I Chose Liberty - Ludwig von Mises Institute

Anne Wortham 379
rallies at my alma mater Tuskegee Institute that was disconcerting and scary. Secondly,
although I didn’t then know how to analyze the civil rights movement’s message, I thought
its leaders were unjust to demand antidiscrimination legislation that assumed the collective
guilt of whites. I also questioned the movement’s approach to the legal redress of private
racial discrimination.
I thought the better way to end racism was with the approach of the intergroup relations
movement that preceded the protest movement but was still active. Its emphasis was
not on government imposed racial equality, but on the promotion of interracial understanding
and cooperation, and the reduction of racial tension and conflict through communication
and interracial and transcultural activities such as interfaith events, summer camps
and international activities. One such organization was the interracial Intercollegiate Council
on Campus Life that I had been a member of. Another was Operation Crossroads Africa,
an international student project founded by a black minister in 1957, after which the Peace
Corps was modeled. In the summer of 1962 I participated as part of an interracial group
of 10 Americans and 2 Canadians who were joined by as many Ethiopian college students
in adding a classroom to a village school in northern Ethiopia.
It was in the spirit of interracial fellowship that a fellow Crossroader from Wesleyan
University-Connecticut and I convinced our universities to sponsor a Tuskegee-Wesleyan
Student Exchange Program that enabled students from the respective universities to participate
in week-long visits with each other’s student bodies. In 1963 eighteen Wesmen and
a dozen Tuskegeeans traded places for a week at a time. According to the Wesleyan Olla
Podrida: “Tuskegee offered the Wesleyan student the opportunity of breaking from his
New England ivy-tinged grind for a week to . . . catch the mood of revolution which
underlies the lethargic appearance of today’s South. To the Northern white student who
has assumed the civil rights problem as one of his own concerns, a trip to Alabama . . .
becomes a trip into a country on the eve of revolution. . . .”
Although these and other interracial and transcultural experiences broadened my
horizons and expanded my knowledge, those benefits were offset by having to deal with
the strange collective guilt that whites of my generation had inculcated. I was baffled by
their eagerness to extend to all blacks through me an unwarranted level of esteem, a version
of what Jim Sleeper calls “liberal racism.” Although I agreed with them that our friendship
and cooperation illustrated what was possible between the races, I could not accept their
tendency to view themselves and me as embodiments of our respective racial groups. The
interaction script was always the same: I was to play the role of the oppressed bearing scars
of slavery and racism; my counterpart played the part of the enlightened liberator bearing
the guilt of the oppressor, and seeking the relief of “your people” while being absolved by
me of sins I did not believe were theirs to claim. It was bewildering at first, but during the
successive years that I continued to associate with whites, I learned how to respond to such
collectivistic altruism.
Earlier that summer I wrote in an essay that although the world was paying tribute to
the Negro, “and this [racial] aspect of my being is constantly being thrown at me, . . . I
cannot respond; I cannot feel what they [other Negroes] feel. . . . I do not feel unequal . . .
I cannot make my heart hate [all] whites . . . I can feel sadness . . . I cannot be a part of