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The common denominator of these views of race is that each still sees black people as a “problem people,” in the words of Dorothy I. Height, president of the National Council of Negro Women, rather than as fellow American citizens with problems. Her words echo the poignant “unasked question” of W.B.B. Du Bois, who, in The Souls of Black Fold (1903):
They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then instead of saying directly. How does it feel to be a problem? They say, I know an excellent colored man in my town… Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the real question, how does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.
Nearly a century later, we confine discussions about race in America to the “problems” black people pose for whites rather than considering what this way of viewing black people reveals about us as a nation.
The paralyzing framework encourages liberals to relieve their guilty consciences by supporting public funds directed at “the problem”; but at the same time, reluctant to exercise principled criticism of black people, liberals deny them the freedom to err. Similarly, conservatives blame the “problems” on black people themselves-and thereby render black social misery invisible or unworthy of public attention.
Hence, for liberals, black people are to be “included” and “integrated” into “our” society and culture, while for conservatives there are to be “well behaved” and “worthy of acceptance” by “our” way of life. Both fail to see that the presence and predicaments of black people are neither additions to nor defections from American life, but rather constitute elements of that life.
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