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Chapter 23
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Unable to attack the real targets of their frustration, white
anger often turns to racial violence. Such bitterness caused poor whites to
lynch more than 5000 blacks in official lynchings and thousands
more in unofficial violence.
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The lynchings continue under different forms today, but
naturally I have only seen the results. Derrick Johnson, whose parents I
came to know, was only 15 years old when he walked into a poor white
neighborhood in New York.
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White parents usually instill fear and racism in their children
with more guilt and subtlety, but here they openly shouted "Kill the nigger" and
"Kill the bastard" - and the children got him with baseball bats in broad
daylight.
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When police questioned people in this poor neighborhood, no one would give any
information. It was in this poor neighborhood.
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The narrow-mindedness of embittered whites often leads to
totalitarian outlooks. To fight oppression effectively it is important that we
always try to make friends with those most at risk.
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My Nazi friend here had first joined the communists, but
realized that they want black equality and then went to the Nazis, who say
whites are superior to blacks and that they will "send all niggers back to
Africa."
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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. However, I find few of
my Nazi and Klan friends actually believing in their own hollow
rethoric.
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With their crushed self-esteem I find the Nazis along with the
Ku Klux Klan - both in Europe and America - the easiest and by far most
important white racists to befriend and embrace as individuals. Yet - instead of
helping them out of their pain (usually mistaken for hatred) - most of us
naively end up fighting them with real hatred - thereby entrenching and
ghettoizing them forever in attitudes which otherwise could have been short
youthful outburst's of anger.
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How easy it is to change them I saw when I picked up a
hitchhiking Klan member. After talking with him about his painful memories of incest in
childhood - which I have found common in most of my Klan friends - he ended up
betraying the Ku Klux Klan by taking me to a secret cross burning.
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Hiding myself in a white robe gave me a great chance to share
their narrow, fearful outlook - and see how the police cooperated with them,
disarming nearby blacks, but not the Klan members with sub-machine guns. At one of their religious cross burning
ceremonies I taped this speech:
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