I suppose that raising the ante resulted from my having lived through quite a bit of American history from the inside, experiencing new movements as they came into existence and lucking upon many chances to see across the lines of color and class. I had the good fortune to have made my way from alleys to mansions and penthouses and back, easing through much of what was in between, on the way up and on the way down. That was why an epic sweep came over me as an ambition, and why telling the story of a civilization took over more and more space in my conception. European novels came to my mind, because writers from Balzac to Thomas Mann were never afraid of letting their characters talk and think. But for an American to make something of the color mess, one has to go to the champions. The Melville of “Benito Cereno” and the Twain of “Huckleberry Finn” were good for much more than starters, but these seven writers were the ones who truly laid it down for me.

When I got to it, I wanted to write an epic that maintained a dialogue with the work of these writers. I was seeking something of an American “Magic Mountain” in which “the sickness” was comprised of varied bigotries, but the troubles of the species were argued and lived in and out of the world of jazz, across the lines of color, in the blues song of an interracial romance threatened by external pressures. To symbolize all of the things we go through in this remarkably mixed and mixed-up country, my heroine is a jazz singer from South Dakota, “a blonde with a black ass.” She is also Achilles, Odysseus, Penelope and a pioneer woman updated to wander in search of her aesthetic home, which is deep in the heart of jazz.

Go Down, Moses by William Faulkner
I prefer the Faulkner of this novel to all the other Faulkners, since the sheer complexity of race, feeling and identity are layered and reverberate against the classical world.

American Hunger by Richard Wright
This memoir, which reads like a novel and is the text central to “Invisible Man,” is also known in its truncated version as “Black Boy.” It surely offers a more intricate vision than any that came before it of the modern psychological dimensions of racial conflict, allegiance and mystery.

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Along with Ellison’s essays, this novel casts an especially profound net, pulling in an expansive cultural understanding, underlined by a rich and so far unequaled blues sensibility.

The Omni-Americans and South to a Very Old Place by Albert Murray
The first is a classic essay collection; the second, a series of musings inspired by Murray’s return to the South, is something he regards as a novel, not just domestic travel writing. Both are not only brilliantly written but essential to any understanding of both national and Southern black and white “kinship and aginship,” as he calls it.

Oxherding Tale by Charles Johnson
This work put Johnson in the front row of American novelists by examining the intellectual and spiritual concerns of existence through the prism of color and class conflict.

The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest Gaines
This book was quite a gift from Gaines because of its epic sense of Afro-American life and its superb rendering of a female consciousness.

Divine Days by Leon Forrest
While it is too long, this is a flawed masterpiece that looks with greater depth and technical complexity into the intricacies of Afro-American life than anyone since Ellison. In the best places of this 1,100-page novel, Forrest truly extended Ellison’s work, introducing romance, eroticism and male-female entanglements within the realms of color and class in ways not touched by other black American writers.

What has always amazed me about the voucher approach to education
reform is how few children it would actually help. Republicans are
supposed to be the party of business, those who look upon our version
of free-market capitalism as one of the great boons in the history of
creating, providing and profiting from goods, from the essential to
the frivolous. While I, too, am proud of our version of capitalism —
primarily because the history of our nation is the history of its
ongoing battle to bring together ethics, morality and the profit
motive — I always wonder why Republicans don’t apply the
problem-solving logic of the business world to the issue of education
and school vouchers. Specifically, I don’t know why the party of
business seems to have no ability to do math when thinking about
public education.

The trouble
with vouchers, like all hot air theories, is that those who
support them obviously have no idea what it actually takes to do
anything of significance in the arena of improving the quality of
public education. They rely on the belief that once people start
checking their kids out of the public schools and have other choices,
public school boards will begin shaping up, in order to compete with
the bustling business arriving in the private schools.

The problem is that millions of kids — many of them white and
affluent — have packed off to private schools around the country,
with very little reaction from public education. There’s no reason to
think that the threat of a comparative handful of poor and minority
kids leaving will cause a state of emergency.

And it would be a comparative handful. That’s why I tell Republicans
to do the math: There’s no way for private and parochial schools to
absorb the literally millions of students right now struggling in
substandard public schools. Right here in New York, as in many places
across the country, the private and parochial schools are jam-packed
and there are already substantial waiting lists. This is a very good
time to be in the private school business.

Even if people were given vouchers amounting to $25,000 per year for
each of their children, where would those kids go to school? (And
most voucher proposals are much smaller, offering somewhere between
$2,000 and $4,000 per student.) Are we actually supposed to believe
that there would, suddenly, as if from the skies above, appear the
number of schools and teachers to meet the demands imposed by all of
these children? The Republicans have more than a basic math problem
with their vouchers proposal.

In the world of business, planning for change occurs quite
differently. Out there in the vaunted private sector, when one is
supposed to be moving a product toward consumers, business people
don’t look up to the heavens for solutions and throw out ideas like
vouchers. They study what works, they test their products, they move
deliberately, they market and then they try to bring good ideas to
scale. Theory is set aside in favor of objective facts arriving from
engagement in the field, not pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking.

Similarly, those who really care about improving education for poor
children try to learn from what works and expand it to whole systems.
One such example is the KIPP Academy, a public school that exists in
the educational hellhole of New York’s Bronx. The KIPP crew (KIPP
stands for “Knowledge Is Power Program”) has been called upon to
oversee curriculums of many states in order to bring them into shape
and to propose new methods of teaching to significantly increase
student achievement.

Why? Because the KIPP Academy has a real track record. Its
achievements are in objective plain sight. KIPP has brought its kids
up to a top-line standard, knocking down the expected high dropout
rates, teenage pregnancy, poor performance and school violence.
Interestingly, there are states in the South and the Southwest that
have hired the KIPP brain trust to reform their public school systems.

Republicans who so love school vouchers should take a lead from those
Southern and Southwestern states. One of them is Texas, whose
Republican governor owes his popularity, in part, to the fact that he
bypassed easy answers like vouchers to do the tough work of reforming
the state’s public school system.

George W. Bush may not be a genius, but when it comes to href="/news/feature/1999/11/01/elpaso/">education, he’s smarter
than most Republicans — he did the math on vouchers, and opted to
try to help millions of kids, not the handful who might benefit from
vouchers.

In the same cathedral, Sunday after Sunday, O’Connor brought a sort of dignity to the pulpit that now almost seems arcane. Oh, but he was not really arcane, if you looked at the man the way he should be seen. Everyone who lives in New York knew who he was, or had seen him somewhere — in the flesh, on television, in a newspaper photograph, in a magazine. O’Connor was an elite part of New York and he upheld a sort of religious majesty. His huge cathedral on Fifth Avenue was almost an argument, with its architecture pointing to the heavens, against all the wealth and money associated with that street, where little of celestial concern ever seems to hold sway.

This is not to say that we can always count on religion to do battle with our slavish materialism. We know better than that. Every religion, surely in every era, has produced its con men and its politicians in supposedly hot get-ups who were bent more on building testaments to their images of themselves and their appetites than to anything deemed permanent and unquestionably worthy of worship in its transcendence. America has had its share of those people over the years, the Elmer Gantrys.

O’Connor was not one of those, nor was he anybody’s perfect guy trying to do a job between the world of the flesh and the world of the spirit. He was an American and he was Irish and hard-headed and a man who not only knew how to put his foot in his mouth but how to pull that foot out in front of everyone. He had a sense of humor, which made him a kind of religious leader almost peculiar to this country when it comes to Christianity, which doesn’t leave much room for the making of jokes and the telling of funny tales. If you’ve read the New Testament, you know that there might not be one joking laugh to be had there.

To be a cardinal in New York and in this time is no easy job, and that sense of humor held O’Connor in good stead. His intellect didn’t hurt him either. He was also helped by his street sense and his conception of faith as something that had to be encompassing enough to maintain itself in the face of whatever lions and rabid dogs stood in its path. That made him perfect for New York, a city of conflicts wrapped in enigmas of greed, self-righteousness, guile and ruthlessness — at least, partially.

At least part of his toughness and his faith as well as much of his
compassion must have deepened as a result of the cardinal’s having
served under fire with the Marines in Vietnam. He was a man who knew
well the immeasurably small distance between life and death, perfect
health and suddenly being crippled or disfigured for life and all of
the things that war teaches those who spend their time inside it.

But New York is also the capital of the national urban soul. It is the place where artists immigrate to find their expressive voices and their audiences and where all kinds of people from just about every place on this Earth arrive, sometimes poor, sometimes repulsively wealthy, sometimes well-educated, sometimes ignorant and ready to learn. But all of them have personal stories and, to Cardinal O’Connor, they each had individual and immortal souls.

Yes, Cardinal O’Connor was up to it; he was ready for the protean beast and the multicolored butterfly that are equal parts of New York. He was a tough guy and he was wise to the ways of politics and human beings. There weren’t any issues that he would back away from, and the opinions that he held were his own, whether or not they went with the commonest ideologies of the day. So even if he was an opponent, he was respected.

Women who believed in abortion thought him a hindrance because he did not. Homosexuals under the banner of ACT UP created a ruckus in his cathedral and threw condoms around for his anti-gay remarks. Those who were aware of the interrelationship of the Catholic Church and the brutal methods of colonialism didn’t buy any of it. The people who took their orders from the Vatican had been on the wrong side too often as far as they were concerned.

It didn’t matter. O’Connor knew the history of the church and he was not afraid to say that it had surely functioned sometimes more for the dark than for the light. He could be eloquent and stubborn and he would stand up for what used to be called “the little people,” meaning the common folk with blue collars, callused hands and only a few bucks to show for their toil and sweat.

He condemned bigotry and was very helpful in handling the AIDS crisis when, as former Gov. Mario Cuomo observed, most were emotionally out of orbit. While being berated for homophobia, O’Connor was washing out the bedpans of AIDS victims.

The cardinal nominated Pierre Toussaint, a former slave, for
sainthood. In keeping with his belief that the love of God was not
color-coded, O’Connor was laid to rest next to Toussaint in the crypt
beneath the altar of St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

The sweep of his authority and the strength of his example brought them out by the thousands to stand in the 90-degree sun while the ceremony went on inside St. Patrick’s Cathedral. They were there in all the national colors, white, black, brown, yellow and everything else. In their differences they represented this country’s diversity, just as the collective feeling of grief transcended those differences. Only our most special people inspire that kind of feeling.

The fact that a small number of white people own a good deal of the land in Zimbabwe is inarguably obscene, the result of a colonial history going back to Cecil Rhodes, one of the prime swine of his time. Rhodes was an Englishman who felt that a white man should do whatever he had to do to expand the empire and bring blacks to civilized order. In Rhodes’ view, the world existed to produce and work for England, the jewel of the British Isles. Any country that refused to submit to superior people would taste the lash, the truncheon, the rifle butt, the boot kicked deep into the recalcitrant buttocks of those known only for their savage wiles, their drums and their unwritten language.

That land now known as Zimbabwe was once named after this fellow; Rhodesia it was called. The colonial yoke under which the black population lived wasn’t particularly different from some others. But what separates the Western world from just about any other place is the fact that moral concerns can rise so high and shed so much light that we are able to see through the thick rhetorical darkness imposed by historical complaints and the heated claims of duty performed behind the implacable wall of national sovereignty.

King Leopold, for instance, became a pariah in Europe for the slaughter of Africans in the Congo so that Belgium could take advantage of the market for raw rubber sparked by the creation of the rubber bicycle tire. Over time the Western world came to the realization that colonialism was wrong, and empires fell internationally.

Now that Mugabe is resorting to traditional totalitarian tactics, we are supposed to assume that anything goes because the white people should not have the land in the first place. If warned by Mugabe that he cannot protect them, the white landowners should either give up what they presently own or accept the consequences.

While it is never said directly, we are supposed to feel that this is some sort of historical payback for a priggish pig like Rhodes or for all those black lives lost during the war for independence that was fought and won against Ian Smith and the colonial forces that once held sway.

There lies another question, however. How long, exactly, does a white person have to live in an African country before he or she becomes a full citizen? The kind of outrage exhibiting itself these days in Zimbabwe is something we should recognize from European and American history. Resentment toward so-called minorities for being successful is something we’ve seen in this country, where Jews, black people and East Indians have been scorned and even punished by those Christian white people who didn’t like how well these interlopers were doing in a world that was not theirs.

While I do not defend how the land came to most of the whites in Zimbabwe who are farming it, I don’t understand why our media is not making a bigger deal about the way white farmers are being murdered and brutalized, with no interference from Mugabe. If it were the other way around, with African whites doing in African blacks, we would have to read endless sanctimonious editorials in our papers, and observe the outrage of television anchors almost overcome by shock, anger and pity.

This barbarism amounts to tribalism put into politics, which is understandable because Zimbabwe is an African country, in which the Shonas are the tribe in power. And tribalism that demeans others is the father of racism. It took a while for the worst effects of tribalism to hit the white Africans of Zimbabwe, but it was alive and well when there was no disparity in skin tones.

For a time Mugabe took the kid-gloves route with his white people, and got praise for not allowing post-colonial bitterness to ruin Zimbabwe the way Idi Amin destroyed the economy of Uganda by kicking out the mercantile Asians. What can you say about that decision? Africa for Africans, I presume.

But other black Zimbabweans were not always happy with him. More than a decade ago in Kenya I listened to a black man from Zimbabwe talk with scalding acrimony about how the Nbedeles, the descendents of Zulus, had done the hardest fighting in the war for independence from colonialism. The Nbedele were the ones who stood in the line of fire and steel with such determination, fury and courage that Smith’s boys finally had to let the black Africans create their own nation.

But the Shonas were the largest tribe, and they had not dealt fairly with the Nbedeles, this man complained. The Shonas favor each other. And guess what? Mugabe is a Shona.

What may be most disturbing is that Mugabe is intent on having his way even though he could not get his land-reform measure put into law. He is now allowing the brute call of the wild to determine who gets it in the neck and who doesn’t. That is the crime we should all be howling against. If there has been some sort of historical injustice, but a legal system has been put into place, deal with it through that legal system.

If you are wont to do things at home the way Stalin was always willing to and as Richard Nixon did on a bloodless but equally contemptible level, those of us who write should never consider giving you a free ride. No matter your color, no matter the inarguable and well-documented oppression that was once the lot of your group. No group should forever be considered innocent. Especially if it assumes that one other group is forever guilty.

Recently I found myself on a panel with an educated and pleasant black female scholar, who impressed me as thoughtful until she began whining about the media. A preponderance of images of young black men in handcuffs, walking out of courtrooms or being lowered into squad cars, she said, was responsible for creating a widespread picture of black males as monsters and criminals. She even had sociological studies to cite to back up her claims.

Having closely observed the media for more than 40 years, I consider that absolute hogwash. Since 1960 and the Kennedy years of white upon white upon white, we have made amazing progress in integrating American images on television programs and in commercials. There are now all types of black people depicted on TV shows and in film and in magazines. If we begin with the world of commercials, which outnumber all shows because there are more products for sale than there are television programs, one does not get the impression that the marketing world is interested in projecting negative images of black people, or any other people.

Black people are shown at every level of society short of abject poverty, from the blue-collar world all the way up to corporate meetings where, male and female, they stand on par with whomever surrounds them. In commercials advertising children’s products, one sees a cross section of American kids now — white, Asian, black, Hispanic. These children are shown with their parents, usually in what would be called middle-class surroundings. There are images of senior citizens, or multi-generational families, white, black, brown and yellow.

Afro-Americans even advertise deodorant these days, as well as sanitary napkins, bras and just about anything else you can imagine. This kind of product pitch is more revolutionary than you might think. Thirty-five years ago, an inside civil-rights movement joke was that America would have almost totally recovered from racism when black people were used in hygiene ads, since racist stereotypes clustered around the notion that Negroes were dirty and smelled bad.

That black women in particular now advertise the gamut of female products, from lingerie to tablets for menstrual relief, means that they are no longer seen as the giggling subhuman accompanist needed to underline the sensitive femininity of the white woman. Now the Negro female is seen as just another woman, not just a comical servant or she-creature whose womb is so hot she can barely walk down the street with it covered by her clothes for fear of collapsing from the erotic combustion.

The same is true of the black man, who is now depicted as just another guy who might be trying to get his mail somewhere fast, who might be in a board meeting, who could be a supervisor in an auto plant, who might be driving a FedEx truck, who is just as interested in a cold beer as anybody else, who has to deal with his wife, his children and his parents and in-laws, who has the bucks to buy an expensive car, who might be found camping, or behind the computer choosing mutual funds. In other words, in the world of commercial images, the Negro man is seen as another member of a society that constantly boasts through advertising of just how easily you can live the good life if you have the appropriate bucks.

This is equally true of dramatic television and of comedy shows. If one can figure out how the black cast members of the very popular “ER” fit into concertedly negative images of black men or women, I would like to know. This has been true of dramatic television for more than a decade now, if not longer, good examples being “Law and Order,” “Homicide” and “L.A. Law.”

When it comes to comedy, well, comedy is usually about buffoonery in an American context, since wit and humor wrapped in sophistication are not thought to play from coast to coast as well as do dumb jokes and heavy-handed slapstick. Ergo, UPN, or, as Spike Lee calls it, “You People’s Network.”

Let us now go to the world of television news, which is supposed to be one of the greatest offenders when it comes to concerted efforts to depict black people in a negative light. But in most cities you will see black people working on the news staff, either as anchors or reporting on a wide array of stories, from local to national politics, the stock market to the weather, the world of entertainment to the world of health. You will also see many black people in high positions of authority in local and national government either giving interviews or holding press conferences.

Yes, you will see some young Negro guys with their pants falling off, their caps turned backward, their hands cuffed behind them and their heads getting pushed down as they are put into the back seats of police cars. From what I can tell, given the amount of crime black people have to suffer — 50 percent of the murders, for instance — the coverage doesn’t seem disproportionate.

And none of the people who are so disturbed by these negative images of young black people complain about them in the venue where they are most common: not in television news, but in black pop music videos. Andy Razaf, the great lyricist and partner of Fats Waller, could be talking about MTV, VH1, BET and the lowest of rap when he wrote in 1939, “The Negro race offers a gold mine of humorous, dramatic, and romantic material, having its share of heroes, adventurers, pioneers, martyrs, scientists, inventors, scholars, athletes, and artists in American and world history. Yet writers and producers continue to portray us as a race of clowns, flunkies, cowards, and degenerates.”

What better way to describe the rap world’s monkey-moving, gold-chain wearing, illiteracy-spouting, penis-pulling, sullen, combative buffoons and their promoters of freelance prostitution, like Lil’ Kim?

But the anti-negative-image lobby invariably punks out when it comes to addressing its gangster brothers and sisters, who are supposed to be “keepin’ it real.” To me, however, the images in the mainstream media are more real than the misogynistic nihilism and hardcore whorishness of rap video.

The reason TV news producers get blamed for projecting negative black images when rap producers are never blamed for their part in this mess is that old double standard formed by cowardice. It’s easy to blame the white folks all the time, since their sins are well-documented, past and present. But to stand up to the enemy within the group takes a little bit of courage, something we rarely see out here.