I would like to add someone to our group here. Professor Paul Weiss, the Sterling Professor of Philosophy at Yale. Were you able to listen to the show backstage? I heard a good deal of it, but then I was behind the last one day.
Yes. So I heard only some of it. Did you hear anything that you disagreed with?
I disagreed with a great deal of it, and of course the good deal I agree with. But I think he's overlooking one very important matter, I think. Each one of us, I think, is terribly alone. He lives his own individual life.
He has all kinds of obstacles in the way of religion or color or size. or shape or lack of ability and the problem is to become a man. But what I was discussing was not that problem really, I was discussing the difficulties, the obstacles, the very real danger of death thrown up by the society when a Negro, when a black man attempts to become a man.
All this emphasis upon black man and white does emphasize something which is here. but it emphasizes or perhaps exaggerates it, and therefore makes us put people together in groups which they ought not to be in. I have more in common with a black scholar than I have with a white man who's against scholarship.
And you have more in common with a white author than you have with someone who's against all literature. So why must we always concentrate on color or religion or this? There are other ways of connecting men. I'll tell you this.
When I left this country in 1948, I left this country for one reason only, one reason. I didn't care where I went. I might have gone to Hong Kong, I might have gone to Timbuktu, I ended up in Paris, on the streets of Paris, with $40 in my pocket on the theory that nothing worse could happen to me there than had already happened to me here.
You talk about making it as a writer by yourself, you had to be able then to turn up all the intent of with which you live because once you turn your back on this society you may die. You may die. And it's very hard to sit as a typewriter and concentrate on that if you're afraid of the world around you. The years I lived in Paris did one thing for me. They released me from that particular social terror, which was not the paranoia of my own mind, but a real social danger visible in the face of every cop, every boss, everybody.
I don't know what most white people in this country feel, but I can only include what they feel from the state of their institutions. I don't know if white Christians hate Negroes or not, but I know that we have a Christian church which is white and a Christian church which is black. I know, as Malcolm X once put it, that the most segregated hour in American life is high noon on Sunday.
That's a great deal for me about a Christian nation. It means that I can't afford to trust most white Christians and certainly cannot trust the Christian church. I don't know whether the labor unions and their bosses really hate me.
That doesn't matter, but I know I'm not in their unions. I don't know if the real estate lobby is anything against black people, but I know the real estate lobbies keep me in the ghetto. I don't know if the Board of Education hates black people, but I know the textbooks I give my children to read and the schools that we have to go to.
Now, this is the evidence. You want me to make an act of faith, risking myself, my wife, my woman, my sister, my children, on some... idealism which you assuredly exists in America which I have never seen