western Hemisphere, with a psychology resembling South African apartheid more than a free society. For to try to integrate that which comes out of slavery is absurd ethnic alchemy. A system which is based on the right of one to float on top of the other will continue to produce half-humans who repel each other like oil and water. The frantic efforts of the liberals to shake these two elements so much together that they split into smaller particles for a short time is a fruitless attempt to give uncontrolled capitalism a human face. For when they do not really wish economic equalization of the enormous class differences in society anyhow, then they in fact make sure that these class differences are carried on among the pupils no matter how integrated the classroom. The tragedy of American liberals is that their paternalistic throwing of guilt money at the poor from above is so engrained in their deepest-down social-Darwinist outlook that they are as frightened as the conservatives at the prospect of a genuine welfare state which respects the dignity of the individual instead of destroying it. In their zealous distrust of the poor they are creating beggars instead of participants and thereby killing initiative in the underclass at the same rate as on chattel slavery's plantations. With conservative infernalism killing what little initiative is left by the liberals it is obvious that a society with such a huge slave culture will start falling behind other industrial nations, much as the American South steadily fell behind the North until the Civil Rights movement. Though American growth rates include the enormous cost of police, prisons, and courts, they have for years been below those of European welfare societies, leading one to believe that racism in more than one way hurts all Americans. However, it is important to stress that racism has only killed the initiative to participate in the mainstream economy. For the prisoners of the closed system are in no way lazy and have developed incredible techniques for survival.

Yet how trapped people are by their culture is shown in this picture of a group of black teenagers. There are no whites among them. The girl was adopted as a baby by black parents and has therefore been brought up to be black: to behave black, to think black, and to dress like blacks. She has hardly anything in common with whites and cannot even speak their language. In white homes I saw black children brainwashed with the master culture and unable to communicate with people bound in slavery.

233

The more I learned about the crippling and self-perpetuating effect of the master-slave relationship, the more difficult I found it to condemn white Americans for their racism. Even for me, and the West Indians, who were not molded by this master-culture, it was not always possible to respond in a human way towards those imprisoned in a slave-culture. The clumsy behavior of white Americans towards blacks became especially understandable when I compared it to my own difficulties in being fully human towards those locked up in the homosexual ghetto by my heterosexual society. My attitude toward gays had been basically liberal, since I had never heard overtly hateful attitudes in my Danish childhood and it took me many "dirty old man" encounters as a vagabond to "come out" of that closet - if ever I did. I soon learned from more "liberated" gays that liberals are true liberation's most insidious enemy. Their deep sense of heterosexual superiority remains untouched by their concern for the "plight" of gay people. They appear to concede so much with their condescending "We should accept homosexuals" while the liberal "we" invariably excludes the very minority whose integration is being urged - leaving the oppressed to struggle not only against genuinely expressed bigotry and hatred, but also "sympathy" and "understanding"-"tolerance" extended to something regrettable rather than normal. After such indoctrination "we" feel as insecure, uneasy, and threatened by "them" as white Americans feel threatened by the blacks, and it becomes more convenient for us to keep them in ghettos. Some Americans see gay ghettos like San Francisco and New Orleans as expressions of a tolerant and free society. As with the old Jewish ghettos in Europe, it is just the opposite. When you for centuries prevent gays from responding freely, kissing and holding hands in an open) atmosphere without fear, make laws against them in most states, make them loathe homosexuality before reaching adulthood so that they adopt and internalize straight people's definition of good and bad, when you force gays throughout their lives into painful, futile attempts to straighten their lives with the same crippling effect on their self-image as when blacks straightened their hair to "pass" or merely survive, - then you will eventually force them into similar segregated ghettos, complete with riots and subcultures.

At times I could hardly distinguish one ghetto from the other. Hitch-hiking in Baltimore's black ghetto late one night to find a place to stay I was picked up by a beautiful black woman, which surprised me as black women never picked me up. She invited me to her luxurious home outside the city. She was one of the few Americans well-read in Danish literature, and with this common interest we got involved in a deep intellectual conversation after which she invited me to share her silk bed upstairs. Not until she started kissing me did her beard stubble tell me she was a drag queen. When I later told the story to American men they would usually burst out with nausea: "What did you do? Did you jump out the window?" Indeed, soon afterward two men, believing they had picked up a female prostitute, killed such a drag queen. For me Willie instead became a dear friend, introducing me to that special subculture of the gay ghetto which has conquered self-hatred and inferiority by living entirely by the closed system's own rules, flaunting its contempt for the world outside. To meet these proud drag queens and transsexuals was for me a happy surprise since they did not live the half-life of cringing servility I had met previously on the road. Theirs was a genuine counterculture and is therefore oppressed like the black subcultures. Time and again I saw how police in San Francisco assaulted my drag friend Tania. Two drag queens were killed by police while I lived there.

Oppression also drives many drag queens into drugs and prostitution, thus mirroring the most obvious end result of black oppression. When a social system treats a minority with contempt and hostility, in the end those within this ghetto become so conscious of its closed system that they go one further and exaggerate their perceived "difference." And so the vicious circle of oppression is completed as the sub-culture now visibly seems to "justify" society's contempt for it. In this way the "ghetto of the ghetto" is created as the "Uncle Tom" conformist homosexuals often feel that the drag, transsexual, and other special gay sub-cultures spoil it for them in their relationship to the straight world.

Ghetto subcultures, prostitutes and pimps

Book pages 238-245

In the same way the strong subculture in the black ghetto is a thorn in the side of better-off blacks who try to integrate themselves into white society, because the pathological picture of this subculture is constantly used against them by whites. Sensitive to this aspect, the upper ghetto tends to view the lower ghetto with a sense of shame rather than as proof of their common oppression. So strong are tensions between the upper and the lower ghetto that I often had to choose sides, which was not difficult after all I had seen of the suffering in the lower ghetto and the resulting contempt from both the upper ghetto and from whites. The more I began to understand the lower ghetto, the more I understood the very dynamics of oppression in our system. The lower ghetto is for many whites an incomprehensible world of criminals, pimps, prostitutes and addicts. Since they live in a closed system, their acts are desperate and disclose a pattern of absolute contempt for the rest of society, of which they know they will never become a part. The pool rooms are their meeting place, the Cadillac their status symbol, the brotherly handshake and the sophisticated "jive" talk their communication. It is important to understand and respect this culture rather than send it to prison - imprisoned as it already is in a cruel and dehumanizing closed system. "Backstabbing" may be as common as the brotherly handshake. But when you have learned these rules and a certain technique for survival in this culture you cannot help but get to love these people more than any others in society. For to meet humaneness in the midst of brutal surroundings will always seem more overwhelming and encouraging than to meet it in more safe surroundings. When this underworld is a source of irritation for society's better-off citizens, it is not least because it constitutes an enormously exaggerated and distorted mirror image of themselves. Here are all the tendencies of the system stripped down to a ghastly caricature: the competitive spirit, the race for status symbols, the male chauvinism, and of course the master-slave relationship.

Wherever in the world the master-slave relationship exists there will be within the slave-culture further divisions into new master-slave relationships. Where any such relationship exists between people you will know that these people are not free, for such a relationship can only exist in a closed system. In the underclass such slavery is seen most clearly in the relationship between pimp and prostitute. The black prostitute is totally subjugated by the pimp and cringes mentally at his feet in deep veneration. The pimp, however, is not only executioner, but also a victim in the greater system in which he becomes the new slave driver who sees to it that the merchandise is delivered to the slave master, - the white man. His tool is no longer the whip, but the pimp stick made from twisted coat hangers. Even though the pimps, like the capitalists in the larger society, can seem quite inhuman, it is important to remember that they, like the capitalists, do business according to well-defined rules and laws which are beyond their control. These laws are laid down in "The Book," an unwritten "Adam Smith" or business manual which has been passed down from pimp to pimp for generations and which almost can be seen as an extension of such manuals as it describes the under system in the larger economic system. Woe to the pimp who doesn't follow the regulations! Just like the larger capitalists, they have their daily board meetings with the other pimps, where they not only discuss how to keep wages down, but also exchange technical details concerning the manipulation of their "ho's." In the same way they establish their employees' working hours which they call "git down-time." You can usually tell which ho's belong to a "mack-man" and which are "outlaws" since all the organized ho's get out on the street at almost exactly the same time every night, while the independent "outlaws" come and leave as they feel like it. I always felt immensely close to these ultimate losers in the multiple layers of exploitation, the black prostitutes, who often in my journey gave me hospitality (although naturally they were only the `outlaws"). As I was one of the few men in their lives with whom they did not have either a sexual or business-type relationship, they could express towards me that humanity which had not yet been destroyed by their harsh exploitation.

One reason we got along so well was no doubt that they were compelled to know every detail of "the system" in the lower ghetto in order to stay free of pimps, while I as an outlaw (or vagabond) in the greater society had gradually acquired a certain knowledge about it as well in order to survive in it. We had therefore in widely different ways arrived at a common outlook. As the parallel between the super-structure and the substructure was so evident, it was usually easy for them to see the inner dynamics of the combined system which caused their double oppression: racism and sexism. For the relationship between pimp and prostitute is in many ways just a wildly exaggerated model of the relationship between man and woman in the lower-ghetto (or even in society at large) in which one of the man's many "hustles" consist of obtaining "broad money" from defenseless women in return for protection against her being "hit on" by other men's sexual aggression. In such a society a woman to a horrifying degree sees a man as at best a mere object for obtaining money and luxury. She is often very straight-forward about her desire to "marry a rich man." This fast ghetto-escape to affluence and security was shocking for me as I had rarely seen such selfish traits in Danish women - perhaps because in a more egalitarian welfare state such exploitation between the sexes doesn't make sense. The prostitution involved in buying women with status and wealth shows especially clearly in the American upper-class and underclass. Within its closed system the underclass has been instilled. with the same admiration for "sharp" pimps and "righteous hustlers" in fine "threads" as people in the larger society are taught to have for successful maverick capitalists. Such flashy pimps and hustlers apparently "making it" are dangerous role models for ghetto children attracting them to the street institution at the age of 8 or 9 years old, but, like the nouveau riche capitalist, they are also pitiful erratic figures continuously manipulating everyone with no time to become lax or their empire will collapse. I learned quite a bit about this side when I was working in a church helping to make a union for prostitutes, which would not only protect them from brutal police attacks, but also against pimps. It is my hope that this chapter will inspire more support and understanding for the work of my dear friend, Margo St. James, the national leader of the hooker's union COYOTE, with whom I later lived.

Among the prostitutes who made the strongest impression on me was Geegurtha who was in the midst of a struggle to get out of this slavery. When I first met her she had just been in prison and was almost totally destroyed by narcotics and violence. Her daughter was born an addict, but was saved through blood transfusions. During the five years Geegurtha was a prostitute she saw nothing of her daughter. But through an enormous effort Geegurtha has become "uphabilitated." The motherly love she has since given - expressed in this photo which I love so much - is so moving and miraculous for me, when I recall Geegurtha from those days when she was a wreck. She became manager of the clinic which once helped her, and majored in psychology in college.

I was deeply moved by this sunshine story with all the odds I had seen against black motherly love. And fatherly love fares just as badly. This man, who let me share his bed in a one-room shack in Florida, was shooting up the first thing in the morning. Because he was unable to kick his habit, his family life had deteriorated and he was in deep pain from not being allowed to be with his child. Another mother I lived with had also been an addict, but was now "clean" and put all her motherly love into giving her two children a good religious upbringing. But when I came back a year later, I was told she was sentenced to 25 years in prison for armed robbery. Although the family always prayed together, it was not allowed to stay together. Such tragedies of people trying to take the fastest road out I experienced again and again in the ghetto. Most people understand why a prisoner with seven years left of a sentence takes the chance and escapes instead of patiently waiting to get out of hell in a legal way. Not until I one day nearly became ghettoized myself instead of living the privileged vagabond life in ghettos, was I able to feel how the closed system functions exactly like a prison in which you have neither the psychic surplus nor the means to invest in a seven-year education which may bring you out of that stifling oppression in the conventional way. All ghetto acts are therefore desperate and with short-term goals determined by the fact that you already live in a prison. For such people no prison or any kind of punishment will be a sufficient deterrent.

The ghetto fighting back against us

Book pages 246-249

Criminal escapes such as robbery and fraud are no more typical of the shortsightedness than the more lawful escape attempts constantly referred to in racist stereotyping. The climate of death and fear kills long-term trust in the future and makes it easier to buy a big Cadillac than to begin saving money in order to someday move out of your rotten shack. Coming from a welfare state, I found it ironic constantly hearing contemptuous white Americans refer to this so-called "low black gratification threshold," while their own lives seemed so completely tied up in a shortsighted tax revolt, trying to heap all kinds of video machines and unnecessary gadgets over their own threshold. When you refuse to pay for the common good you certainly invite criminals to your house. A country deserves the criminals it produces. The black criminal directly challenging these inequalities is the most misunderstood and unduly feared person in white America. He is actually of little danger to whites - 95% of U.S. crime is white on white or black on black. In Africa, criminals impressed me by working together in highly organized groups. They would go for the wealthiest homes regardless of color, spend days researching when guards were off duty, poison the dogs earlier in the day and at night, so it was said, blow "witch powder" into the house, causing the whole family to fall asleep and thereby avoiding bodily harm. With the family in deep sleep they would empty the entire house and even have a party in it. The contrasting disorganized state of the black American criminal indicates a state of slavery as much as the futile American slave rebellions did. I can take dubious pride in having participated in several muggings simply because my friends did not let me know about them beforehand and in fact had not even nurtured any plans themselves. When they saw prey they acted on the spur of the moment in a vicious cocktail of deep-seated hat and self-hatred rather than actual need. Just as colonized children everywhere will steal from you when you show them "master"-kindness, I found that the adult "rip-offs," "stealers," and even "strong-arm studs" were overwhelmed by Shakespearean motives: "I am one, my liege, whom the vile blows and buffets of the world have so incensed that I am reckless what I do to spite the world."
248

Freddy's dead, that's what I said.
Let the Man rap a plan,
say he would send him home,
but his hope was a rope
and he should have known.
Why can't we brothers protect one another?
No one's serious and it makes me furious.
Everybody misused him,
ripped him off and abused him
another junkie plan, pushing dope for the man...

When you live long enough in these surroundings, you easily feel that conspiracy against the underclass the blacks talk about. All the actions of the dominant class manifest its need to divide in order to preserve the oppressor state. Upper ghetto is pitted against lower ghetto, gang against gang, family against family, even brother against brother. When I lived with this 15-year-old boy and his mother in Richmond, Virginia, his 13-year-old brother lay in the hospital, hit in a gang fight by the brother's bullet, which penetrated his head and made him blind. Nevertheless, I followed the 15-year-old in the streets two days after the tragedy on his new expeditions. Many of these street gangs were destroyed by heroin; the press disclosed that the police had sold heroin and flooded the ghetto with it at a time when some gangs had become politicized. It is again the divide and rule policy being used against a colonized people to further fragment it. Yet I know whites well enough to believe that except for a few FBI-"Cointelpro" activities there is no planned conspiracy against the blacks. There is no need for it, for our daily "innocent" racism, our daily activities and master-race vibrations function as effectively as the most well-plotted conspiracy. Touring the luxury estate of the richest man in the world, Jo Paul Getty, furnished with marble and art from all over the world, I knew that his two black figures fighting under the white plantation pillars were not an artistic expression of any "ruling class conspiracy" against the underclass. But having just been ghettoized for eight months, experiencing eight people murdered, I could hardly avoid seeing it that way.
 

Among Eloi and Morlocks

Police brutality

Book pages 254-255

The crime of the poor - like the exploitation by the rich - is almost impossible to photograph. You can take pictures of the result, but rarely of the process itself. One junkie in the act of burglarizing almost stabbed me in the stomach with his "blade" and it took me a whole night afterwards to make him trust me. Usually I would be with criminals for days before photographing them. In order to survive among them it was a deadly necessity that I always had faith in their inner goodness, directing myself toward the human being inside and away from the role the system normally forced them to model their lives on. By photographing their shady activities I was relating more to their environmental side and thus betraying the trust they had given me. I always wanted to photograph crime as seen from the point of view of the criminal, but to photograph I had to set myself at a distance and so was no longer "one of them." Recording the system's violence was easier than photographing its counter-violence. Here I was caught in a shoot-out between police and criminals in Harlem. A policeman rushed over and used my doorway as a firing position whereby I suddenly found myself photographically on the side of the police. On such occasions I began to understand the brutal but all-too-human reactions of the police. Their racist attitudes and lack of understanding of the reactions bred by poverty is one of the reasons for the angry charges of police brutality. Society has trained the police to expect the worst instead of communicating with the good in people. Therefore they shoot before they question. In general I find it to be an act of violence to carry weapons into a ghetto, since this shows that you have no faith in the people of the ghetto, which breeds counter-violence. The police build on the negative in people and thereby promote it. If they instead like British police arrived unarmed with open faces they would have a chance to foster the positive sides I always managed to find in even the worst types "who will kill for a dollar" or a camera. The police build up a climate of fear on both sides which makes brutality inevitable. Much of it is sanctioned by white authorities. Many states passed laws authorizing the police to break into people's homes without knocking. Many innocent people have been killed in this way.
 

You explained it to me, I must admit,
a long rap about "no knock" being legislated
for the people you've always hated
in this hell-hole you/we call home.
NO KNOCK the man will say to protect the people from.
themselves. Who's going to protect me from you?
No knocking, head rocking, enter shocking, shooting,
cursing, killing, crying, lying and being white.
NO KNOCK told my brother Fred Hampton
bullet holes all over the place.
But if you're a wise "no knocker" you'll tell your
knocking' lackeys no knock on my brother's head
no knock on my sister's head
and double lock your door
because someone may be NO KNOCKING..... For you!

Cop killers, reprisals and faith
in humanity after all

Book pages 259-263

The people of the ghetto do not put up with all police brutality, and it is not all cops who attain flowers and promotion by the mayor. A white policeman who was beating a black woman was shot down in hurt and anger by a young man from a roof top. In revenge, 5,000 cops marched through the ghetto in a power display to frighten the blacks. Every time a policeman is killed by a black sniper the entire apparatus of colonial power is set in motion in this way. But there is a deeper tragedy underlying these sad police murders. This 26-year-old widow of the dead officer comes as he did from the lower middle class. Even though it is impossible to excuse the brutality of the police, one can very well understand it — exploited and downtrodden as these whites have often been themselves, with such grim prospects in life that they had no other choice than to join the ranks of the old overseers. The racism and limited trust in fellow beings instilled in them by their background are reinforced by their nervousness at being occupation troops in a culture to which they do not belong. It has become common to just attack the police but it is too often forgotten that they are just as much the victims of the system as they are its representatives. Looking at their narrow lips and hardened faces it is all too easy to despair. One can only infer that they will forever be marked with bitterness, hatred, and apprehension. But did they mold these faces of their own free will?

Or did their lives force their faces into masks like closed visors? Yes, it is difficult to change society into a more just system, for to even see the necessity for change means to have faith in the inner goodness of humanity and it means in your everyday life to be able to look beyond and negate the master-slave roles, everywhere around. The duty of our generation must be to change this system so that people can become fully human all over the world, not least for our own survival.
I do not think that I would have been able to survive among all these peculiar people in America if I had not had a strong faith in the best of people. If not, the worst would have gotten the upper hand - and I would have been obliterated.

My journey has taught me that I can no longer hate any single person or group or even class of people — not even the worst exploiters. If I said that I hated the Rockefeller family I would quite simply not be honest now that I know some of its members. Certainly it is true that Nelson Rockefeller ordered the massacre at Attica and murdered 41 inmates who were only demanding prison reform. But even though I was present at the mass funeral and heard the armed Black Panthers in the church shout "death to Rockefeller, jail the rich, free the poor" — and even though 1 knew several of their relatives among the weeping families — and even though I once again saw the color of blood in the Afro-American flag... yes, even then I was not capable of hating Rockefeller. For I know that there behind the role he was brought up to perform and believe in within the system, is concealed a human being who, under other conditions, would not have become a murderer in a desperate attempt to subjugate the underclass. If we understand that the underclass is murdering and robbing because of its environment, we must also logically acknowledge that the upper class in its actions, thinking, and tradition is also slavebound by its milieu. The more I let myself become brainwashed into the upper class, the more its actions started to seem valid and understandable to me. I would be dishonest if I tried to conceal that I have come to like the people I've met from America's upper class. When I condemn the upper class it is really a condemnation of the system which created these classes, and which teaches their members to rob and murder — not only in the U.S.A., but also in the Third World; — a system so strong and inhuman that it cannot be changed through attacking its symbols. If I had hated the Rockefellers as symbols, I would have denied them the humaneness they had shown me as a vagabond, under conditions not dictated by the system. The longer I wandered as a vagabond in this system, the more I lost the desire to ever again become a part of it. Everywhere the system had given people a false face. The more distinctly these contorted masks outlined themselves for me, the stronger was my urge to penetrate in behind them and look out through their narrow eye holes. It was never any beautiful sight: just hatred and fear and distrustfulness. I did not wish to become a part of that hatred. I learned that it is easier for people to condemn and hate than to understand. For hatred is based on one-sided and simplified considerations and most people are so absorbed in the pain of not being able to live up to the norms of their milieu that it is easier for them to reduce reality to symbols rather than understand it. It is far easier when reading a book like this one to hate white Americans than to try and comprehend them, because in that way we avoid fighting that part of the system which is to be found in ourselves. Not until we realize how we ourselves are a part of the oppression can we understand, condemn and change the forces which dehumanize us all. In my journey I was able to survive outside the system, because 1 always sought the human being behind the false facade. But everywhere behind these facades I saw the defeat of love. The more these threads connecting people in a wholesome society were missing, the more petrified and impenetrable seemed the masks I always had to penetrate to survive. But even within this oppression it is possible to find many shades of humanity. Even though love between people has been killed in this system — we all know that love can shoot up through the asphalt whenever... wherever...
 

Ghetto love

Finally I harbored such hatred for both blacks and whites around me that I became afraid of myself. One night when Annie had been drinking I became so desperate that I aimed a blow at her in the darkness. The next morning she had a black eye like everyone else in the building had had. Having never before laid a hand on a person, I was shaken. I had a sudden fear that I would end up killing her one day. The only way I could break the ghettoization was flight. We managed to get a tiny room for Annie in a white home outside the ghetto. After that I went straight for the highway. The highway I knew meant security and safety, recreation and freedom. For four years I had lived an escapist privileged vagabond life in ghettos without being affected. When I became a part of the ghetto, I was destroyed in less than a year, had ended up hating blacks, had lost faith in everything, and had seen the worst parts of my character begin to control my behavior. One of these was an increasing selfishness and aggressive callousness in my relationship to women. It was no coincidence that I immediately entered a period of conspicuous consumption of "girls" with my friend Tony in North Carolina. I had no inhibitions left. And yet I was not exactly a horn seducer. Time and again Tony whispered to me, "Hey, why don't you make a move?" and time and again he ended up having to drive my date home prematurely. And then every night there were disturbing obstacles. One night I couldn't get home with my date because of a shootout in the street. Another night we all went to see Earth, Wind and Fire in Chapel Hill and I used my white privilege to "con" my way in for free as I never had money. This so irritated Bob, who drove the car, that on the way home he suddenly stopped and said, "Hey, man, you gotta get out, understand?" Since Bob was a double murderer, having killed both his wife and her lover, and everybody knew he boiled inside, nobody tried to intervene and I had to get out in the frosty night in the middle of nowhere.

An essential tool in dating is the car. Since I couldn't take my dates for a ride I instead invited them for what I loved most of all in the world: hitchhiking. It was these trips more than anything else which made me aware of my sex-ploitative frame of mind. I had lived with blacks so often that I paid hardly any heed to being "on the wrong side of the tracks," but to hitchhike with a black woman quickly shakes one into "place" again, especially if one is as ignorant as I had managed to remain about the additional master-slave relationship of men to women. Because of my vagabond attitude that the driver should be "entertained," if the driver was a woman or a gay man, I would sit in front to make conversation, whereas if it was a straight man I would make the woman sit next to him, even if she didn't want to. The reactions from the white male drivers were terrifying. If they didn't content themselves with psychological torture of the women, they would use direct physical encroachment. Although most of those I hitchhiked with were well-dressed daughters of professors and doctors in the North and had the education and trust in their surroundings which made them - unlike ghetto women - even dare to go on such a trip with a white, they were considered as nothing but easy sexual prey or even whores. Several times lustful drivers violently tried to push me out. For some of these women it was their first chance to see their country. Most didn't even last to the state line. One lasted 4,000 miles through Canada and the Grand Canyon - then broke down in a hysterical fit which almost had us both arrested. I was still enormously out of balance after my ghettoization and I decided I needed to recreate myself in a calm family atmosphere. After having lived in a couple of white homes I searched back to the most harmonious and stable married couple I could recall having seen in the underclass: Leon and Cheryl in Augusta, Georgia. Their love and devotion to each other had been so enriching and contagious that I often thought of them in the course of my own abortive ghetto love as living proof to myself that real ghetto love could thrive. While I had lived in their home I had had peace and support, enabling me day after day to hitchhike out to explore the poverty in the area. But when I came to their house I immediately felt something had changed. Leon asked me in, but he was not happy. He seemed to be in a trance as he told me his wife had died from a disease which was curable but which they had not had money to get under proper treatment before it was too late. Leon had not recovered from the loss. He never went out of his house which stood right next to the elite medical school in Augusta. All day long he sat on the blue shag carpet in front of his little stereo as if it were an altar, listening to music while staring at a photo of Cheryl above. Some days he sang love songs throughout the day, putting her name in them. Once in a while he would scream out in the room: "I want you! I want to hold you. I want to be with you again ... We must unite, be one... I want to die... die... " Never have I seen a man's love for a woman so intense. At most once a day would he turn around and communicate with me, and then only to tell me about how he wanted to join Cheryl in heaven. Sometimes when he stared directly at me with this empty look as if I were not there my eyes would fill with tears. I felt a deep understanding for him, yet couldn't express it. In the evenings he lay in his room. His mother or another woman would bring us cooked food in the two weeks I stayed there. This depressing experience made me look deeper into myself. I became determined to go back to Annie, and later she returned with me to Denmark. Our relationship had suffered too much, so after a while we separated. We achieved a good working relationship and she helped translate parts of this book and all of the film.

Three years later I traveled all over America to give or show this book to all those friends who made it possible. One of them was naturally Leon, who had helped me so much and was one of those I had in mind to come and help run the show in Europe. But when I came to his screen door with the book under my arm, a strange woman answered my knock. No, Leon didn't live there any more. He was shot three years ago - by a white man. All afternoon his mother showed me the photo album with Leon and Cheryl's pictures and told me tearfully about their three happy years together. We sat sobbing in each other's arms on the front porch. I know that Leon and Cheryl are united again. "There is no love like ghetto love."

Letter to American friend

Fortress America

Book pages 276-281

A society where love and mutual connection have been killed is not a beautiful sight. Even the church escapes the social ethics of Christ and betrays the poor. That many poor then betray the church is no wonder. It is not uncommon for black robbers to arrive in churches just before the collection plate is passed round and force the churchgoers at gunpoint to give to the real needy. A despairing minister in Chicago told me that they were closing his church because the congregation was plundered every Sunday. Teachers are attacked at gunpoint in front of their pupils. In some cities there are armed guards or police on every floor of hotels to protect the guests. Trains on the subways of New York and Chicago carry both uniformed and plainclothes cops, and still people are being murdered and raped before the eyes of panic-stricken passengers who dare not try and help. People are murdered on the street in front of 40 spectators, who watch from their apartments without any of them calling the police, because they "didn't know if the attackers were in collusion with the police," they told Life Magazine. Tourists return to Europe with "American neck" from continually sending anxious glances back over their shoulders. A Nigerian student I met in Philadelphia's ghetto was so panic-stricken over conditions there that she tried to be sent home "to safety" before the end of her studies. Her statement would not have surprised me if it were not for the fact that she had just lived through the civil war in Biafra.
The confinement of the underclass is dehumanizing for all. In five of the homes I lived in there were armed robberies twice in the period I was there. Billions are spent to cure the ill. A manufacturer I stayed with had made himself rich producing military equipment for the Vietnam War, but had now rearranged the entire production line to make burglary alarms and teargas guns as a direct result of the country's wasting such great resources fighting the Third World that the "war on poverty" at home had to be given up. Everywhere people entrench themselves against the poor. In New York, steel bars shot up over windows at the same speed that steel shrapnel had been spewed at poor Vietnamese. The more people struggle for a so-called "freedom" without social justice, the more they cut themselves off from it, and many Americans can today look at huge army billboards from their own steel barred fortification. Slowly but steadily the iron curtain closes in on America. You walk into stores and find yourself inside a closed steel cage. The wealthy can naturally afford more discreet things and invest billions in invisible electronic fortifications between themselves and the ghetto. The more electronic rays replace trust, the more the system closes itself. The more fear paralyzes people, the more the arms industry profits from the poverty. Many homes have one, two, three, and even four pistols and guns with which to "defend themselves against the niggers" as this family in Michigan said.

I don't know what is most shocking: that there are Americans so desperately poor that they can kill for a dollar or that millions of Americans are willing and ready to take a human life just to defend a TV. 130 years ago the value of a life at least could be said to be $1,400. As much as I love Americans I could never reconcile it with the fact that the majority of them are secret killers at heart. Now when the old communist countries have given up capital punishment to join the democratic European Union, we realize that America could never join. It is the only developed nation that still supports the civilized communal savagery of capital punishment which is increasingly being widened to include public approval of vigilante on-the-spot executions of unconvicted criminals. People intuitively know that they are in the process of digging their own graves, but cannot do anything about it and therefore try to see them as fortified trenches.

The more cars (for lonesome flight rather than the cozy strolling of streets as in Europe), the more weapons (rather than communication), the more fortresses (instead of sharing), the more military build up (instead of sharing with the Third World through its proposed New Economic World Order) ... all the more does private industry enrich itself on this systematic subversion of society. The higher the barriers big business constructs between people, the higher the stocks rise on Wall Street... and in the process people are either made insensitive to or begin to rationalize sights such as this woman standing hungry outside the Stock Exchange... Nowhere have I found the art of rationalizing poverty and racism mastered to such a degree (not least by the intellectuals) as in America.

When people do not fortify justice it becomes necessary to justify force. The more they try to shoot out a short cut to freedom and security, the more society's actions are revealed as the escapism and desperation of the ghetto. Just as those imprisoned in the ghetto look for quick escapes into awe-inspiring SUVs and violence, so the greater society escapes from its problems by the use of even more awe-inspiring tanks and military violence against the ghetto instead of changing the system creating the ghetto. Such a banana-republic mentality leaves deaths after even the smallest riots (while police in England were not even allowed to use rubber pellets in the riot in 1982).
How really free are people in God's own country when it has become necessary for thousands of people to watch the Statue of Liberty from behind barred and grated windows? Her watchful gaze - which always looked the other way from the enslavement of blacks - is increasingly being replaced by Big Brother's ever-present eye. In every building you walk into, every elevator, every store... everywhere you are watched. Under the pretext of fighting crime, again and again the anxiety-ridden and alienated population seems to fight the constitution itself.
In one respect America is dangerously close to totalitarianism. Everywhere it is swarming with secret police. Nobody, absolutely nobody, except those like me who have hitchhiked around in big and small American towns, have any idea how many of' these plainclothes police there really are. They were constantly stopping me. Even in small sleepy towns in the South I could, on occasion, discover up to twenty in a single night. The more the system closes, the more trust and hope in the actions and values of the whole of society are disappearing. Fear is superseding reason and stifling concern and compassion for fellow people. The criminal and repressive escape acts are spreading to the entire population, which is gradually being corrupted and influenced by the violence it perpetrates against the black ghetto.

A ghetto cannot be eliminated from the inside; it is created and perpetuated by outside forces. Paralyzed by fear and violence, the entire American society begins to assume the character of a ghetto; the population becomes increasingly aware that it is operating in a closed system: a system in which it hay lost its imagined freedom of action. A system which (on fundamental racial issues) cannot he changed from the inside because for generations it has deformed and molded people to such a degree that they cannot imagine alternatives... nor would they (in the short run) he able to live with them if they could.

So ghettoized and disillusioned with their system hat Americans already become that while 90% of Europe; usually vote in elections, only half of Americans do - not least because, often there are no alternative candidate at all. This doesn't mean there is not a rich democratic life within this closed conservative framework, but when the population is never, as Europeans are daily, confronted with alternative leftist points of view, the the debate becomes so one-sided and covertly racist that even liberals are nipped in the bud. Thus the few activists and "block organizers" also tend to reduce themselves to "liberal" topics. They try to make the ghettos better places to live instead of making society a better place by eliminating ghettos.

And so the entire society becomes a closed system in the same way the South was before 1865 and before 1954 - a system which in spite of its liberals and activists was unable to change from within. It was not least Gunnar Myrdal's theory of the vicious circle that in 1954 helped convince the Supreme Court to rule against school segregation which had the well-known snowball effect giving proof to the theory: White prejudice and discrimination keep the blacks low in standards of living, health, and education. This, in its turn, gives support to white prejudice. White prejudice and the resulting black standards thus "mutually" support or reinforce each other. If things remain as they are, this means that the two happen to balance each other. If some outside forces could cause discrimination to be decreased, this would cause a betterment of the black situation, which might decrease white prejudice still more, which would again allow the black situation to improve, and so on. If instead discrimination increases, the vicious circle will spiral downward. Northern outside interference in the Southern closed system did not break the circle. It only found a new, higher level of balance, raising the median black income in the South from 45% to 55% of white income. In the final analysis the great progress of the 60's may have come about as a result of the international decolonization efforts and the worldwide economic boom after World War II. In 1972 new outside forces interfered. OPEC tried to break out of' the Third World ghetto by charging more realistic prices for oil. The industrial countries built up on exploited cheap energy were therefore thrust into prolonged recession which made the vicious circle for American blacks start spiraling downward. White Americans have been conditioned to think that things can only move forward. However, for blacks there is no reason for such optimism. Twice before they have seen their few gains taken away from them. In 1691 and in 1877 after reconstruction they were thrust into long periods of downward spiraling. In the 1970's their perception of' America as a closed system for them was once again cemented and without outside influence it could very well remain so for the next hundred years. The whites hold the power to eliminate the ghettos, but as long as they are trapped in the enslaving pattern of' well-coordinated infernalism and paternalism I see no reason why this would happen. They don't understand the underclass monster they continuously create - therefore turn their backs to it and destroy their own society in the process.
 

Our final confinement of the ghetto

Book pages 282-284

My journey through this social jungle had automatically led me into the ultimate closed system - the prison in which I now met again the three underclass robbers who five years earlier had attacked me on my arrival in the country. While society had slowly closed like a vise around me, these people meanwhile had opened up to me and had (through my own ghettoization) become a part of myself. I now understood that they had had no real choice: their freedom was one-dimensional. Their choice then, of whether or not to make me a victim, is indicative of the white choice: Should they stop oppressing an enslaved people in order not to run the risk of ending up themselves in a repressive kind of prison?
The freedom to choose may already be lost in a system where "life's design is already made." Even if the liberals were to grant billions of dollars for slum clearance, better schools, and jobs in an attempt to unlock those imprisoned in the ghetto, to them it would just be one more case of humiliating "tokenistic" emergency aid a la the 60's - mere crumbs from the rich man's table - and they will bite the hands which feed them. For a system which is built on one's right to exploit and dispose of another and within this framework tries to legislate one's duty to help others, will only worsen the self-image of' those who were disposed of and who are now to be halfheartedly reclaimed. In the hest years of liberal tokenism, 1960-67, $348 billion was spent on war, $27 billion on space exploration, and only $2 billion on aid to ghetto areas. It is no surprise that the underclass burned down the ghettos in contempt!
Such a helping hand from above will unintentionally function just as the American penal system does. Here 95% of the money is used to dispose of the unwanted and infernalize them, and only 5% is spent on paternalistic "rehabilitation" of the waste product which took years to produce. Most inmates are so wrecked by the prison system that afterwards they can never adjust to society outside again and therefore return to prison. The present conservative mood of incarcerating even more of the ghetto will in the 1980's make America the leading repressive nation - even ahead of the Soviet Union and South Africa. Here we are not speaking of' the forced confinement on psychiatric wards of unwanted intellectual dissidents and critics of their system. Millions of people who need psychiatric treatment as a result of the ghetto's institutionalized, chronic, and self-perpetuating pathology are in our system being locked up instead of getting treatment. 25% of prison inmates are mentally retarded as a result of their impoverished backgrounds. More than half the inmates are people of color. When in addition you learn that blacks on average receive sentences twice as long as whites for the same offense, you begin to understand why many blacks see themselves as political prisoners. The undisguised contempt they show for the system, the admiration many lucky hustlers receive in the underghetto as well as the way they justify criminal acts as being a protest against the system which has knocked them down - all of this shows an unmistakable political protest and a deep dissatisfaction with the life society has granted them. 1 am not holistically trying to exonerate black crime, but when crime is so alarmingly much worse in South Africa than in surrounding independent countries, only a white racist will even mention "individual black responsibility" before indicting the underlying white causes (responsibility). I hope that this book will be, if nothing else, my slight support to those forces such as the American Civil Liberties Union who are working to prevent these tendencies from leading to underclass blacks ending up in concentrations camps some day. In one of his last speeches, Martin Luther King warned against this and demanded that the existing concentration camps erected in 1950 under the McCarran Internal Security Act be dismantled. A week later he was killed. Nixon said they ought to be closed down, but in the ghettos this was understood as a warning that they still exist.
284

But it must not be forgotten that for those who can adjust to this gulag-system, American society, from the inside, can be experienced as the freest in the world. A book like this one will to the surprise of most Europeans (and Russians) - be greeted with open arms because the system is so strong and massive in its oppression that all criticism is lost upon it and becomes instead entertainment or religious escape. Only when the system meets organized resistance does it come down on you hard. Countless black leaders have been gunned down by police in their own homes. Even liberals like Rev. Ben Chaviz from Wilmington, North Carolina, are severely oppressed. Ile told me about it: "We were attacked by the Klan, a number of us were shot. One of our student leaders, 17 years old, was killed. We tried to organize against racism in the schools and started to run people for office from my church. There are no elected black officials in the county, which is 50% black. They couldn't drive us out through fear and violence, so they decided to stop the movement by using courts and prisons. We were indicted on five felony charges from conspiracy to murder. The 10 of us were sentenced to a total of 282 years in prison, and I received a 34 year sentence." Partly as a result of this book a strong campaign for his release was started in Europe.

Our ultimate oppression -

the case of my friend Popeye Jackson

Book pages 286-290

34 years is a rather mild sentence in America. Others have received more than 1.000 years in prison. (In Denmark it is rare that anybody serves longer than eight years). And this too is a mild sentence compared to the one my best friend in California - Popeye Jackson - eventually got. When I met Popeye I had reached the end of my journey. I loved the freedom of the vagabond - the freedom to lose myself in the individual being. I had believed that as a vagabond I stood outside the system, but now began to realize that my vagabonding had been just another privileged white flight. I had taken thousands of pictures, but increasingly felt that I was just exploiting the suffering with my camera and it was beginning to make me sick. While I had been taking pictures, dozens of my friends had gone off to prison - friends who had acted in protest against the system, many of them without thinking about it - while I had just been thinking and photographing without acting. Whether my escape had been on the highway or into the pictures, I had nevertheless been an integrated part of the system. The more i had come to love America, the more difficult it was to remain a silent observer to its destruction. 1 wanted increasingly to help change it. Therefore I put my camera on the shelf and began to work with Popeye. Popeye, who was proud of his lower ghetto background and always dressed in typical hustler fashion, was for me the personification of the underclass with all its openness, violence, sexism, beautiful culture, generosity - all the things we in Europe consider stereotypically American. Popeye had himself been on a long journey. He was only 10 years old the first time he went to jail and had since spent more than 19 years in prison. During the long confinement Popeye grew politically aware and studied Marxism, through which he was able to liberate himself' from the intensified self-hatred a prison term usually leads to. He did not want Marxism to be just an individual psychological escape or purely analytical system as it is for so many European students, but began organizing the other inmates into the United Prisoners Union of which he later became president. He felt that it is only possible to escape the ghetto by collectively changing the entire system. He quickly became a well known figure and was, for instance, chosen as a mediator between the Hearst family and the S.L.A., the terrorist group who kidnapped Patricia Hearst and the media. Popeye's influence on the prison inmates increased and I was told that the police had tried to get him back in prison by planting dope in his car just as on occasion they had threatened him with death. Working in the Union we became closer and closer bound to each other.

When he saw the big holes in my shoes, he one day gave me a pair of boots without a word. Though I had stopped photographing, he persuaded me to smuggle the camera inside the prison and take these pictures for the prison paper. Here it made a deep impression on me to see how Popeye constantly tried to organize the inmates under these inhuman conditions that stifled all private life, and where the system used almost any means to break people down. Exactly because I was totally paralyzed myself in these surroundings, it made an indelibly strong impression on me to see how Popeye got the other inmates to read political literature even though it was impossible to imagine how anyone could read in this ominous noise and constant fear. Many inmates told me that Popeye had made a similar impression on them, because he was not a "fake intellectual revolutionary," but clearly one of their own. Although an extremely promising organizer, Popeye was naturally not without severe human failings that disturbed many of the volunteers in our group, particularly the women. They had learned a lesson from the naive left of the 60's, which had romantically embraced all kinds of rapists as the "avant garde of the revolution." Some of them left our group because of Popeye's sexism. I had severe clashes with them over these issues, because I after my own ghettoization felt that their views were just another form of racism - a modern up-to-date radical way of saying: I don't like the underclass. "If you think a man can come out of 300 years of slavery and 19 years of prison as an angel, you are fools. Even Martin Luther King was sexist, Coretta says today. If you think that a man should be denied a powerful leadership role until he in every respect lives up to white liberal norms, then you are as powerful an enemy of affirmative action as the worst Southern racist. If you turn your backs on Popeye now, then it is not their racism which forces him back into a ghetto, but yours," I said. Having myself ended up in the sexist trap, I was a great defender of Popeye. But thereby I was also betraying him: just as whites do not put enough pressure on each other's racism, I and the other men in the group did not try to change Popeye's sexism, if only to allow him to be a more powerful organizer.

Outside the prison an effective campaign was started to get Popeye released, and at long last he was freed. We threw a big "back in the world" party for him. Popeye had often warned me against FBI-infiltrators among the members of the Union. Having always trusted anybody I met in my vagabonding, I took his warnings lightly as normal ghetto paranoia. For some reason I had difficulty imagining anybody I knew being secret police. Therefore it totally knocked me out to experience the terror the system utilized against Popeye's union and to realize that one of my friends whom I had most faith in indeed was from the secret police. It was Sara Jane Moore, who was a bit older than the others, and whom we thought was a nice, sympathetic, although slightly confused, housewife from the suburbs It therefore shocked us when suddenly in the newspapers she openly confessed that she was a spy for the FBI, but now had pangs of conscience because during our work she had been converted to Popeye's views. Two months later she was close to changing world history, when she attempted to shoot President Ford on Union Square. She had such terrible torment over what she had brought about by her FBI work that she wanted to get revenge on the FBI by assassinating the very head of the system, as she said. So what had happened between these two episodes, which could throw her so off balance? Saturday night, a couple of days after our party, Popeye was scheduled to come over to select the prison pictures for our paper. He called up, however, and said he didn't have time as he had a meeting with the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. We arranged that I should come to the meeting later in the evening and drive home with him. Only two hours beforehand I got a phone call asking me not to go home with Popeye. If I had not received that phone call, I would not have been in a position to watch the news next evening:

"Good Evening, this is the Sunday edition of the eleven o'clock Eyewitness News. The San Francisco Police continue their investigation into the execution-style slaying of prison reformer Popeye Jackson, who was head of the United Prisoners Union. Jackson was sitting in a car with Sally Voye, a school teacher from Vallejo, when the shooting took place 2:45 Sunday morning. Police say they died immediately.
- Now, like many of you I love dogs. I am concerned about them. That's why I feed my dogs Alpo. Because meat is a dog's natural food. That's what they love most. And Alpo's meat dinner has beef products that are really good for them. Not a speck of cereal. Not a better dog food in the world.
(Police): Reports indicate that the killer first fired a shot that smashed a window of the car. The first bullet hit Miss Voye and then Jackson. The gunman was not there to rob the people. Wallets were intact.
This sounds like an execution-style slaying?
- You could call it that. We're working on that as a possible theory. We have to rule out robbery.
- Police say a number of people went to their windows when they heard the shots. Police will begin questioning them tomorrow to find the killer.
- Here's how it starts. You see someone take that first mouth-watering bite and you've just got to get a taste for yourself. In this world there's only one fried chicken that always tastes so finger lickin' good: And you've got to say HEY! It's a Kentucky Fried Chicken day!"

Although it was my best friend I saw lying in a pool of blood on TV only a few hours after I myself would have driven home with him on that disastrous night, I was unable to cry the first four days - so unreal did it all seem to me in this peculiar American mixture of dog food and fried chicken commercials. The system with its media can do anything totally unimpeded, for it is capable of making us forget in the next instant what we have just seen. Not until the funeral did it dawn on me what had happened and I totally broke down in tears. Then I had also come to realize that Sally, whom I liked so much, who worked with ghetto kids and prisoners though she was from the safe suburbs, and who even had tried to work on Popeye's sexism - then it dawned on me that this fantastic woman had also been murdered for no other reason than that she would have been a witness to the assassination. And naturally I also knew what my destiny would have been if I had been with them that night. Here is Sally seen with Popeye a few days before their murder. It has still not been established who assassinated them but now since Sara Jane Moore has been sentenced to life and in an interview with Playboy has given her harrowing account of her work for the FBI and how the FBI began threatening her life when they realized she was being converted to Popeye's ideas, few of us have any doubts. Popeye had often warned me of ex-convicts who could have struck special early release deals with police. But Popeye was never afraid of dying and the San Francisco Chronicle later revealed that police previously had threatened to kill him. In his last article, which he wrote while I was with him in prison, he said: "We ought not to fear death. We are the convicted class and only through revolution can we win our freedom and the freedom of all oppressed people in the world." At the funeral his many union workers and prison friends - Indians, blacks, Chicanos and whites - kissed him farewell, while others will only be able to get "back in the world" to see his tomb a generation from now. His mother, who every single week during the 19 years had brought him cake in prison, suffered a total breakdown in front of the coffin.

There is a man
who stands in all our way

Book pages 291-294

There is a man
who stands in all our way.
And his greedy hands
reach out across the world.
But if we slay this man
we will have peace in this land
and this glorious struggle
will be done.

And what we want
is just to have what we need
and to live in peace with dignity.
But these few old men,
no they won't break or bend
so it's only through their death
that we'll be free.

And if we dare to fight
for what, for what we want
sparing none
who are standing in our way:
The fight is hard
and long
but we can't, we can 't go wrong,
for our liberation will be won.

And we can meet again
if we do not die
for that is the price
that might be paid,
But if we pass this way
we shall meet some day,
we shall meet again
if we do not die...

But how long... how long... ?
Popeye was the last friend I wanted to say goodbye to in this way. With the murder of Sally and Popeye I could take it no longer and fled the country.
All my feelings and senses had been killed. I had lost 12 of my hest friends in the senseless American violence, and numerous others had disappeared into prison for life. I loved the American people more than any other I had ever known. I wished in the end to become a part of it and did not mean to leave the country. The human warmth I had met everywhere was a fresh breeze in my life after the detachment and reticence I had known in Europe. But the warmth and openness of the American people stood in such glaring contrast to the cruel and inhuman system I had met everywhere. I had been on the highest peaks and I had been in the deepest shadowy depths with one foot in the grave of America, and everywhere it hurt me to see the increasing fossilization and fortification this warmth and openness is subject to a warmth from which I could still benefit as a foreigner, but which has long ago petrified into fear, hatred, and bitterness towards fellow-Americans, who live more isolated and in greater alienation from each other than any other people I know of. But the violence goes on - the violence against all oppressed people. Our own European violence against the Third World each year kills more people through underdevelopment and unbalanced trade than were killed in the whole of World War II - people who could he saved. Yet another body are we ready to cover up, but just how many people are we prepared to dispose of in order to avoid establishing systems which are better able to serve the interests of the entire world population? This man was murdered where I lived in New York right across from a ghetto mural (seen behind the shroud) which he perhaps never paid attention to and perhaps was unable to read. On a late evening we find at the same wall two crippled Vietnam veterans who have been out defending "Western civilization" - and who now have to beg in the streets. The scene is changing. The colonized peoples - their backs to the wall - now must serve as colonizers and oppressors and are sent out over the oceans they came from. Our inhumanity has come full circle. We have finally managed to create them in our civilization's own sanguinary image. Yet another child has been killed in the ghetto violence - five years old. The ring is closing. How much more suffering are we still going to witness - or to cause? We don't know. We throw our uncertainty in the ocean with the ashes of our victim. The ocean shall lead her back to the shores her ancestors once came from when we needed them. Once again a black mother must throw her child in the ocean - as she did 300 years ago... the lifetime of our system...

Ship Ahoy! Ship Ahoy! Ship Ahoy!
As far as your eye can see,
men, women and baby slaves,
coming to the land of Liberty,
where life's design is already made -
So young and so strong
they're just waiting to be saved...

American Pictures Foundation would like to thank the following song writers and owners for the use of lyrics: page 53, 59, Holly Near. Redwood Records; page 291 Elaine Brown, Jobete; page 169, 174, 177, 179 Stuart Scharf. Takya Music; page 144, 19, 293, 294, The O'Jays, Mighty Three Music; page 220, Robert Flack, Frank Music Corp.; page 166, Neil Diamond, Prophet Music, Inc.; page 211, Jimmy Cliff, Island Music; page 63, Jimmy Cliff, PPX Enterprises, Inc.; page 159, Eugene McDaniels, Sidney Seidenberg; page 249, Curtis Mayfield, Warner Brothers; page 154, 157. Eugene Record, Unichappell Music; page 135, Bill Withers, Interior Music.

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