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Visiting the super rich

Chapter 52

 

 

  

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.

  

  

Since the responsibility for the ghetto lies outside the ghetto, I had to find out how great a responsibility each of us has.

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A little background information for the following story:

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 this $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?

  

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