'Membering

by Clarke, Austin;

  able as a gentleman’s agreement, which sought to keep me numbered amongst the underclass. Canada had to have an underclass, because it was a racist society, and each racist society needs to have a class, usually visible so far as complexion is concerned, to kick around. I would say that this is the basis of the success of capitalism — this worker class, this gang of immigrants who are janitors, cleaners, car-park attendants, elevator operators, sweepers, and taxi drivers. In early times, in this country, this underclass emptied spittoons, toilets pits, vomit and faeces from hospital wards and rooms.

  I believe that I was “watched” and my telephone was tapped because I am black and a writer whose writing was radical in comparison to the sentiments expressed by other writers, both white and black, who had no conviction to take a stand against racism. And I mean to suggest that I was a target because Canada was racist: and did not, to put it quite bluntly, like black people; particularly black people who were not afraid to speak out. In these days of the fifties, this city and this country showed no inclination to embrace the black strangers living amongst them, in a way to suggest mutuality of decency and civilized social intercourse. There have been individual cases of such mutually beneficial relationships; but as a “policy,” not a public declaration by a government, but rather an “understanding,” a code of behaviour and of etiquette, even something suggesting the term that came to be used, “multiculturalism,” there was nothing of this social and behavioural intermingling and “understanding” that we now take for granted, for instance, by the fleetest glance at the landscape of Toronto.

  The change in the attitude and in the comprehension of the social, racial, and political inter-relationship amongst African, African Americans, Jews, and Irish that exists today, had repudiated, perhaps scorned the “linking of Black, Jewish and Irish suffering and oppression.”

  When former slaves like Frederick Douglass invoke the words in Psalm 137: “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Yes! We wept when we remembered Zion,” he was indulging in more than the similarity in the echo of racial suffering and oppression: he was showing the symbiotic nature of the two codes, or appeals, or ideologies.

  Here is part of a letter that Douglass wrote to William Lloyd Garrison on February 26, 1846, regarding the question of slavery, and the moral need to abolish it. But in this letter, George Bernstein suggests that Frederick Douglass was showing his surprise at the “degradation of Irish oppression,” which led him to take a new interest in the anti-slavery struggle:

  Of all places to witness human misery, ignorance, degradation, filth and wretchedness, an Irish hut is pre-eminent … without floor, without windows, and sometimes without a chimney … a picture representing the crucifixion of Christ … a little peat in the fire place…a man and his wife and five children, and a pig … a hole … into which all filth and dirt of the hut are put … frequently covered with a green scum, which at times stands in bubbles. Here you have an Irish hut or cabin, such as millions of people in Ireland live in…in much the same degradation as the American [Negro] slaves. I confess that I should be ashamed to lift my voice against American slavery, but that I know the cause of humanity is one the world over.

  But relations between blacks and Jews, and blacks and Irish, have not always been hospitable. Remember that some of the worst race riots in New York involved the Irish immigrants and the American Negro. Remember that Stokely Carmichael issued an edict banning Jews from taking part in the demonstrations organized by the Student Non-Violent Committee (SNCC). And remember that here, in Toronto, Mayor Givens extended an invitation to Governor Wallace, at the height of his declaration of “segregation (in Arkansas) would be forever,” to speak at Maple Leaf Gardens. This was in the mid-1960s. Remember, too, that in 2004, the mayor of Toronto, Mel Lastman expressed his consternation about travelling to Africa with the Toronto committee seeking to attract the Olympics to this city, that he did not relish the possibility of being boiled in a pot. There was no apology, no attempt to assuage the impropriety of the two instances I have mentioned: Mr. Givens’s invitation to George Wallace, and Mr. Lastman’s allusion to Africans’ cannibalism. I cannot remember the attitude of Mayor Givens, but Mr. Lastman regarded his statement as a joke, saying he was not serious, that he was not a racist.

  This indelicacy is usually not regarded as damaging, or even as expressing a change in the close relationship that the three oppressed groups, Jews, Irish, and Negroes, used to honour. But when the shoe is on the other foot, for instance, when Reverend Jesse Jackson, in a lapse of judgment during his running for the U.S. presidential nomination, was stupid enough to say in a speech in Harlem, that New York was “Hymie Town,” and the wrath of the accusation of anti-Semite fell upon his head, and upon his political campaign. His statement ended any realistic chance of acceptability — even by those Jews who had no political intention to vote for Reverend Jackson.

  Consider now, Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones) and his poem about the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, “Somebody Blew Up America” written while he was still the poet laureate of New Jersey, and in which he enumerates the massacre and oppression of black people in America, Leroi (which is what I call him), refers to “five Israelis filming the attacks; and asks in the poem:

  Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed

  Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers

  To stay home that day

  Why did Sharon stay away?

  The governor of New Jersey, James E. McGreevey, asked for Leroi’s resignation, “because of the poem quoted above, which Leroi read at a poetry festival,” Leroi believed, and said so, that “Israel had advance knowledge of the September attacks.” Leroi refused to resign.

  In 2004, the same governor resigned from his office because of a homosexual incident, in which he feared his lover would expose him.

  The duel between Leroi and the governor struck the inhabitants of New Jersey as surprising, since the state has a poetic tradition that includes Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, Allen Ginsberg, and a turnpike rest stop named for Joyce Kilmer. The New York Times commented that Leroi said, “superfluously that he dislikes poetry as ‘decoration.’ He likes strong stuff that rattles people. ‘If they resent what I am saying, I can resent their resentment,’ he said, ‘but I’m not going to censor them.’”

  When we came here to Toronto, in the mid-fifties, as immigrants and as university students, very ordinary, nice, mature, and Christian-minded men and women like Mr. Mel Lastman, wondered aloud — at times, in our presence — whether we black people, immigrant and student, “had tails,” and some of these men and women inspected our backsides, surreptitiously, of course, as Canadian propriety dictates to see if we had tails. Some wondered if we “lived in trees,” and some, still with a disquieting curiosity, wanted to know whether it was true that we ate one another. And some of these Christian-minded men and women called us monkeys.

  Many times, on subway and streetcar, small children, barely able to talk, exclaimed with the gratification that their recent fluency with words afforded, “Mummy! Look, a chocolate man!” Those of us who had studied literature, West Indian or African, recognized immediately that the child’s own literary preference lay in Little Black Sambo, enhanced perhaps, by some homespun soliloquies coached into his brain, by mother and father — if only subliminally. Perhaps, the child was read a new kind of bedtime story, different from Dr. Seuss, or Hans Christian Andersen, and that Uncle Tom’s Cabin was selected instead.

  We could not refuse to admit to the possibility that this small child had received instruction at home, in secret, of racial curiosity (and intolerance) about the sudden, strange, presence of so many black people upon the geographical and psychological landscape of Toronto’s absolutist whiteness.

  Toronto in 1955 was a plateau of lily-whiteness, remarkably intolerant as if this was metropolitan or provincial policy, and its disposition toward black people ventured on the truculent in the white-black psycho-existenti
al complex, that is to say, the physical closeness of blacks to whites, all of a sudden, and without preparation, created the mutuality of distrust based upon race.

  In the late fifties, when accommodation at Ontario resorts in the cottage districts of green grass and chilly lake water, which were not then rented to Jewish persons, in these days when the Granite Club refused membership to the Jewish wealthy, when Jews were restricted to quotas in certain professional courses at the University of Toronto, a very ordinary, nice, mature, and Christian-minded man, very much like Mr. Mel Lastman, but by the name of Mr. Pierre Berton, exposed this racism in housing — and other anti-Semitic discriminations — in a series of articles in the Toronto Star. We from Africa and the West Indies applauded Pierre Berton’s courage and decency, and we formed in our minds an allegiance with him. His and our appeal in the mid-sixties to racial tolerance and integration was a common plea. (I was disheartened to watch the ceremony of readings and toasts and panegyrics that flowed at the memorial service held for Pierre Berton at the CBC, and which was televised, perhaps, to the entire country, for it presented Mr. Berton in a “whitened” state of consciousness and opinion. Mr. Berton, to me, has done more than most politicians and bureaucrats in Toronto and in Canada, to rid our society of racism and prejudice. His series of articles on the woes of Jews and blacks, during the 1960s is one of the most impressive commentary and analysis ever done in this country. So, when I saw the omission from the ceremony of this significant aspect of his life, I was disheartened, but I was not really surprised. For Mr. Berton’s career and his “acceptance” into the Canadian Literary Establishment — whatever this is! — has only recently been vouchsafed. I remember the days, in the sixties, the seventies, and the eighties, when Mr. Berton was not taken seriously as a writer. Yes, his articles, and his appearances on television programs, debates, and Front Page Challenge showed him to be more entertainer than writer, or historian of popular culture. So, even though my distress at the exclusion from praise of Mr. Berton’s understanding of the treatment of Jews and blacks in Canada, and their allegiance in the fight for equality, I was nevertheless gratified to see his work re-evaluated and his character come through a revision from its previous, pervading rejection — the ignoring of his talent. He has emerged from being a “hack writer” who churns out books, to commentator of the flesh and bones, the skeleton, of Canadian sensibility toward honesty. Pierre Berton made simplicity and honesty a revisited Canadian virtue. I was pleased, in spite of the attempt to “whiten” his literary and social persona, to see that he was honoured.

  Pierre Berton presented, through debate, the rawness of Canadian racism. In his interviews and commentaries, on radio, on television, and in the Toronto Star, he challenged our prejudices. (He was after all the first serious Canadian journalist to interview Malcolm X.)

  In the early sixties, when we black people in Toronto (and Canada), were buoyed by our false sense of racial tolerance (or euphemistically, by our smallness of racial intolerance), and we displayed a superciliousness in our attitude of superiority towards those “racist Americans” — high-powered water hoses, bombings of Negro churches, murder, rape, and savage police beatings of suspects; more palatable demonstrations of truculence and of racial animus, than a little girl’s naive inquiry after “a chocolate man, Mummy”; a very ordinary, nice, mature, and Christian-minded man, a charitable man, Rabbi Feinberg — and I — marched in demonstrations and took part in sit-ins, to protest segregation and racial discrimination in American cities; against the assassination of Medgar Evers, against apartheid in South Africa, and the equally vicious racial soliloquy of Mr. Mel Lastman; and, before his time, during the pass-book riots by black South Africans in Johannesburg that exposed the cruelty of white South African police, up stepped Mr. Garfield Weston, president of Weston Bakeries and of Loblaws, with his own soliloquy concerning his belief that “every black piccaninny or black mammy can call on the government for solutions to every social problem.” Jewish men and Jewish women joined our insignificant ranks in these protests against Garfield Weston’s sentiments. Our ranks were thin, but the new alliance of Negroes and Jews revitalized our ranks.

  It was always assumed that Jews shared the “psycho-existential complex” with black people, that their suffering and oppression, their present racial nationalism came out of that experience of persecution, which is, arguably, of the same “complexion” as slavery. There could not be two more symbiotic political sensibilities to fight expressed racial hatred.

  The mutually beneficial alliance of “Negroes and Jews” was fashioned many years ago upon moral principles, including in America, the WPA projects of the late 1930s, based also upon the similarity in political philosophy that caused members of the two groups to be affiliated with socialism, if not communism. In these days, socialism was almost synonymous with racial and political freedom. The psychology that exists at the bottom of this affiliation lies in its fascination with Russian Communism, and with Trotsky and Stalin, and the Russian Revolution. It is based also upon the more realistic and symbiotic tribal closeness of the two groups who are victims of racial animosity and persecution, who had a common history in the 1930s.

  We come now to the year 2001.

  I have been puzzling, since 1955, on the reasons used to defend racial intolerance. I have considered the economic reason, the environmental reasons, the sociological reasons, and still, with each time the head of racialism is reared, I have to go back to Frantz Fanon, and see in his explanation, the most feasible reason. Fanon believed that the Negrophobia that exists in Canada, is dermatological. It is a disease. Lingering in the blood. In the veins. “Bad blood,” my mother used to say. And if it is in the blood, then this is the best interpretation to apply to Mr. Mel Lastman’s truculent behaviour, in spite of the advances in “race relations” that we have made in this city, and this province, especially in this city of Toronto.

  But blood is blood. And blood will have its say. Now, this question of blood brings to bear the corollary, “racial collective responsibility.”

  Mr. Lastman’s soliloquy brushes all of us who are black. But it does not miss those of you who are “white.” It diminishes both black and white. James Baldwin argued that racialism does not corrode the mind of the victim, only: it also eats away at the mind of the man who created the victim. Victor and victim are destroyed. And if this is so, it really is a point of great moral virtue and astonishment to recognize and to be deafened by the silence of those elected white people, who normally are radical and moral, conscious and outspoken on all matters that are not directly related to, and that have no clear, direct identifiable connection with racialism, to voice an opinion. Baldwin also had a term for this convenient sudden inability to voice an opinion, for this convenient silence. He called it “the immorality of silence.”

  Where then, in the passing of wind, the passing hurricane in the wind of Mr. Lastman’s word that wrecks years of piling brick upon brick to construct a statue of multiculturalism are those conveniently “periodic radical views?” Where is the premier of the province? Where is the attorney general? Where is the Human Rights Commissioner? Where is the police chief? Where are the mayors of towns surrounding — all except Mrs. Hazel McCallion?

  Where were Councillor Layton and his radical partner in the crime of politics, Ms. Chow? And where is — even if it is not proper for him to voice an opinion publicly in this matter that transcends the jurisdiction to contend with the separation of law from politics?

  I have never met Mr. Mel Lastman, but I worry that the span of similar years, 1955 to 1975, did not expose him to the bitterness of racialism of the sixties, both here in this city and elsewhere in Canada, and to the struggle of good men like Pierre Berton, Rabbi Feinberg, Roy McMurtry, and others, but most importantly, to the pride that some of us, can, justifiably, wallow in, and say that in spite of the silence on important racial matters, in spite of the interminable, gnawing, and destructive eroding of racial harmony from the spirit of som
e of us, Toronto’s summers have never been “long and hot” in the same way as Watts, Chicago, Newark, Detroit, Selma, and Harlem have been. No Canadian author has had the inspiration to label his or her forecast of the racial situation in Toronto and Canada, as “the fire next time.” The unrelenting persecution and racism, as silent and sophisticated as it is, has not, as it ought not to have had, theoretically, brought about a revolution. Not even a revolution of black political thought. We are all integrationist conservatives; and still are able to be hypocritical about the silence with which we endow that conservatism.

  Do we dare argue that Toronto is not, in spite of the former mayor’s statement about the fear, the threat to him, of black cannibalism, a very racist city? The mayor’s statement has hit us hard here, as it has, for generations, hit those who live in Africa.

  The mayor offered a weak argument to postpone — I use the word, advisedly — to postpone his resignation from office, by attempting to confuse the number of ballots cast in his favour, in the election, as the statement of overweening popularity — but who were his opponents? — with his intrinsic, innate inability to say a racist word. His argument is puff, is straw. Unless he can show that those who voted for him in such numbers, assumed that when they cast their ballots, that he was going to make racist statements in their behalf, then surely he cannot now claim umbrage and electoral sovereignty and personal innocence with those very votes.

  And those who voted for Mr. Lastman must certainly feel some discomfiture that their votes, cast in ignorance and disbelief of this development, are now being manipulated to keep him hanging on to the girth of a moose.

  It has done something else. It has caused me great shame. It has reawakened my reservation against trust, and challenges the conviction of the “niceness of Toronto,” and has added a taint to the honours which Toronto and Canada have given me — Member of the Order of Ontario and Member of the Order of Canada.