A Dream Deferred, the Second Betrayal of Black Freedom in America. - book review

Public Interest, Spring, 1999 by Alvin Kernan

In literary tragedy, the curse on the land continues until some hitherto hidden truth becomes clear enough to be understood and acknowledged. In Oedipus, the curse on Thebes is broken only when Oedipus tears out his eyes, when he finally understands that he is the killer of the king, his father and the husband of his mother. The play teaches that human rationality is blind to its own dark side and ignores its own weakness. In Moby Dick, to come closer to home, the truth is out only when the power of nature, the moral emptiness of the universe, appears in the white whale and destroys the Pequod and the Yankee drive of Captain Ahab to control nature and to penetrate the transcendental.

If we apply the template of literary tragedy to racism in America - which was the way we once used our Great Books - we can only wonder what kind of truth might be needed to bring it to an end at last. The Civil War, the lynch mobs of the Ku Klux Klan, the assassination of Martin Luther King, the revelation of Jefferson's guilt - all these and so many other events of pain and suffering would seem to be catastrophic enough to force the truth into the open at last and to wear out the curse. But, as in Aeschylus's Oresteia, where in a search for justice each revenge becomes only a new crime requiring new punishment, so with American racism each attempt to end it seems only to become a new instance of it.

What, we ask then, can possibly be the truth that will end our curse? Steele's profound answer is that it would be a full recognition that power underlies all of America's race relations, and that even attempts to lift the curse by acting morally and generously, as in affirmative action, are themselves only new ways of asserting black inferiority and thereby maintaining white authority. When will we know it? Only when white America can at last recognize its own aggressive pride, and when suffering causes blacks to assert their equality by taking full responsibility for their problems.

* Harper Collins Publishers. 185 pp. $24.00.

ALVIN KERNAN is Avalon Professor of Humanities, Emeritus, at Princeton University. His In Plato's Cave will be published by the Yale Universtiy Press this spring.