Days of Grace

by Arthur Ashe

  Sorting out the various aspects of this matter is difficult, but it can be a matter of life and death for me. I have faith in Dr. Fauci and Dr. Sullivan. I admire and respect Dr. Justice. I liked that clean, earnest young man from the Nation of Islam and I was moved by his concern for me. I do not believe that AIDS is the result of a conspiracy by powerful whites against black people and other people of color and homosexuals. And I do not take Kemron. I do not take it for the same reason I have not tried a half-dozen other suggested treatments. I have simply decided that I will try drugs that have proven their efficacy by consensus, after scientific studies carried out by reputable authorities. In this matter, as in others, I cannot allow myself to be swayed by arguments based on theories of racial conspiracy and racial genocide.

  AS A CELEBRITY, I encounter few examples of overt racism directed specifically at me. Perhaps I encounter more than I acknowledge, because I never want to dignify ignorant or malicious people by assuming they are fully aware of what they do. I am well known because of my years as a tennis player and my exposure on television as a commentator, and few people try to humiliate a celebrity. (Rarely, of course, I come across someone who takes a special pleasure in doing precisely that.)

  I remember vividly, however, growing up under segregation. I remember the mandatory all-black schools, and the white line behind which I had to ride on buses. I remember the kindly white bus driver who politely but firmly made me move to the back of the bus after I had sunk blissfully into the most cherished seat for a young boy: down front, right across from the driver. I remember the kindly white tennis official, Sam Woods, who would not allow me to play in municipal tournaments in Richmond, and all the other not-so-kind officials who barred my way so that I finally played in only one official tennis tournament while I was a junior in Virginia. I remember that the University of Virginia, the state school founded by Thomas Jefferson, was forbidden to me because of the color of my skin.

  In St. Louis, where I lived during my senior year in high school, I played freely with a cadre of brilliant white players, all about my age. But there were private clubs where they were welcome but I was not, and one tennis court from which I was literally and ignominiously chased. I also sensed the limits of hospitality and friendship between me and most of the white boys I played with. Sipping a cold Coca-Cola after practice was fine, and an occasional visit to the home of one or another; beyond that point, a wall rose between us, to keep us apart. In Los Angeles, where I attended UCLA, the barrier against interracial dating fell, but an exclusive club called Balboa Bay still barred me from its grounds; and the mother of the first white girl I dared to date recoiled in horror when she saw me on television and discovered that I was black, a detail that her daughter had failed to mention in singing my praises.

  After I became better known following my selection for the Davis Cup team and my entry into the top ten of American players, both in 1963, I faced racial discrimination less and less. By this time, too, I was on my way to becoming a master at the game that all African Americans must learn if they wish to preserve their sanity: how to live with reasonable freedom and dignity and yet also avoid insult, disappointment, and conflict rooted in racism. I learned not so much to turn the other cheek as to present, wherever possible, no cheek at all. I learned to give no opportunity for a bigot to pounce on and exploit. I learned in moments of humiliation to walk away with what was left of my dignity, rather than lose it all in an explosion of rage. I learned to raise my eyes to the high moral ground, and to stake my future on it. I revered Martin Luther King, Jr., because, on the question of race, no African American commanded that ground as splendidly as he did, with surpassing eloquence and (despite his human failings, which disturbed me) consistency of argument.

  Although I ceased to experience racial discrimination on a daily basis, race remained a burden for me, the most oppressive burden of my life. In fact, race is a double burden. Coping with racism is onerous; but so is coping with the myriad effects of that racism on blacks in general, the ways in which the harsh conditions under which most of us live have led to patterns of behavior that are themselves destructive. And yet I am no tragic mulatto, caught poignantly or forlornly between the races, as are many Coloreds in South Africa or mulattos in the Caribbean. Any person, black or white, who refuses to surrender himself or herself to racism is bound to know that feeling intimately. One is on the margin or between two groups if one chooses to be rational rather than emotional, judicious rather than passionate, inclusive rather than sectarian. In this racial divide, I often find myself critical of both whites and blacks. In the end, I am not for black or white, nor even for the United States of America, but for the whole of humanity. I can’t define myself finally as an African American, or an American. My humanity comes first. I have felt that way since I have known myself, and I hope to die that way.

  As for the very existence of African Americans in the United States, I truly believe that many people wish that we would go away, vanish, cease to exist; doubtless even many blacks have that feeling, and wish that they could lose their color in a tide of whiteness. On the ladder of minorities in our nation, we blacks are at the bottom. Jewish Americans are first among minorities (Jews are not a minority according to the Department of Labor, but by virtue of their numbers); then Asian Americans; then Hispanic Americans; then blacks. This was always the case; it will probably always be the case. I remember how in the segregated South poor whites could be kept in check by rich whites simply by reminding them that they were not blacks, that even in their poverty they were higher in the pecking order than black Harvard professors or black millionaires.

  The need for us to be at the bottom seems integral to the identity of the nation. At every turn, our character and competence are questioned. Usually, the challenge is deviously expressed. However, certain foreigners, such as the Japanese, have openly questioned our abilities and our integrity. In sport, our capacity to lead and manage teams is doubted, as by the former broadcaster Jimmy “the Greek” Snyder and the baseball executive Al Campanis. People in positions of power and influence, who are in charge of making important decisions, do not believe we can do the job; sometimes it hardly matters what the job is. Our reputations, our abilities are constantly being impugned.

  Because I am often the only black, or one of very few blacks, in certain organizations and social settings, I am also alert to the phenomenon that I and others call racial “tipping.” In many white circles, blacks are acceptable as an element only if they comprise a certain small percentage of the people involved. Beyond that number, the presence of blacks threatens whites, the organization or group begins to lose whatever cachet it formerly enjoyed, and a sense of doom taints the atmosphere. Tipping is probably most potent in the area of housing; at a certain point, usually long before any real problems arise, white flight begins. But tipping enters more subtly into a host of other areas. We African Americans are perceived as acceptable in a token amount, toxic beyond it. This is a devastating commentary on the majority’s perception of our nature.

  In the past, some blacks undoubtedly liked being the only African American admitted into certain circles, in that it heightened their sense of accomplishment and prestige. I take no satisfaction in such exclusivity. I take no pride in the fact that twenty-five years after winning the U.S. Open, I am still the only black American man to have won a Grand Slam event. (However, I resent the suggestion I have heard that I should have done more to encourage younger black players; I think I have done much, and conscientiously.) I take no pride in being the first and only black member of a certain country club to which I belong. Wherever I go, I want to see other blacks present, whether on the tennis court, in the board room, or in the most prestigious clubhouse.

  Nevertheless, in the last ten years or so, what has increasingly dominated my thinking about race in the United States is not what whites think about blacks and do to us, but what we blacks think about and do to ourselves. Perhaps this has always been my concern,
but I don’t think so. In most ways, we have never had as much power as we have commanded in the last twenty years. Under segregation, we African Americans lacked, to a great extent, the capacity to act in any substantial way to affect our future, to control not only our destiny but, in a way, our daily lives. Hemmed in by segregation, physically threatened by police and the Ku Klux Klan (which were sometimes the same, no doubt), we were a dependent, intimidated people. Apart from civil insurrections, we seemed to be beneath the notice of most whites. Overt racism erected walls about our community that few of us could scale or were allowed to scale. We developed certain solid institutions in response to segregation, notably the black church and our black schools and colleges; but as a community we were more acted upon than acting. Our middle class conducted its life with a constant awareness of the pressure of the white world. This awareness gave a quality of mimicry to black life but also stimulated the community to serve itself.

  The cornerstone of identity in the African American world was the knowledge that we as a people had been historically wronged by the larger culture that dominated us. We believed that we were morally superior to that culture because it was only a misfortune to be a slave but a shame and a sin to be an owner of slaves. Here and there in the Bible, a verse might seem to support slavery, but the overwhelming weight of Judeo-Christian morality opposed the ownership and exploitation of human beings, whether in slavery or in the neo-slavery of segregation. We were the meek who would one day inherit our share of the earth.

  Now, as we approach the close of the twentieth century, I believe that we have lost much, perhaps most, of that moral high ground. One can argue in legal terms about reparations for slavery or segregation, or about the merits or demerits of affirmative action; but broad, deep moral arguments about racism in America have become harder to make. We African Americans cannot argue easily from a basis of morality because we are now, unlike as short a time as one generation ago, a moral example to far fewer people, even among ourselves. Many of us have abandoned God. I don’t mean to criticize the masses of our hardworking, churchgoing people. I refer especially to younger, talented people, who have had certain opportunities and should be preparing to become our leaders. I remember reading that Martin Luther King, Jr., had said that he thought black Americans might eventually prove to be the agents or vehicles through which America redeems itself as a nation—that is, if America would look into its heart and admit that it had been founded on the forcible theft of land from the Indians and on the exploitation of Indians and Africans, and then redeem itself morally by addressing and solving the problem of race and racism. Such an option for redemption hardly exists any longer.

  Now the moral fabric of African American culture, like that of America as a whole, is sadly compromised. Our churches are not nearly as influential as they once were. Our family life is disintegrating. Our respect for our elders, for the weaker among us, has dwindled. Our educational standards and expectations are low and falling fast. Our ability to generate jobs, always a problem, is even more so. Our crime rate is soaring, both in terms of the number of crimes and in terms of the heinousness of those crimes. In April 1992, the month I made my announcement that I had AIDS, Newsweek documented our crisis. The mortality rate of black children, 17.7 per 1,000 births, is more than twice that of white children. Among Americans with AIDS, blacks number 28.8 percent; 52 percent of afflicted women are African American, as are 53 percent of afflicted children. Nearly half of U.S. murder victims are black. Homicide is the leading cause of death among black males between the ages of fifteen and thirty-four. One in every four black men between twenty and twenty-nine years old is on probation, on parole, or in prison. One-fifth of all black males from fifteen to thirty-four have a criminal record, according to one study. Black children are “three times more likely than whites to live in a single-parent household.” Of all black American children, 43.2 percent live in poverty as defined by the government. Most blacks seem to agree that the quality of our lives is worse now than ten years ago. It is almost certainly worse than in the 1960s.

  What happened to black America since 1954? That was the year when the black community and the nation were electrified by the news that segregated education was to end, that the U.S. Supreme Court had declared it unconstitutional in the decision Brown v. Board of Education. First, I think it is accurate to say, we passed through a period of elation and optimism. I myself remember the day when word swept through our grammar school that we children would thereafter be going to school with whites; we would have all the rights and opportunities that whites had. The truth was somewhat different. In the 1960s and early 1970s, a small but important group of blacks was able to take advantage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This group proceeded to move out of the old neighborhoods and leave the poorer, less educated strata to fend for themselves without the leadership and guidance that more fortunate blacks had often provided.

  The national economy started to change. Blacks, who had been dependent on high-paying blue-collar manufacturing jobs, were often made obsolete as workers when the economy became more oriented toward information. Masses of immigrants, ready to work harder for less, entered the U.S. by crossing its borders legally and illegally at every available location. In places like Miami and Los Angeles, immigrants from Cuba and Central America devastated the internal black American economy by securing first the lowest-paid jobs, then moving upward until they had evicted black Americans almost entirely from the workplace. Single-parent families headed by women began to proliferate. The public schools began to deteriorate, as increasing numbers of students entered school without first having been prepared at home to accept the rigors of education. The cost of attending college soared. Crime exploded.

  Behind all these ominous trends is, unquestionably, the cumulative impact of racism on African American culture. The cruel denial of jobs in sector after sector of the economy, the imposition of job ceilings that keep blacks down among the lowest levels of the company structure, the exclusion of blacks from the social settings that stimulate leadership in a variety of areas—these unquestionably account for most of the decline of the African American community. The decline is real. However, I do not view the decline as irreversible. We are no more prone to crime, immorality, and other forms of delinquency than any other social group. But I estimate that it would take at least a generation, perhaps more, before African American culture can regain the moral authority it once possessed. Then we would have, as we still did when I was a child, a sense of the integrity of the family, including mother and father; a sense of the value and power of education; a sense of the deep importance of religion and moral instruction; a sense of pride in ourselves as achieving, thinking human beings; a sense of our place in the community of peoples, regardless of race; a sense of our superiority to those who would deny us our rights because of the color of our skin.

  Something fundamental has changed in African American culture, and for the worse. It hit me hardest when I was sitting at home one recent afternoon, watching CNN in the aftermath of the revolt in Los Angeles. Two members of the most notorious youth gangs, the Crips and the Bloods, were being interviewed about the possibility of an end to their years of bloody strife. On the subject of the police, Crips and Bloods were united. They hated the police. With a bitterness no doubt born of years of insult and injury, they denounced the police as interlopers in the community, outsiders who despised the residents and brutalized them routinely. The alienation of the two men was unmistakable.

  What shocked me finally, however, was not their hatred of the police, which one might expect, but their attitude to the beating of the white truck driver Reginald Denny during the riots. Denny, driving his truck, had found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. With a television camera in a helicopter broadcasting the event, several young black men pulled him from his truck and beat him savagely and without mercy. Although some people had tried to blame Denny for the attack by saying that he
had provoked it by making racial slurs against blacks, Denny’s only crime probably was that his skin was white. Naively, I expected the Crips and the Bloods, despite their hatred of the police, to concede that the beating of Denny was unjustifiable, that it had been wrong. Their response was exactly the opposite. Denny meant nothing to them. His innocence meant nothing to them. The principle of right and wrong meant nothing to them. Society despised them; they would despise society and its ideals.

  Watching the television screen and listening to these two young black men, I felt sick. That’s not us, I thought. That’s just not us. It was as if spirits from another planet had come to earth and invaded black bodies. We were once a people of dignity and morality; we wanted the world to be fair to us, and we tried, on the whole, to be fair to the world. Now I was looking at the new order, which is based squarely on revenge, not justice, with morality discarded. Instead of settling on what is right, or just, or moral, the idea is to get even. You get even, although doing so is almost always a short-term proposition that ultimately leaves you further behind than where you started. Reginald Denny has not only recovered, but is talking humanely and idealistically about forgiveness. As I write, the young men accused of beating him are in custody, awaiting trial, and recalcitrant.

  Not long afterward, I saw the television journalist Ed Bradley questioning a group of youngsters about morality, about the determination of what is right and what is wrong. In my boyhood, right and wrong were clear and unequivocal; but to the boys present, everything was shaded, compromised. Is it right to steal? Sometimes. Often? In practice, yes. Is there a moral aspect to sex? Not really. You get what you can from a woman. Do you have an obligation to a child you father? No; that’s the mother’s problem, not mine. Is it all right to cheat in school? Yes; just don’t get caught. Getting caught is stupid. And so on.