Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

On Imagining Foes, Imagining Friendship \\ 375
3. Desegregation of public facilities, buses, churches, etc.
4. Political enfranchisement
5. Fair treatment in the law courts
6. Economic opportunities
"The curious thing about this 'Rank Order' was that when Myrdal approached
the Negroes, they put clown the same items as did the whites, but with one major
change—they listed them in reverse order!" 1
Moreover, if the whole world were grey tomorrow, I think the situation in
Crown Heights would still exist, because it can't be cured by convincing everyone
that we're all related. Crown Heights is about how—or if-—we human creatures
can live together while observing very different cultural practices. I do not
mean to suggest that racism and anti-Semitism are not key dimensions in the dispute,
but rather that resolutions based on innocently assimilative, dehistoricized
ideals only blur or aggravate rather than assuage. And that maybe a more respectful—yet
perhaps ultimately more difficult—vision would depict a Hasidic Jew
and a Caribbean neighbor just nodding and saying "Good morning" to one another
as they passed each other on the street they share.
It's a kind of heresy, I know, to suggest that the storybook desire to marry a
Capulet and live happily ever after might be oppressive, and again I want to
underscore the degree to which, like Spiegelman, I personally believe that the
streets of Verona will never be calm until there's a little more love between us.
But what concerns me is that the West Side Story solution is a blindly depoliticized
one, and obscures the possibility that simple cantankerous coexistence may
be more like what we should be aiming for in a democracy based on live and let
live.
The Crown Heights situation exemplifies the difficulty of understanding the
tensions faced in current race relations: we hear about Black/white, Black/Jewish,
Black/brown, Black/Korean confrontations. It is only when it erupts at the level
of international figure skating competitions, perhaps, that we are aware of Irish,
Italian, or Chinese gangs, to say nothing of White Aryan Resistance gangs, all
battling one another dreadfully. The irreducibility of the categories of "Black" and
"Jew" in racist and anti-Semitic imagination must be whittled away by persistently
detailed descriptions of lived encounters among live neighbors. The genuinely
difficult task facing our times is to come up with images that might suggest
a model of coexistence that is fluid rather than static, a model of value that
does not substitute a facile sociobiology for the actuality of culture.
To illustrate how hard I think the work that faces us will be, let me try to lay
out some of my own thoughts about the pitfalls that even our best efforts at reconciling
democracy's challenges seem to encounter, as well as my sense of the
urgent necessity to continue such conversations, even when they misfire dismally.
In a much-publicized incident at Harvard University a few years ago, a white
student hung a Confederate flag from her dormitory window saying that to her it