Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

On Imagining Foes, Imagining Friendship \\ 373
circumstances is epitomized by a story one of my students told me: at the height
of the Crown Heights tension, one of the local television stations thought it
would be a great idea to have a group of Black and Jewish teenagers engaging in
conversation that would model tolerance, healing, and general we-are-the-worldness.
The plan encountered immediate problems; among other matters, the
Hasidic boys could not have such a conversation in the same room with girls, and
the Black youth of Crown Heights seemed a little sullen. So the producers went
about remedying this situation by fetching a group of reform Jewish students
from Long Island and some pleasant-faced upper-middle class Black kids from
private schools—and had them talk about Crown Heights, in Crown Heights
even, engaging in a "debate" that had less to do with the affected communities
than with modeling an imagined melting pot bubbling happily, full of flavor and
harmony. But the absurdity of importing people to enact a conversation that the
actual neighborhood could never have is directly akin to the Allan Bloom-ian nostalgia
for an undifferentiated "American" culture flowing seamlessly from the font
of "Western" civilization. Whose anxieties are supposedly redressed by such
mythic representations? And is it possible that such representations are not just
misleading, but downright oppressive?
The challenge becomes, as years since the civil rights movement have taught
us, how we can envision a racially integrated world that will represent not merely
the absorption of racial and ethnic minorities into dominant white society, but
the fluid mix of race, culture, and much more. Equal opportunity is not only
about assuming the circumstances of hypothetically indistinguishable individuals,
but also about accommodating the living, shifting fortunes of those who are
very differently situated. What happens to a single person may be the repercussive
history that repeats itself in the futures of everyone. Nevertheless, in an environment
where Blackness and whiteness are the objects of relentless biologized
essentialism, it is not surprising that a frequent metaphor for racial harmony, at
least since the 1960s, has been embodied in the notion of "grey babies." While I
understand that a waved banner of aggressive miscegenation is one kind of logical
response to the virulent history of anti-miscegenation in the United States, I
do worry that life is not that simple.
When in early 1993 Tina Brown's new New Yorker blasted its way into its first
national controversy, it did so by meshing—I even want to say mashing—embodied
symbols of that violent showdown in Crown Heights. The February 14th issue
featured a cover illustration of a Hasidic man kissing a Black woman on the lips.
The artist, award-winning cartoonist Art Spiegelman, whose Maus books are
among the most oddly captivating and moving accounts of the Holocaust ever
published, explained his intentions as a Valentine's day wish to New York that
life's collisions be as simply resolved as kissing and making up.
But The New Yorker cover offended everyone, it seemed; pleased no one; and
for all of Tina Brown's protestations that it was meant to spark controversy, the
controversy that ensued hardly addressed the problems of Crown Heights or racial