Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

what this country does to him every day—because he is a blackman; he cannot not know. Those at his funeral service are bitter,because they had great hope that the promise of his lifewould redeem something of the cost of theirs. They are sadand angry, inexpressibly so, because their brothers, fathers,sons, husbands, live on the verge of madness and suicide, selfdestruction,as Rufus did; and like him, they die from the anguishof being alive. “4If the world wasn’t so full of dead folks, ”’the preacher tells them, with a passion that tries to make senseof this death added to all the others, ‘“maybe those of us that’strying to live wouldn’t have to suffer so bad. ’”3Being “deadfolks, ” in Baldwin’s world, is nothing so simple as being white.Being dead is being ignorant, refusing to know the truth, especiallyabout oneself. Remaining ignorant about oneself througha life of inevitable experience is hard; it requires that one refuseto know anything about the world around one, especially whois dying there and why and when and how. White people especiallydo not want to know, and do not have to know to survive;but if they want to know, they have to find out; and to find out,they have to be willing to pay the price of knowing, which isthe pain and responsibility of self-knowledge. Black people areunable to refuse to know, because their chances for survivaldepend on knowing every incidental sign of white will andwhite power; but knowing without power of one’s own to putone’s knowledge to use in the world with some dignity andhonor is a curse, not a blessing, a burden of consciousnesswithout any means of action adequate to enable one to bear it.Self-destruction is a great and morbid bitterness in which onedestroys what one knows by destroying oneself; and thepreacher, hating this self-destruction, finds an ethic that repudiatesit: 4“ The world’s already bitter enough, we got to try to