Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

374 // PATRICIA J.WILLIAMS
confrontation in the United States. As lucidly, even childishly resonant, as
Spiegelman's wish was on one level, his illustration nevertheless blundered onto a
battleground of complicated symbolic meaning. That battleground is fraught
with lessons about the kinds of conversations Blacks and Jews need (and need not)
to have with one another, and about the pitfalls that even our best efforts at reconciliation
seem to encounter. It underscores, moreover, our urgent necessity to
press on with the conversation, even when it misfires as dismally as Spiegelman's
kiss.
First, it was hard to imagine to whom Spiegelman's fantasy was addressed.
Was he trying to speak to the upscale post-ethnic Manhattanites or wanna-be
Manhattanites who form so much of The New Yorker's readership? Or perhaps to
Hasidic Jews, who are not permitted to touch anyone but their own spouses—and
certainly not with the closed-eyed, mouth-to-mouth eroticism of Spiegelman's
depiction? (Spiegelman was the first to admit that the woman was most likely not
"his wife, an Ethiopian Jew.") Or was Spiegelman addressing Blacks, whose experience
with artistic representation by whites has always veered to the erotically
transgressivc? (And imagine how transgressive the Jezebel was who could lure a
devout Hasidic man from his pursuit of piety.)
This kiss as Spiegelman's chosen metaphor for the kind of complicated political
reconciliation that Crown Heights requires strikes me as a sign of how
immensely sexualixed our culture is—in particular of how sexualized our racial
encounters are. And the kiss depicted was a quite sexual one; if there is any doubt
about that, consider the same pose with, say, a Hasidic man and Al Sharpton.
Perhaps then, in our sexually titillated but homophobic society, the raw sex
appeal, even pornography, of the pose would have been all too exaggeratedly visible.)
Grey babies have become the optimist's antidote to everything: the pervasive
antimiscegenist horror of tainted blood lines that inspires segregation's powerful
taboos having been countered time and again by the simplistic antidote of
More Miscegenation. (My impatience here parallels my concern with the cheerfully
chipper blather so popular these days that hate speech can be countered by
the innocent redemption of More Speech. Neither redemptive sex nor whole droning
clouds of More Speech will do much if people fail to grapple with—and
"grappling with" need not suggest censorship—the complex histories and causes
of race hatred and violence.)
But, while political intermarriage may be noble and good, this form of romanticism-as-political
solution misses the point. As Calvin Hernton has noted: "One
of the most interesting aspects of the race problem was formulated by [Gunnar
Myrdal, in An American Dilemma,} into a schema which he called 'The Rank Order
of Discrimination.' When Myrdal asked white Southerners to list, in the order of
importance, the things they thought Negroes wanted most, here is what he got:
1. Intermarriage and sex intercourse with whites
2. Social equality and etiquette