Page 6-Sunday, February 11, 1979- The Michigan Daily
The Michigan Daily--Sunday, Februc
blacks
7 Ct'
(Continued from PageS)
try to integrate the black tables, they
are greeted with cold stares and silen-
ce. One white student recalls how he
wanted to assert his "liberalism" by
joining a black friend at the all-black
table. Within a few minutes, the white
student said, one of the blacks asked
icily "What's he doing here?" But one
black student defended the lunchroom
was soon both hurt and saddened by
some of the overtly racist commen-
ts-uttered, I think, out of
jealousy-from some of my supposedly
"liberal" white colleagues at the Daily.
One white female who I once con-
sidered a good friend made a comment
that cut particularly deeply. "I guess
they had hired enough women this
year," she said. "Maybe I should have
be black, everyone assumes they are
"going out." A white female friend of
my own once told me how some of our
white friends warned her behind my
back "about sleeping with a black
guy." She said she tried to explain that
we were jdst friends, but they wouldn't,
believe her. The head of one all white
fraternity, when asked by a white
colleague of mine why that frat had .no
table separation: "We're not going to
talk about the same things," he said.
The situation on campus here is one
of racial segregation, even tension bet-
ween blacks and whites. While many
black-white relationships do exist,
black clubs and cliques chastise mem-
bers who associate too closely with
whites and most white fraternities and,
sororities remain "lily white." There is
one black reporter on the staff of the
Daily, and Eclipse Jazz, dealing with
many black jazz artists, remains an all-
white organization. Five out of seven-
teen members of the Literary College
Student government are black and two
of thirty-five Michigan Student Assem-'
bly members are black. '
In trying to integrate organizations
like the Daily and Eclipse, many blacks
say they are unable-and unwilling-to
fight the problem of "cliques" that
develop. Also, there is the subtle
racism. Being "the only black" in a
white club or organization usually
means being the butt of what whites
call "good-natured" teasing. Coming
into the Daily I hear the joke every
spring break about how I must have
been to Florida because of the great
suntan. "You know I'm only kidding
you" is the mandatory tag at the end. In
a dark room, someone will invariably
say "smile so I can see you."
Most such subtle remarks are
honestly made in jest, many times
without even thinking. But for a black
person in an environment already
alien, the constant onslaught of "in-
nocent remarks" makes separatism
the easier alternative. For those blacks
who do not see separatism as
realistic-"there are more white people
in this country than black people
anyway"-then the only other answer
is 6i6tural assimilation.
ACISM ALSO flares in even the
most "liberal" whites when
threatened with more compe-
tition in a shrinking job market. During
the spring of my sophomore year I was
accepted for a summer internship at
the Washington Post, one of the most
prestigious of the internship plums. I
was hoping for congratulations, but I
tried shoe-polish." Another of my so-
called friends here was less reserved:
"You know the only reason you got that
job was because you're black," he said,
totally ignoring any journalistic skill on
my part as a considerable factor.
Perhaps it is because the incident
involved people who I considered my
friends-people who, before, had
pretended race was irrelevant-but for
the first time I realized that the color of
my skin would forever be a factor in
others' opinions of me-no matter
where I went or with whom I went
drinking. For me, there would never be
any such thing as assimilation.
When I was a freshman orientation
student, another black student who
looked like a throwback to the
1960s-complete with full beard and
red, black and green skull cap-ap-
proached me and told me to "watch out
for the racism at this place." I told him
I didn't think it would be too bad.
"When you go to your first football
game," he told me, "count the number
of rebel flags you see." I didn't believe
him then.
Sometimes subtle racist remarks
creep into even' the strongest black-
white friendships. One black student
recalled listening to a blues album with
a white friend, when the friend
remarked without catching his slip-of-
the-tongue that he used to call those
long, drawn-out harmonic blues notes
"nigger tones." Another black remem-
bered watching a football game with
whites, when one of them referred to a
particularly rough defensive play as a
"nigger tackle."
Many black students suggest that
disguised racism will surface when
whites are threatened with the old
bugaboo of'interracial dating. With the
influx of new, middle-class black
college students from integrated high
schools and integrated neighborhoods,
mixing of the races has become more
observable than before. And, likewise,
are old racial hostilities, especially
when the interracial mix involves a
black male and a white female.
Several white female students com-
plained that whenever they have frien-
ds who happen to be malea 0f Appen to
Doily Photo by ANDY FREEBERG
black members, replied in all
seriousness: "W ell, who would he dan-
ce with at parties?"
But blacks here as elsewhere are as
hostile as whites over meeting and
mixing of the races. One black student
with a white girlfriend complained,
"Everytime I walk into the cafeteria
with Sue they (the blacks) start giving
me the stare. It's your own people who
are always trying to start some shit."
But black students are defensive, and
consider a black who dates whites as
having accepted the white system of
values, including the beauty aesthetic.
Blacks feel in danger of seeing their
culture assimilated and eliminated.
"Black students today are forgetting
who they are and where they came
from," Richard Garland says.
"They may be a little better off, but go
back a couple of generations, we're not
that far removed from slavery."
Black females are especially defen-
sive. "We got something to offer, too,"
said one black female student. "Give us
a chance." The black females inter-
viewed complained primarily that as
more of their ranks are attaining
college degrees, the pool of available
black males with equal education gets
smaller and smaller. They see white
females as invading the already scarce
supply of intelligent, middle-class black
males.
Many blacks here feel that racism is
more a problem in the classroom than
in social interaction. Professors, they
say, do not take into consideration the
special needs of black students, and the
large University setting is not oppor-
tune for one-on-one instruction.
"I'm sick of these professors with
their corporate style of teaching," one
disgruntled black senior declared.
"We're the ones who need a little extra
help because we didn't go to the high
schools in (the suburbs)." Another
black student added, "We haven't had
quite the same education they've had."
Sometimes, classroom racism
comes in the form of biased lectures,
black students say. One student recalls
a lecture in which the professor ex-
plained how marijuana was brought in-
to this country by- "tbe indigent
Negroes." The student says that when
he challenged the professor's theories,
he was put down for interrupting. Other
blacks say the black students are proc-
tored more closely during exams than
white students, and are more quickly
accused of cheating.
One black student in the pharmacy
school, said that college was par-
ticularly biased: "'While we are being
proctored so closely, the white students
are overtly cheating." Even a white
student in that school agreed: "There
were black students caught cheating.
There were white kids cheating too,
but they were just more discreet. That
started a lot of racial shit. There are
equally as many white kids doing it."
The voluntary separatism that exists
here has created a climate of mistrust
on the part of both blacks and whites.
And in this, the age of limits, the com-
petition among students and
organizations for larger and larger
slices of the shrinking financial pie,
that separatism is leading to hostility,
But if separatism is the
problem-and if white racism is the
cause of separatism-then the roots of
the crisis lie deeper than any isolated
classroom incident or segregated lun-
chroom table.
"Discrimination still does exist," one
black student said in terse summation
of the problem. Another black student
was less euphemistic: "They're kicking
our ass," he said. "I don't know how
much longer we can take this shit."
How much longer blacks here on
campus can take racism and the en-
suing alienation and loneliness that
accompanies black skin depends for the
most part on the Attitude of whites. But
racism is one problem that has existed
as long as civilization. It is unlikely that
attitudes nurtured through the ages can
be changed by a generation only four
times removed from slavery.
For now at least, the task of coping
with racism rests with the people being
discriminated against. History has
shown that unity and solidarity are the
only way any oppressed people have
been able to survive, from the Jews in
Hitler's Germany to South African
blacks today. But attitudes here on
campus are indicative of what is hap-
pening to blacks in general-that is,
there is widespread disunity.
As Garland says, the black culture is
still there-it can never be eliminated.
It is there in black music, in food, in the
way blacks dress and talk. That culture
is living and thriving in the cities and
" the ghettos across the country. No mat-
ter how able blacks are to adjust to the
white stystem of values, the color of
black skin precludes total acceptance.
With the influx of blacks who have
lost their identity, it would be easy to
conclude that the "black movement" is
dead on this campus as across the coun-
try. But to conclude that would be to
ignore the entire focus of Black History
Month, the Black United Front, and the
hundreds of blacks here who are still
working-quietly-for the same goals
they protested for five years ago.
The black community now is in.what
might well be called the regroupiong
stage. They are now trying to close
ranks, and to find new members to fill
the leadership void created by the
graduation of the leaders of BAM I.
This is the time for consciousness-
raising among blacks, time for them to
sit back and plot a strategy for the
future.
Only this time, the obstacles are
greater-greater, even, than in 1970.
Then there was a prevalent mood on
campus that blacks were being treated
unequally, so there was a sentiment for
-Se 4LACKS, Page 8
THE STAND
By Stephen King
Doubleday and Co., $12.95,
823 pp.
THE FIRST place you are likely to
encounter a Stephen King novel is
in some grocery store checkout coun-
ter, or perhaps in an airport bookstore
as you look for a diversion for the flight
home. And you'll find Carrie or The
Shining or 'Salem's Lot half-hidden
among the latest from Xaviera, Love's
Passionate Madness, and Forty Ways
To Improve Your Sex Life, because
horror novels are classified in the same
cheap-thrills category-books good
By Donna Debrodt
swerve ana crash, that a plague beyond
the healing powers of modern medicine
has destroyed all, but a remnant of
humanity, and that the survivors are
now haunted by an Antichrist called the
Walking Dude.
And if you have been foolish enough
to pick up one of King's novels with the
idea of reading yourself to sleep, forget
it. If you are actually able to put the
book down, you'll find your familiar
4
'King reaches far
down into the read-
er, past the rational,
eduction and eons
of constant civiliz-
ing, and exploits
that same fear which
caused the first man
to cower in his cave.'
characterization and language. It is the
most terrifying of King's novels
because evil is nonspecific; there are
no special circumstances giving rise to
the horror, and it seems not only real
but imminently possible.
In The Shining, currently being made
into a film by Stanley Kubrick, King
returns to a more prosaic form of
human weakness and its vitalizaing ef-
fect upon evil. Evil comes alive at a
haunted resort hotel because of a small
boy's psychic power; it becomes
menacing because of a father's vanity,
his sense of failure, and his addiction to
gin.
Perhaps. because he has abandoned
his successful format, King's newest
novel, The Stand, is not quite as
horrifying as the others. In a secret
government installation, something has
gone dreadfully wrong: a virus with
total mortality and 99 per cent com-
municability contaminates the center,
and one frightened man escapes,
spreading the black death which comes
to be called the superflu. A few people
are immune, and soon they are left
alone in silent cities filled with corpses.
And the survivors begin to have
dreams, of an old black woman in
Nebraska who represents God, and of a
dark man with no face called the
Walking Dude.
The survivors come together slowly,
drawn by the dreams, and, according to
their orientations, go either toward
Mother Abagail and the Free Zone, or
to Las Vegas and the Black Man-Ran-
dall Flagg. It becomes apparent that a
great confrontation between the
remaining forces of good and evil is at
hand.
THE PROBLI~
that the evil
honestly terrifyir
that of mankind,
is the Walking I
weak men that h
him. And the dar
to a crisis too qui
superb sense of i
and good starts 1
quickly.
But while Kin
long novel, there
brilliance. There
terrifying scenes
survivors must v
Tunnel, now alr
pses and wrecke
pounding thunder
"It was much
he had imagined
the- opening be
white light ahem
yet more cars, jai
bumper (it mw
dying in here
claustrophobia v
banana fingers
head and began
pies, it must hav
must have been
greenish-white ti
upward-curving
They would le
and then they wo
... to come alive
car doors clicki
softly chunking
shuffling footste
broke on his be
stupid, he told h
that's what this
do is stay on the
See KI:
Stephen Kcing's prophetic ho.
I
only for a quickie voyeur session, or a
fast cold run up the spinal column.
Then again, if you are at all nervous
about flying, a King novel might be the
best choice for the flight. For compared
to the bone-freezing terror lurking in
these pages, nose-diving through a mile
of sky to a crash-landing below seems
tame indeed.
That is King's genius. The man knows
evil, intuitively grasps its unexpected
manifestations, and forces his reader to
become only too well-acquainted with
it. He knows the core of superstitution
in all of us, that primitive streak passed
along from Neanderthal days when our
ancestors, heard thunder and called it
God. And King reaches far down into
the reader, past the rational education
and eons of constant civilizing, and ex-
ploits that same fear which caused the
first man to cower in his cave.
His novels start calmly and innocen-
tly. Characters are introduced one by
one, in vignettes which in amazingly
few words create men and women so
genuine that you are sure you know
them, or have known them. His charac-
ters are so believable, so normal, that
when the horror softly begins-a child
suddenly dies, a long-abandoned wasps'
nest inexplicably spews living swarms
into a bedroom-you explain these
things away even as the characters do.
And thus you believe that vampires
stalk a small Maine town, that a hotel is
coming alive with ghosts who have long
partied in the ballroom, that a girl with
mental power alone can cause a car to
Donna Debrodt is a regular con-
tributor to the Sunday Magazine.
S
i
i
a.
a!
d
room suddenly alive with strange
noises. And you get up to pull the cur-
tains, suddenly sure there is a dark face
grinning through the glass. Something
creaks, and you start. And sooner or
later you roll over and pick up the book
again. You know good will win over
evil, or you think you know it, but you
much reach the end in order to make
absolutely sure.
STEPHEN KING knows that the
most frightening thing of all is
evil grinning with hideous good cheer.
And he knows the potential for evil that,
through weakness or temptation, lies
dormant in all of us. In his first novel,
Carrie, upon which the Brain De Palma
film was based, King uses his pervasive
knowledge of evil to shame anyone who
even knew the cruel and cliquish world
of high school. The evil in Carrie is a
social kind; it is the evil inherent in
Carrie's fellow students that catalyses
her telekinetic powers, and in the end
breeds the apocalyptic destruction of a
small New England town. There is
terror, but there is also an awful pity.
And the evil of the high school students
is all the more real for the shame in
remembering when this evil was all too
present in ourselves.
In King's second and best novel,
'Salem's Lot, the human weakness in-
volved is stubborn adherence to logic
even as the world fills with an evil tran-
scending rational belief. For to
recognize and believe in the vampire's
evil is to reach depths of terror bor-
dering on insanity. Instead, the charac-
ters merely succumb.
'Salem's Lot is a masterpiece of Stephen K ing