The predisposition toward dead things, toward dead writers and dead ideas, becomes a great concern to the black student at this university; for to a large extent, his background in literature and his experience, the essence of it, is in clear contradistinction to the underlying philosophy that might be culled from the study of such works. The whole cultural background against which these works have been produced is anathema to him. He can no more relate fully to Dante than he can relate to the chamber music concerts in some of the colleges in the university. There is never any intention to feed him with the poetry of Amiri Baraka, for Amiri Baraka himself as a man and also as a poet, is the contradiction of Yale. He will get Amiri Baraka only in strict relation to “Black Studies.” Black Studies and Black Literature, so far as Yale University is concerned, has not yet achieved “academic legitimacy” as a discipline. Perhaps this attitude is based upon the quality and the credentials of the black professors on the faculty; perhaps it is based upon the feeling, and this would seem to be the more honest reason, that “Black Literature” has not yet become a sufficiently intellectual discipline that scholars, both black and white, can study and criticize without being embarrassed into feeling that they are either radical, or stupid. For serious professors to specialize in “Black Studies” at this time is to bring down upon their heads the criticism which scholars like Melville J. Herskovits of Northwestern University suffered, when, early in the last century in which 1969 occurs, through study and scholarship, he found out that the Negro was worthy of serious study, and that the Negro was not a “myth.” The academic prejudice against “Black Studies” is prevalent today, 1969, in the same proportionate intensity as there is prejudice against the black American in his own society.
But to look back at the black student at Yale: someone who finds himself boasting that he is from the ghetto, in a physical sense, from any ghetto in America, although if you checked his records, you would be informed that not many like him do in fact come from such harsh beginnings. But the concept in their minds of “machismo,” of being black, requires them to invent this metaphor of the ghetto, which has come to have significant meaning, and which, when exhibited against their present position in an Ivy League university like Yale (which only began to admit black students in any reasonable number), this insistence upon a romantic “black ghetto” background, even when it is false, even when it is pointed out to you that there is not even a significant fraction of them who have ever even visited a ghetto, let alone lived in one; and this exhibitionism is just part of the total deception that they are forced, through their presence at Yale and their duality of feeling for Yale, to indulge in, I am told that quite a large number of the black students are wealthy children of wealthy parents, doctors, lawyers, businessmen …
Although Yale has its share of wealthy and influential students, students who sometimes flaunt this wealth and this influence and this privilege most indiscreetly, to be black and to be wealthy at Yale, does not mean very much to his status vis-à-vis the university; because it is the blackness, the peculiarity of that blackness which becomes phobogenic, and which in turn defines the student and follows him throughout his university career. He is plagued by his colour, whether he is an avowed black cultural adherent or a black nationalist, or just “a nice Negro boy.” And it is this blackness that strikes the campus policeman first. And their reaction to this blackness upon the landscape of Yale, which to them is clearly a white college, suggests that not only is the campus policeman’s attitude a reflection of the university’s, but also is its way of seeing black students. It is merely a slice of the perspective from the same fruit of presumption, that the larger society, America, assumes to be the correct and precise one with which to regard a black student or a black man.
One gets the impression sometimes, judging from incidents of blatant racism caused by the campus policemen and the bad manners of some university officials, in college dining halls, and from the elevator operators in the library, most of the white employees at Yale feel themselves to be inherently superior to the black student, and to the black faculty. One can therefore imagine how they feel toward the black employees.
The black student has been assaulted, harassed, and persecuted by the campus policemen; and in spite of proof (which the black victim is always called upon to demonstrate as his proof of racism), the president of this university would still insist that he does not have the power to correct and to put an end to this treatment of black students attending his university. If one were to seek some reason, or some rationalization for this kind of persecution, one might have to conclude that Yale University forgot to inform and to brief its campus police, and some of its college staff, including college masters and college deans, that the university had officially accepted so many blacks as students, and that their sudden presence in the college quadrangle and dining hall and at the college mixer, was not the anticipated and feared eruption of New Haven “delinquent blacks” on its campus. These officials were probably not told that the sudden number of blacks were not “from the community” (meaning that they were “outside blacks”), in spite of the fact of cosmetic similarity of colour.
It was an assumption on the part of the university, that the campus policemen and other university staff would accept the sudden dramatic appearance of so many blacks on the campus in 1968 and 1969. And it was an assumption of equal importance that the university authorities would understand that the black student was there, by right, and that he had the same rights as the white student.
I have always felt that policemen and guns have no place on a university campus. Their presence is an anachronism: even in spite of the concept of law and order, rampant in America. Law and order in 1968 was beginning to be rampant even among some professors as a modus vivendi. To see these stout, ugly, overfed white men in their dark suits, their hips bulging over their leather belts, because of too much food, hamburgers and pork chops and steaks with the blood still in them, and milkshakes that look like white, sweet glue; and from too much sitting at their desks, or in their parked cruisers; and to see their buxom hips, and to know that part of that bulge around the waist is not the result of their higher standard of living, but rather is the reflection of their higher worth or status, in the society, that they were wearing guns, making all this become very frightening.
The campus policemen at Yale do not draw guns on white students. The campus policemen at Yale do not beat up white students. The campus policemen at Yale do not question a white student entering a college gate to attend a college mixer, or some other function at which there are women, white women from neighbouring women’s colleges. And everybody at Yale knows that many of the white youth who attend the social functions of the university are not Yale students, that some of them are under the legal age for drinking liquor, and that most of them are not even invited as guests of college residents. It is conceivable that a campus policeman who has to stop someone from entering a private party on the campus would tend to stop a “New Haven–type black person,” since to him, with the predominant white enrollment, he is going to be more accurate in his un-random sample of intruders if he forbids only black persons from entering. But his accuracy is based upon his own racial prejudice. Nothing more, nothing less. So, the white official at the wrought-iron gates of the college, does nothing about the white “students,” for they all look alike to him; and they are all white to him.
This practice of unfair judging reached a climax one night at Calhoun College, of which I was a Fellow. A very popular black rock group was playing there at a college mixer. (A college mixer at Yale is an affair at which girls from the neighbouring all-women’s schools are brought to Yale in a bus, transported sometimes at the expense of the college hosting the mixer; and they are then escorted into the dining hall of the college, where beer is served free, where the men mix with the women, just as freely, and get to know the women in ways that a man gets to know a woman. After the dancing and after the mixing, should the girls so desire, the
y can return to their own college, or else remain in a man’s room. This overnight stay in the man’s room, though not officially permitted, is not too seriously prohibited. This kind of mature way of treating men and women is one of the good things about Yale University.) This black group was so popular, the music so good, that every black person in New Haven having heard of the dance, decided to attend the mixer. At this mixer, most unusually, an admission fee was charged, thereby making it public, and moreover, legal for anybody, student or visitor, to enter the college gate and attend the dance.
The usual thing happened. White teenaged girls, younger than the state’s drinking age, were admitted by the campus policemen guarding the entrance to the college; and of course, it is fair to say that it is not really the sole responsibility of a policeman to question every young woman about her age. Some of the regular dates of the black students, both those resident in the college and those from other colleges, were refused entry. Or, else were asked to show their identification. Only blacks were questioned. Perhaps, the policemen were more versed in the history of Calhoun College than it was generally thought: that the college had had over the years, a very large percentage of white students from the Southern states in America, that the Rebel flag and the Rebel battle hymns were sung regularly in residence.
But at one point during the mixer, the college dining hall where the dance was being held, was so crowded, and there were so many black faces on the dance floor of this college named after John C. Calhoun, who by no means was disposed to this kind of mixing of the races, that fear ran through the Calhoun College white students, and through the white college administrators of the mixer, when they saw so many of their women dancing with black men. Had Senator John C. Calhoun been present at this mixer, his entire endowment to Yale University would have sweated away at the sight of this miscegenation.
Rumours spread. Like incidents of police brutality, like charred blackened pieces of paper in the wind. Somebody said there was going to be a race riot. Panic gripped the student organizers of the mixer. They called in the police. The feared campus police. The whole affair deteriorated into a distasteful reminder to the black students of the racism on the Yale campus. And it was distasteful to those black students who lived at Calhoun College, reputed amongst the university’s black students, to be the most undesirable place to live.
The night this incident took place, I was having dinner with the master of this college at the Master’s House of another master, a novelist. We had been drinking in the manner in which Yale faculty drinks: as much as possible, just before complete insensibility takes over; in enormous quantities in enormous drinking glasses that could hold almost two beers poured, or one-fifth of a bottle of Wild Turkey Bourbon, as if we had made a vow with ourselves to break records, to erase, to drown out from our senses all meaning of our life at Yale. I had been thinking of going to the mixer after dinner, because I too had heard of the good quality of the music. But something had happened to postpone my arrival there. Perhaps I too had been insensibly drunk. So, I did not go to the Calhoun College until the next day, when I heard the story from the black students (white students at Yale never mentioned any distastefulness about racism and police brutality to me, or to any other black faculty member), about the previous night’s happenings.
I felt it was in my position, as some kind of a figure in the eyes of the black students, to at least try to inquire what had really happened; and also to find out the truth in what I had been told by the black students; and to see what the master of the college intended to do about the situation. I felt this responsibility also because I was a Fellow of the college. The black students who lived in the college expected this involvement from me. So, I stopped by the college that Monday during the “tea-and-cookies” afternoon of fellowship, when the master’s wife serves; and there and then, I brought the concern of the black students to the attention of the master. Not only had he heard not a word of their side of the story, he had not even heard the whole story. And naturally, he had done nothing about it. Doing nothing about matters of this nature and gravity was, I learned, the characteristic response of the University, to things that smelled of racism.
“What do you think I should do?” he asked me, as he would have asked a student of his who had got into some intellectual difficulty over American Literature.
I could see in his eyes the earnestness that you sometimes see in the eyes of a plaintive. The man was approaching this problem as if it were an academic matter. I was not sure whether he felt that as a black man, as a faculty member closer to the black students than a white professor normally is, I was therefore in a position to offer a solution, or to give some advice. But I resented his question. “What do you think I should do?” It had absolutely nothing to do with me. It was an administrative problem; and he, as master, was the chief administrator of the college.
“I think I should do something,” he went on to say, “But …”
“I think you should do something,” I told him. “I do not know what you should do. But whatever you do, you should do it quickly. And it should be something to make those black students, who attended the mixer in their own college, feel that you are serious. But what is more important, you should make the black students in your college feel as if they belong in your college.”
I then watched him, and his manner did not change from the academic. He seemed far off, away in some textual intricacy of an “American Adam.” I watched that face made purple by bourbon, a face that I had seen often, close up, during many nights of drinking in his living room, with the huge untitled painting above a large couch, and I would see how this painting was transformed, and in its place there appeared another “portrait,” the stained-glass window in the lounge of the college, just as you enter by climbing the two cement steps of the dining hall door opposite the Porter’s Lodge, that stained-glass window that shows a planter from a Southern plantation, planting his foot (it seemed then, that the foot was planted for an eternity, and not symbolically), on the head of a Negro, a slave, a black man, even a black student, as he would come to be known …
Something in the irony and the metaphor of that stained-glass window told me that it stands, not so much, for an aberration in history, the history of America, the history of the relationship between the black students and himself, but that it was the printed, stained reminder of the black students in Calhoun College and in the university, that neither their presence nor their academic achievement should ever be measured against the rod of their collective knowledge of origin in segregation, on plantations. The foot was no longer planted, in a real sense, on the neck of the black student at Yale; certainly not during the time of this college master. But in a symbolic sense it was still there. The foot has always been there; and it seemed that it would be there for some time to come. And the master must have been thinking about this, because he said, “You know, Austin, Calhoun is not the most racist college on campus. Why Branford College could not make Professor Houston Baker, a black faculty member, the college dean, because the white students protested, and were against it.”
He had travelled full circle: from the point, the intellectual, at which I first met him, to that point which black Americans refer to as “bullshitter.”
This was the same man, who during those days of grief, following the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., had watched the funeral along with me; and had insisted upon sending up to the guest suite in his college, during the time I was a Hoyt Fellow, a bottle of Scotch, one day of that long period of national mourning and embarrassment, and fear in New Haven and in the rest of America, gifts to act as his own assurance (so it seemed now), that the passion and the sorrow and the hate of the nation’s black population would not catch like a match nursing a fire and spread to New Haven and Yale, and to Calhoun College, and tear down the ivy from the brick, and the brick itself, fistful by clenched fistful.
And even then, my tendency to come to some conclusion about the meaning of his patronage
, his kindness, the possibility that he was buying me off, a complete stranger then in his country, that he thought I was so important in the struggle for racial justice and thereby angered by its absence, to be bought off, just as it might have been in those days in the era of plantations when the master gave the slaves an inordinate amount of rum and liquor to drink on holidays before the slaves were obsessed by murder and revolutionary rape, and their black bodies would be imbued and deadened by the spirits in the liquor which would bring about a prostration in that metaphor of drunkenness which in later years came to be regarded and to be held by white masters, on plantations and in colleges, as the image of the Negro.
The master had told me one afternoon, during that precarious time that required love and black allegiance, a need emphasized and magnified during this period of fear, “I am glad that you are living upstairs in the guest suite. I’m sure the blacks won’t think of burning down Calhoun.”
And when, on this Monday afternoon, following the confusion with the mixer, that “Calhoun is not the most racist college on campus,” I went back to that time of mourning, America’s mourning for its loss of racial innocence; and I had to wonder, in what other ways and in what number of times, he might have used my presence as a visitor in the college to assure himself of protection from the wrath of his own black countrymen. I wondered also whether my life would not have been worth it, had New Haven’s blacks stormed the ivied battlements of Yale University, and razed it to the ground as the Black Panther Party had threatened to do with words of black cultural nationalism. Would I lie, consumed in “the fire next time,” useless in the ruins of his sincerity?
“Calhoun is not the most racist college.” In this confession lay all the extenuation against any act, against any attitude, before, and even up until then, might have been deliberately racialistic. An act that he himself might have admitted to, as racialistic. But I feel certain that in spite of the great American conspiracy, an immorality of silence, the master’s own silence must have rebelled vociferously inside his heart. And if I were to analyze his statement, spoken with all sincerity and pride that is characteristic of a Southern gentleman who confesses that he is a segregationist, and who would maintain that his state, let us say, Louisiana, “is not the most racist in the country,” and that it is in fact less racial than either North Carolina, or South Africa during its apartheid regime, and would attempt to use this statement in a logical way against his enemies who may be black and white liberals, the statement that “Calhoun College is not the most racist college” can be taken as a reflection of the attitude of the university itself, a confession that seeks to bring about some extenuation of its heinousness. It is the kind of statement that I have heard used many times at Yale, when the university was challenged about the quality of its Black Studies Program. I can hear the president saying, “Yale is not the most backward college on these matters, gentlemen.” And in this context, “not the most racist” means the same thing as “not the most backward.”
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