Early, Gerald L. "The End of Race as We Know It." CHRONICLE REVIEW October 10, 2008.

In our bull sessions, some of us would talk about jihad, or righteous war, against the whites. (It was all talk.) Some of us actually became Muslims (very few — we were Christians to the bone, despite our chatter about "the white man's religion") or joined some Eastern religious sect and adopted certain garb and mannerisms. Many of us wore wild Afros, making them wilder with blowout kits, and thought we were revolutionaries of a sort. After all, some of the black upperclassmen among us had seized buildings in protest, and a few even brandished weapons during the sieges. Looking at The New Yorker cover as a middle-aged, black baby boomer, far removed from any of the Orientalism and racial and political romanticism of my youth, reminded me of a certain kind of silliness, but it also, strangely, moved me deeply. The cover told the story of a rite of African-American passage that occurred at a particular time for the generation of blacks who would become the most successful in the history of the group, and the most integrated. The relatively difficult years that my generation endured integrating white institutions — difficult not in any material sense, but in the sense that we were not very well prepared academically or emotionally to cope with our surroundings (we were given more than we knew what to do with, so much that one felt simultaneously intoxicated by the riches and stressed to the breaking point by how alien it all felt) — made us clutch at any sort of feeble identity protection we could muster. We had to "act black" because, after all, that is why we were at the university in the first place: to provide diversity in the only way we knew how. Basically, entrapped in our excessive and youthful self-consciousness, our special sort of juvenile insecurity, we were trying, ironically, to show that we belonged, to protect ourselves from being considered "dumb niggers," or, even worse, "charity cases," the ragtag tail end of the American bourgeois elite. Some succeeded (by graduating). Many didn't. It is a modern story about integration in America — not the bloody civil-rights struggle of gaining access, but rather how people can sometimes be killed by kindness, paddled by paternalism, undone by philanthropy. I think back on it all as a remarkable form of self-hazing. . . . The presidential campaign of Barack Obama has raised the question of what happens to the black American meta-narrative of heroic or noble victimization if he wins. (Presumably nothing happens to it if he loses; the loss can be blamed on racism, as it will, in fact, be another example of victimization. White folks will always find a way to cut down a successful black man, to not let him get too far, is the common belief. That sort of black cynicism, expressed in different political and aesthetic modalities, underscores both the blues and rap. If Obama loses, he becomes, in black folklore, John Henry, the "natural" man with the courage to go up against the political machine. The moral of the tale, in politics as in life, is that the machine always wins.) . . . Many of us black professionals, members of the black elite, keep the embers of our victimization burning for opportunistic reasons: to lev-erage white patronage, to maintain our own sense of identity and tradition. In some respects, this narrative has something of the power in its endurance that original sin does for Christians. In fact, our narrative of victimization is America's original sin, or what we want to serve as the country's original sin, which may be why we refuse to give it up. We have used it shamelessly — especially those who are least entitled to do so, as we have suffered the least — hustled it to get over on whites, to milk their guilt, to excuse our excesses and failures. Being the victim justifies all ethical lapses, as the victim becomes morally reprehensible in the guise of being morally outraged. Being the victim has turned into a sucker's game, the only possible game that the weak can play against the strong with any chance of winning. Nonetheless, the narrative does a kind of cultural work that serves our purposes in some profound ways, and it may be good for the country as a whole in reminding everyone about the costs of American democracy, its fragile foundation, its historically based hypocrisy. The conservatives are right: Freedom isn't free, and the black victim narrative reminds us all of that. . . . Read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i07/07b01101.htm.