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Chapter 42
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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.
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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. |
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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. It is not only the underclass we ghettoize. |
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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 an absolute mystery
why we whites are moving away from everything we have built up and come to love just because a black
- or in Europe a Muslim - family moves into the neighborhood.
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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. |
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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. |
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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.
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I am not dealing in this presentation with the problems of
the black 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.
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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.
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Almost every time I came back to Detroit more of
my black friends had been killed.
Interview in my show with my former girlfriend,
Denise:
- Is that the only one of my friends who has been
killed?
- Yes, but one of my brother's friends got killed
too... |
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The letter on the next page 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: |
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