Chapter 28

When everything shows that whites no longer feel so good about themselves either, it is perhaps as difficult to find real love under the crystal chandeliers of the self-made millionaire as among those confined to "shacking together" in the glow of the kerosene lamp.

I had found that one of the most peculiar aspects of Southern hospitality is the desire to immediately "give" the male visitor a very attractive "girl." Not only in the old aristocracy, but also among the "up-and-coming" millionaires, seldom more than a day had passed before they had supplied me with a "date" from the same class (or more often one aspiring to become a member of that class), often without even having asked me.

Their attitude towards "white womanhood" seems little better than their historical relationship to black womanhood, yet this sacred white womanhood has often been used as one of the many excuses for violent suppression of blacks.

Our oppression constantly finds new patterns, but nobody who felt really good about themselves could possibly oppress so devastatingly as we do today.

And the victim today is not only the black family, but increasingly the children.

We middle class whites, who love to mention that one of our best friend is black -- to attain moral stature and black recognition -- and who love to denounce the more primitive racism of others --

-- we continually forget that bigots like the Ku Klux Klan are deeply victimized "loosers" who have themselves been so shut out of the American dream that they are without any power to affect the overall quality of black life today.

Students in black universities often laugh at the Klan speech in my show, for they know all too well that their pain and exclusion is not caused by a few hooded nuts out in the woods, but by us - the great majority of "good" law-abiding citizens - who are today silently forcing millions of blacks into ghettoes, isolation, despair - and finally prisons and death.

In our white guilt from not living up to our own lofty democratic ideals and Christian values we escape into Bill Cosby shows to cover up for our ultimate crushing of the black family.

Today more than 70% of black children grow up without a father and one in ten without either parent - twice as many as when I first came to America - and three times as many as under slavery.

Therefore the grandmother increasingly becomes the life saver for many.

Black students, who here after year 2000 manage to succeed and stay in college in spite of this - the black family's worst oppression since the slave auctions - often tell me that precisely the grandmother was their saving angels.