get sky high in a single swoop, and sit out on the balcony, hidden in darkness, and watch the thronged street below as if ensconced in a private box at Shakespeare’s Globe in seventeenth-century London.
But then a second abyss opened between me and Zack. It was racial, and therefore political, and it surprised me because, until we found ourselves in Africa together, I had believed that Zack and I shared at least the same racial politics. We celebrated the same heroes and models—those white, nineteenth-century radical abolitionists who were devoted to the ideas of absolute racial justice and equality—and loved saying so to each other. We had both committed our lives up to then to extending the blessings and bounty of absolute racial justice and equality to all the dark-skinned peoples of the world. We would smash the Republic, if need be, or die in the effort to liberate our colonized black, brown, red, and yellow brothers and sisters both within and beyond the United States of America. That’s how we talked then. Back in New Bedford, night after night, just as we had in college, Zack and I had analyzed the symbiotic relationship between racism and capitalism, the evolution from colonialism to imperialism, critiquing ourselves and each other in the attempt to expunge our residual racist attitudes, depriving ourselves of our racial privileges wherever we saw them lurking, and becoming in the process what we called “white-race traitors.” Together, we ground our racial consciousness to a fine powder.
Our ambition, however, our regularly stated intention, as I was slowly, reluctantly learning, was little more than a well-intended fantasy. In Africa the racial mythologies we’d grown up with were turned on their heads. A minority at home was a majority here; the majority was black, and the minority minuscule in number and white. And like many of the African-Americans who’d traveled to Africa in search of their roots, Zack believed that he’d come to a race-blind continent, and since surely he wasn’t a colonial, nor, given his radical politics, was he an imperialist, he could be race blind, too.
It seemed to me, however, that at bottom nothing had changed. Despite the beauty and energy of Accra, when I looked beyond its exoticism to the day-to-day reality of people’s lives, I saw that they were made poor and weak so that I could be rich and powerful; they watched their babies shrivel in their arms so that my children, should I ever want to bear them, could be inoculated against the plagues and run in the sun and someday go to Harvard. I could no more alter my relationship with the Africans who surrounded me in Ghana than I’d been able in the United States to alter my relationship with the Americans whose African ancestors had been enslaved and shipped to the New World. In the United States I’d been stuck with being white; in Africa I was stuck with being American.
And while this was not a problem for Zack, for me there was no morally acceptable response to it, other than guilt. Which, to be honest, was not a problem for me, even though it alienated me even farther from Zack. Over the years, I had learned to live with guilt and had even come to embrace it, for I was the strictly engineered product of an old New England puritan line, starting in the seventeenth century and ending with my parents. With my father in particular, who believed in his bones that one’s consciousness of guilt led straight to good works and awareness of God. One’s awareness of guilt was a barometer of one’s virtue. Absence of that awareness led straight to sinful self-indulgence and damnation. And unlike feelings of mere regret or remorse, which mainly work to separate people from one another, feelings of guilt, thanks to my father’s teachings, had always felt warmly humanizing to me. Even when I was a child, it was guilt that had let me join the species. And there in Africa, for the first time in years, those feelings emerged
But then a second abyss opened between me and Zack. It was racial, and therefore political, and it surprised me because, until we found ourselves in Africa together, I had believed that Zack and I shared at least the same racial politics. We celebrated the same heroes and models—those white, nineteenth-century radical abolitionists who were devoted to the ideas of absolute racial justice and equality—and loved saying so to each other. We had both committed our lives up to then to extending the blessings and bounty of absolute racial justice and equality to all the dark-skinned peoples of the world. We would smash the Republic, if need be, or die in the effort to liberate our colonized black, brown, red, and yellow brothers and sisters both within and beyond the United States of America. That’s how we talked then. Back in New Bedford, night after night, just as we had in college, Zack and I had analyzed the symbiotic relationship between racism and capitalism, the evolution from colonialism to imperialism, critiquing ourselves and each other in the attempt to expunge our residual racist attitudes, depriving ourselves of our racial privileges wherever we saw them lurking, and becoming in the process what we called “white-race traitors.” Together, we ground our racial consciousness to a fine powder.
Our ambition, however, our regularly stated intention, as I was slowly, reluctantly learning, was little more than a well-intended fantasy. In Africa the racial mythologies we’d grown up with were turned on their heads. A minority at home was a majority here; the majority was black, and the minority minuscule in number and white. And like many of the African-Americans who’d traveled to Africa in search of their roots, Zack believed that he’d come to a race-blind continent, and since surely he wasn’t a colonial, nor, given his radical politics, was he an imperialist, he could be race blind, too.
It seemed to me, however, that at bottom nothing had changed. Despite the beauty and energy of Accra, when I looked beyond its exoticism to the day-to-day reality of people’s lives, I saw that they were made poor and weak so that I could be rich and powerful; they watched their babies shrivel in their arms so that my children, should I ever want to bear them, could be inoculated against the plagues and run in the sun and someday go to Harvard. I could no more alter my relationship with the Africans who surrounded me in Ghana than I’d been able in the United States to alter my relationship with the Americans whose African ancestors had been enslaved and shipped to the New World. In the United States I’d been stuck with being white; in Africa I was stuck with being American.
And while this was not a problem for Zack, for me there was no morally acceptable response to it, other than guilt. Which, to be honest, was not a problem for me, even though it alienated me even farther from Zack. Over the years, I had learned to live with guilt and had even come to embrace it, for I was the strictly engineered product of an old New England puritan line, starting in the seventeenth century and ending with my parents. With my father in particular, who believed in his bones that one’s consciousness of guilt led straight to good works and awareness of God. One’s awareness of guilt was a barometer of one’s virtue. Absence of that awareness led straight to sinful self-indulgence and damnation. And unlike feelings of mere regret or remorse, which mainly work to separate people from one another, feelings of guilt, thanks to my father’s teachings, had always felt warmly humanizing to me. Even when I was a child, it was guilt that had let me join the species. And there in Africa, for the first time in years, those feelings emerged
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