Book 2 "You must have faith in the best of man and distrust the worst. If not, the worst will prevail." Jose Marti (19th Century poet and freedom fighter)
"We know now that there is no way out; that the system that was the evil offspring of public neglect and private greed has come to stay, a storm-centre of our civilization. Nothing is left but to make the best of a bad bargain. "If it shall appear that the suffering and the sins of the "other half," and the evil they breed are but as a just punishment upon the community that gave it no other choice, it will be because that is the truth." The quote above is from Jacob
A. Riis' book How the Other Half Lives, which I found by chance
in the summer of 1975 when I dropped into a bookstore in San Francisco.
I had never heard of Jacob Riis before. The book made such a strong impression
on me that I decided to steal it - which says a bit about my economic
situation at the time. (If any of you looking at this are just as down
and out, naturally I will understand if you decide to steal my book. Stealing
is not a good thing, but we all ought to try it once in our lives in order
to get a bit of understanding for and solidarity with those who are forced
into that way of life.) Nobody is born a vagabond and it was a long series of circumstances that led me to such a happy state. I was born in a little country the size of Massachusetts. Together with Sweden, Denmark has for many years had a reputation for being one of the most liberal countries in the world. I grew up in the Western, more conservative, and formerly very poor part of Denmark from which thousands emigrated to America at the turn of the century. My father is a minister in a little village. For generations the firstborn son in the family has been named Jacob Holdt and has been a minister, so it was always in the air that that was to be my destiny too. My grandmother was the spiritual head of the family, who let no chance go by to tell me about the religious achievements of the family and make me aware of my duty. Through all the years I vagabonded in America I continually got letters from her about how I soon would have gathered worldly experiences enough to be able to come home and begin the study of theology. A very great part of the reason I continued vagabonding
and imagined I would do it the rest of my life was the fear of returning
home to eight years of dry Latin and Greek. Let me just explain here for
American readers that the church in Denmark is nationalized and
ministers are employed by the state. Since very few people go to
church, the ministers' role tends to be more like that of a social worker
caring for the elderly, sick, and troubled. The rhetoric of "personal
salvation, which I found rampant in American churches, is to a large degree
unheard of in Danish churches. When I left church on Sundays in my childhood,
my eyes would usually fall on a great beautiful portrait of a black woman
across from the church. It was the only advertisement in the little village
- the trademark for Denmark's biggest business, the cooperative store
"Brugsen." When I have since thought of the enormous influence
white advertising in America has had on the white as well as the black
psyche, I can't avoid reflecting that this one-sided advertising must
have had some effect on my later involvement in black issues. In the village
elementary school we wrote reports on the apartheid system in South Africa
and the black struggle in America long before the height of the civil
rights movement. We were jubilant on the day South Africa's prime minister
was shot, but our teacher pointed out that this would not solve the problems
there, and in high school, when Martin Luther King became our hero, I,
at least, was strongly affected by his philosophy of nonviolence. From
my astonishment that the white church in both America and South Africa
was hostile to blacks, I was not far from rebellion against my father's
church. When the congregation at one point during the Biafra famine decided
to spend several hundred thousand kroner to build a tower on our village
church, I was so outraged that in the dead of night before Easter morning
I painted over the entire church with huge biblical quotations about how
you shouldn't build temples for God when your neighbor is suffering here
on earth. My father's reaction took me by surprise. He was so furious
that without a word he drove me out to the highway, where I was asked
to hitch-hike off. During the next half year we were not on speaking terms.
Perhaps this was the start of my career as a vagabond. I had at any rate not much
of a choice. I had been kicked out after two years in high school and
had been fired from several jobs. I was considered the black sheep of
the family. Even the army had kicked me out. I had always wanted to join
the Royal Danish Palace Guard, being deep down inside very conservative
and even a member of the Conservative Party. But the very first day
my company had target practice I ran into problems. We were asked to shoot
at a target in the shape of a man, but it was absolutely
impossible for me to get myself to shoot at anything even resembling a
human being, so I refused point blank. To avoid. having to shoot again,
I pretended to be sick and limped around on one leg. I was sent to examinations
in various hospitals and walked with crutches for eight months before
they kicked me out. Great was my surprise when the mailman half a year
later knocked at my door with $2,000 in compensation for having suffered
in the army. When I think back to the feelings I had then, I find it interesting that it was a young American I had staying with me who opened my eyes to the injustices of the Vietnam war and got me involved in opposing it, although during the whole time I was involved it was mainly out of a deep moral indignation. I did not see the Vietnam war as a product of any system, but merely as an unfortunate digression for democracy. Thus I remained a member of Conservative Youth and did not see anything inconsistent in that, just as I always felt irritated about the red banners in the demonstrations "because it would make people think we were communists." I worked on the Canadian farm for a year along with a young leftist Argentinean who got me interested in Latin America. I therefore decided to travel down there just for adventure. To get to Latin America I had to pass through the USA. Canadians had told me many frightening stories about how dangerous it was to hitch-hike in the US, but I nevertheless decided to make the attempt. I took my savings from my work on the farm and hitched down to the border, crossing at Port Huron, a little town in Michigan. I was terrified. I saw a man walk down the street with a hunting rifle and perceived violent vibrations everywhere. The young people in town said that the police would beat me up if I hitch-hiked. I have since returned to this town and see it today as one of the most peaceful in America, but I have met many other young foreign visitors who have had the same terrifying first meeting with the violent American society until they got used to it and in the end no longer perceived "the violence in people's eyes" as a sensitive Frenchman expressed it to me. I was so shocked that I took the bus to Detroit in the belief that it would be easier to hitch-hike from there. But that was only going from the frying pan into the fire. I got off the bus at night thinking I was in a great metropolitan city of millions with just as much nightlife as in European cities and when I couldn't see a soul around I asked for directions "to downtown." A news vendor answered with surprise, "You are downtown," and then told me that people simply didn't dare to walk outside at night. I was again so terrified that I ended up buying a ticket all the way to Chicago. The first young long-haired guy I talked to in the bus station in the morning told me that he had just gotten out of jail for hitch-hiking and that Chicago's cops had the reputation of being the worst to hitch-hikers. And had I been thinking of hitching through the South? I must be kidding. This up here was nothing compared to the South. I was now so despairing that after a day in the city I went to a church to get help. I hadn't enough money for a bus all the way through the US, and Chicago seemed such a terrible, inhuman, cold city that it gave me no desire to see more of America. But later in the evening a young black writer, Waltdenia Lewis, started chatting with me in a coffee shop. She invited me to come and stay in her mother's house in a black middle class area of South Chicago. Here I spent a fantastic week with her and her friends - a week which meant a decisive turn for my relationship to America, which in spite of my early school teachings I had perceived as a boring white middle class country. That my first American home was a black home, which gave me warmth and encouragement in the midst of my freezing despair, was no doubt a great part of the reason I didn't immediately turn my back on America. Waltdenia and her friends introduced me to black culture in such an infectious way that I had to come back. They drove me everywhere and told me about the conditions of blacks in that most segregated of all American cities. They communicated in a language which I could hardly understand then, but which, with its almost singing, constantly joking soprano tone, I found fantastically rich. Without knowing it they also gave me a gift which was to be my admission card not only to black homes, but everywhere in society. One day when braiding their hair they insisted on braiding my beard, which had gotten fairly long. They made a bet that I wouldn't dare to walk around a whole day in Chicago with a braided beard. I was terribly shy and ashamed of myself looking so foolish, but soon I discovered that this city which I had perceived as cold and misanthropic suddenly began to open up. People would smile at me or sometimes react negatively, but at any rate open up whereby contact is possible - the contact which is essential for the vagabond. Therefore the beard stayed braided, and without it this book would not have been made - if only because it several times helped save my life. I decided
to find another way to Latin America and went back to Canada, where I
hitch-hiked to Vancouver and down to San Francisco. It was as far as I
got. As soon as I met the American youth there I fell in love with them
and let them carry me away. Some Vietnam veterans invited me to go with
them to the big anti-war demonstrations in Washington. That was in April
1971. There were one million demonstrators and a solidarity and atmosphere
which made a deep impression on me. I saw hundreds of Vietnam veterans,
many of them crippled, throwing their military medals up against Congress.
It was then, moved to tears, that I realized this was no time for adventuring
in Latin America, but that I had to give support to these people in some
way. And for the next year I had little time for anything but rushing
from demonstration to demonstration all over the country. I quickly overcame
my fear of hitch-hiking, which seemed so ridiculous compared to what these
Vietnam veterans had gone through, although I did take the precaution
of wearing a shorthair wig at first, as it was then still common to shoot
down people with long hair. I had seven such deaths confirmed personally
- two of them sons of families I stayed with. (I myself only had beer
bottles thrown at me from car windows, in addition to numerous fines and
warnings from police who in several states consistently throw hitch-hikers
in jail.) Gradually as I began to meet the ordinary population, I discovered
how few of them actually supported the Vietnam war. I therefore began
to ask myself what it was that allowed this war to rage on. Everywhere
I met an openness to my point of view about Vietnam which I had never
experienced among the fossilized Danes, as I began to think of them. I
started to feel that while the disaster for the Americans was that they
had not been informed about Vietnam by their one-sided
press, which had in turn been misled by the government; the disaster in
Europe was that the Europeans simply did not want to listen to other views
than those they already had. Whether this impression was reasonable or
not, it was nevertheless what made me love the Americans. Working with the Vietnam
Veterans Against the War helped to politicize me and I came to strongly
oppose what we called the "system." I got into circles, both
black and white, which did not shrink from using violent methods and for
a while I went through a period of questioning whether the use of such
counter-violence was justified. I mention later in the book how Wounded
Knee was a turning point which made me a strong advocate of non-violence
- not least for practical reasons, since I have never been able to kill
a fly. Yet after Wounded Knee I made a more serious attempt at going to
Latin America and when I saw conditions in Guatemala - the hunger, the
child funerals, and the brutal American installed military dictatorship's
repression of the Indians - I was so embittered that I hitch-hiked around
in the mountains hoping to join the guerrillas. I didn't manage to find
them. Instead I was constantly stopped by machinegun-toting soldiers and
interrogated. One time a branch tore my wig off and all my hair fell out
right next to them - luckily without their noticing it. Somewhere in the
jungle I read an issue of Time which said that big demonstrations were
anticipated at the upcoming Republican convention, particularly by the
Vietnam veterans. As I had become enormously bitter toward Nixon for his
support of Guatemala's bloody regime, I decided that I had to support
my friends in Miami. I tried to get there on a banana boat, but in vain.
There were only six days till the convention. Hitch-hiking back to Guatemala
City, up through Mexico and across Texas and the South, I arrived just
in time. This was one of the biggest psychic leaps I ever made, for a
few days after having left the Indians' straw huts I managed to get to
live in the headquarters of Nixon himself, the Fontainebleau, by disguising
myself as a Republican delegate, with shorthair wig, tie, etc. A delegate
let me share her room. Here I spent a couple of days in the company of
the Nixon family and notorious Republicans such as John Wayne and Ronald
Reagan. I felt strongly drawn to their warm personalities and I couldn't
help asking John Wayne his opinion of the time we stopped his film "The
Green Berets" from showing in Denmark. Reagan I was much less interested
in. I perceived him as an extremist demagogue and outsider without any
chances. When he claimed that America had the best medical care in the
world I knew he was lying. I had already seen plenty of suffering and
unhealthy people in America. Still, I tried to the best of my ability
to live myself into the Republican thought-world and my view became affected
to such a degree that when I stood at the window of my room on the 12th
floor I could not help looking at the thousands of demonstrators below
as dirty hippies and lazy bums. I had no desire to sleep outside with
them in the Flamingo Park. But entirely Republican I must not have looked,
for I ended up being arrested and interrogated four times by the Secret
Service. One time they sent a bomb squad up to my room to dismantle a
gadget which turned out to be my ancient flash being recharged. Another
time when I had been out with the demonstrators, and afterwards hid behind
a bush to change to my shorthair wig and Republican outfit again, an agent
hiding behind another bush called for reinforcements on his radio and
a whole squad of agents came running and seized me. Their leader thought
I was a "Bolshevik." The fourth time I was seized I had managed
to slip inside the convention center itself through waves of teargas during
Nixon's speech. It was the plan that an Australian journalist and I should
unfold an enormous banner with something like "Nixon napalms babies"
in front of Nixon, the world press, and the thousands of delegates. In
my bitterness after the experience of Guatemala I felt this would be a
worthy way to get at Nixon and wind up my USA journey. But as soon as
the Australian reached under his shirt to fish out the banner - shakingly
nervous as we both were - he was attacked by a whole flock of Secret Service
men. I hurried as discreetly as I could away from the spot and up on the
viewing stands under the huge American flags. But several delegates pointed
me out to the agents. I ran behind the flags where there was a fairly
free passage all the way down to the exit at the other end of the convention
hall. I thought I had a great lead, but in running I started a several
hundred yards long wave in the gigantic flags which the agents could follow
with their eyes and walky-talkies, with the result that a great reception
committee greeted me warmly when I emerged from behind the Stars and Stripes
at the other end. However, nobody could prove that I had been with the
Australian, so after a long interrogation I was released and avoided deportation.
I was, however, deported from Nixon's headquarters, but I considered it
a great moral victory that I first managed to make good friends with one
of the agents who said that he "understood" me. Such good friends
that when months later I stood on the viewing stands on Pennsylvania Avenue
in Washington to see Nixon's second inauguration and the grey flannel
suited agents with their paranoid eyes advanced in front of the motorcade,
one of them suddenly jumped up and waved when he saw me in the crowd.
I had succeeded in penetrating the secret police's grey anonymity. In the beginning I had such negative feelings about Denmark that I had completely broken off all communication, but when I again started relating to my father I urged him to use many of the experiences I wrote about in his church, and a good dialogue emerged in which he sent me tapes of his sermons. My parents sent over a camera for my birthday so that I could "prove" the many shocking things I wrote about. It was a cheap half-frame camera that didn't demand much skill from one who had never photographed before. In Wounded Knee the camera was damaged and it was almost a year before I could afford the money to get it repaired. So I got hold of a used Canon Dial, with which almost all the pictures in this book were taken. The first couple of years I traveled rather at random. It was during these years I learned how many lonely and lost souls there are in our society, as it was almost always them I ended up with. They needed someone who would listen to them. I felt like some kind of wandering social worker and the photography was only a secondary preoccupation for me - a kind of diary to remember the people who came to mean something to me. Often I spent days with a lonesome person listening, and the more I learned about their frustrations, the more I began to think about the society which had brought them into this situation. Many of these relationships were sexual in origin. It was often as if you had to pass such a threshold to reach the intimacy that lets you open up to each other. Americans are very sexually aggressive, both men and women, but I love them for that aggressiveness, because whatever else, it creates possibilities for human contact, whereas in Europe, for example, a man can easily travel without getting to know a single person. Certainly it could be a little irritating and exhausting, with my inability to say no, when I would get three rides with homosexuals in a row (the 25 miles between Winston-Salem and Greensboro thus once took a whole day) or even worse three religious lifts with three different sermons. I have sat praying with people all over America, but it could be a bit comical when in the course of one day I would have to pray to Jehovah in one home in the morning, later chant "Nam myo ho rengay kyo" in a Buddhist home, and in the evening kneel to Allah in a Black Muslim home. I always did what people told me to do and am therefore certain that I am in good standing with all the Gods. But when I was in a rush I often made a big detour around the thick Bible belt in eastern Tennessee, which almost always sent me to the "Kingdom of Heaven" instead of my destination. Occasionally I experienced the most surprising combinations of aggressiveness. In Texas I stayed with a Catholic priest whom I first had to pray with and who afterwards turned out to be gay. Critics will find a lot to accuse this book of, but it will certainly not be possible to criticize me for not having been completely open to Americans. I tried always to immerse myself completely into people's ways of thinking, though one night I had a narrow escape. I had been sitting and praying for hours in a church in Mississippi with two women, both of them holding my hands. As always I tried the best I could to open myself up completely. They were convinced that I could be "saved" and that I would be able to "accept Jesus," and they had a love and intensity in their eyes stronger than any I had ever seen, so suddenly my head started swimming and I really began to feel that I might see Jesus. Then I started to resist tooth and nail. I sat and whispered to myself, "No, you must not flee it all now. You must believe in people. You must believe in people. You must... " I succeeded in rescuing myself from being saved, but the dilemma I had found myself in was constantly a burning actuality for me. If I was to believe in people then I also had to have faith in what these two women were telling me. From then on I was more aware that to believe in people I always had to believe in the totality of the people I met. The argument I used that night was: "They don't let blacks into their church." Without that they would perhaps have "saved" me, but I did not have the heart to tell them that, as I liked them very much. Although eleven
o'clock Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in America, I constantly
came to these white churches as I loved to see these racists from their
best side which usually flourishes toward guests right after the service.
From the moment when I began to see the sum of human suffering, the term
"the system" which I had learned from the demonstrators, became
practical for me, for as a vagabond you cannot survive without seeing
people themselves as without sin. Otherwise you would soon be eaten up
inside by hatred and thereby close yourself off from the world around
you. It was nevertheless hard to avoid identifying myself more strongly
with certain social groups than with others. Especially with the underclass
whom in my wanderings for food and housing I constantly encountered. Without
money and education I was myself a social loser and therefore naturally
got in touch with these street and night people. Since I always tried
to believe that what comes out of people's mouths is the truth - especially
with angry desperate people - I could not help being startled at hearing
apparently absurd utterances from people in the black underclass, like
"Hey, man, this ain't nothing but slavery." A great deal of my journey was therefore guided by my increasing curiosity to find out whether there could reasonably be said to exist a kind of slavery in the midst of the apparently free and mobile American system. Some of the conclusions I came to I have gathered in this book. Almost everything in the book is based on personal experiences. Therefore there will probably be many misinterpretations in the book, which experts and scholars will be able to pounce on. The book with its emotional statements ought to be experienced for what it is: a travel book. It is a book for the broad masses I met as a traveler and its truth does not go deeper than the verbal utterances you hear in the underclass - which nevertheless are true for those pushed out of the system. As I could almost never concentrate on reading as a vagabond, only a very little derives from books. Even the statistics are picked up from garbage cans (from which I usually fished the excellent New York Times). I have, however, in this updated version written especially for Americans, checked some of my sources on the topic. Furthermore, I have learned from the audiences of the original slideshow (which the book is based on) in both Europe and America, and I have included photos and experiences from my later vagabondings in the States. However, I want to stress that this book can in no way stand alone. To obtain a complete impression of the Afro-American situation you must do other reading. If you do not intend to do that, blacks will be better off if you don't touch this book. It is, and can only be, a vagabond's impressions, and must on no account be considered the statement of an expert. The only thing one may call me an expert on is vagabonding, which is something you can't learn from books. In the last few years I have seen a severe deterioration of conditions for the black underclass and the late 1980's will most likely look even worse than the picture the book gives. It is worth mentioning that the shock I convey here at my meeting with American poverty is based on the underclass in its best years ever - the time right after the gains of the Civil Rights movement had been instituted and before Reagan's cutbacks had taken effect. I have often been criticized in America for not mentioning
these gains. That I do not is partly because I take it for granted that
everybody has heard about this now historical period in school and partly
because I had not myself seen conditions before that time enabling me
to compare. But it is difficult for me to imagine that conditions can
have been much worse before my arrival. When conditions are as hopelessly
desperate as I experienced them, dwelling on the big gains of the past
can easily serve as an excuse for not doing anything about the problems
today. Dostoyevsky once said that you can get an impression of a society's
character by entering its prisons. Whether you can also judge a social
system by entering its ghettos must be up to the reader to decide. I just
don't think one can claim to be "objective" if one does not
continuously see a society from the viewpoint of those worst off. Those
journalists who try to balance the viewpoint of the rich with that of
the poor have already accepted this lopsided distribution of wealth and
justified it and are therefore themselves a part of the oppression. They
can therefore not claim to be historically objective. History has almost
always proven the worst-off right; there are not many today who will not
admit that it was right of the radicals of years
ago (the abolitionists) not to try to balance the point of view of the
slave master with that of the slave - even when a majority of the slaves
in the eyes of whites looked "happy." This worm's eye view is
however not only a vagabond perspective, but also to some extent a traditional
Scandinavian perspective. In Denmark, which has given support to many
liberation movements in the Third World, the traditional social ideal
is a country where "few have too much and fewer too little."
The photos in this book of broken and apathetic people generate in the
average Dane a strong feeling of sympathy and in many an automatic indignation
against that society which has caused such human oppression. When they see the faces in this book they intuitively know that they are not the faces of a free society. Most Americans to whom I showed the book, however, leafed through it quickly with a feeling of distaste and automatically put the blame on the victims themselves. The same difference in attitude is behind the criticism I often get in America, that I present the black underclass as "powerless victims." When that underclass generation after generation has constituted a permanent component of society - even in the boom of the 60's - then they are, as a matter of fact "powerless victims" of a system not designed to give the weakest a chance. The lack of social understanding of which Scandinavians often accuse Americans is most clearly shown in their eternal pointing to some individual who worked his way up from poverty as proof that there is possibility of opportunity for the group, while they are blind to how the group as a whole is shut out from opportunity. Knowing how differently Americans will see these photos I can't help having uneasy feelings about publishing them in America. They could simply serve to reinforce racist attitudes toward the underclass there, since the feeling that it is "society's fault" if a group of people can't fit in (and that therefore society ought to change continually to be in harmony with human beings) seems to be on a decline in the conservative wave in the States. There is naturally also racism in Denmark - first and foremost towards foreign workers and Greenlanders, especially now, as a result of the current economic crisis. Though I have gradually learned that I, like all other people, am a product of my environment, this of course doesn't mean that all Danes share the opinions of this book. In fact the original edition was meant as a very strong attack on parts of Danish policy, where I used the bogey of America to point out where certain tendencies in Denmark could lead if we don't change our political course in time. But even with this strong critique of Danish conditions, many elementary schools there have bought the book as a classroom text and the four-hour multi-media show has become a yearly recurrent event in Danish high schools. The difference between the Danish and the American points of view comes out most clearly in a couple of key sentences I hear again and again in the two countries. In the early 70's I felt myself extremely drawn to the American hippies, but when I constantly heard them fall back on a sentence I heard throughout the rest of the population - "I just want to have a good time" - I knew how far I stood from them. For the corresponding Danish sentence is "Hvor har vi det dog godt herhjemme" - a strong conscience-stricken expression ("How good we (unfairly) have it here at home (in Denmark).") Such collective guilt about having it too good in comparison with the poor countries hardly exists in the States, while you sometimes get the impression that Scandinavians feel personally guilty for all the crimes in the world. The two expressions are directly reflected in our differing foreign policies, as Scandinavia has often given support to liberation movements in the same countries where America for purely egoistic and commercial reasons supports repressive regimes.
A part of this (in comparison
to America) rather strong social awareness no doubt stems from the way
Danes bring up children. We socialize children by bringing about guilt
instead of using force. Since this is also the Jewish way of bringing
up children it could explain the relatively strong Jewish American engagement
in social issues and civil rights movements - and that I as a Dane often
felt more in harmony with the Jews I met than with other white Americans.
But to bring up children to feel strongly connected with their surroundings
and actuated by guilt also has an unhappy side effect which is demonstrated
in a higher suicide rate. In Denmark it is very common to commit suicide
to hurt others with guilt feelings. Hardly anybody in the American army
would dream of committing suicide because they feel wronged by their commander,
but such tactics are common in Denmark. That it has nothing to do with
the welfare state, as popular American theory has it, can be seen from
the very low suicide rate in Norway's welfare state. Probably nothing
is more misunderstood in America than this welfare system. Magazines like
Time regularly call it "socialism," although
our countries are just as capitalist as the US in terms of private ownership.
A welfare state can maybe just be characterized as a more intelligent
form of capitalism, giving the inhabitants so much security that they
can walk the streets without fear, look into store windows without iron
bars, get on the bus, get change back, and not sit on either hard plastic
seats or slashed upholstery, and walk into any bank in the country and
cash a check, to mention just a few of the things shocked Northern Europeans
find they cannot do in America. American media often go out of their way
to show the huge economic cost of the welfare state, such as people being
mistakenly taxed up to 110% of their income (which however doesn't prevent
the average working class Dane from taking a yearly 5-week paid vacation
- (the norm in most of Europe) - in Africa, Sri Lanka, Cuba, or the Mediterranean.)
I will here in this book mostly concentrate on pointing out the alarming
human costs involved in not having a welfare state though I in
no way claim that a welfare state alone will solve the race problem
in America. But it would alleviate the suffering of those most hurt. It
is nevertheless necessary to point out that Danish social training combined
with a feeling of distance from the problems may make Danes much more
sympathetic to suffering and helplessness than to rage and resistance,
which require not a guilt response (which comes from a psychological position
"above" the victim) but solidarity - genuine identification
with the group. Thus this guilt-ridden, if relatively strong, social awareness
easily becomes condescending and paternalistic. Black Americans especially
are very sensitive to this form of racism, which I can in no way say I
am free from. What interested me most throughout my travels was human
weakness and failure, both as a result of and as an indicator of social
oppression. Certainly it is true that most blacks do not live like those
in the book, but without understanding those who are too weak to effectively
struggle against their oppression I have found it futile - at least photographically
- to convey to a white audience how devastating and destructive racism
is.
Still I will not hesitate to point out that in the description of
the people I met in my travels the book is a totally dishonest piece of
work. By choosing to show only the side of people which relates to the
subject matter of the book I indeed make them very one-dimensional. I
personally know so many other sides of them and it saddens me to see many
of best friends being reduced to such narrow roles.
Moreover, vagabond sociology is of extremely questionable value as it
may only be a certain type of people in any group who gives you shelter.
Even though I visited thousands of American homes, my personal involvement
with people and constant survival struggle did not always give the intellectual
distancing necessary for sociological generalizations. When I nevertheless
take the liberty of making sweeping generalizations in the book, it is
more as a foreign traveler than as a sociologist: the type of primitive
generalizations most foreigners make upon visiting a new country. You
see a breadline of people in a communist country and immediately draw
conclusions about that system. Such generalizations can at times be eye-openers
to one side of the truth, but they can also be dangerous. When like me
you come from a society with no recent colonial background (unlike England
and France) it may make you see certain aspects of black/white relations
more clearly, having not yet developed a master-race mentality (although
the influence of American media might be rapidly changing this Scandinavian
aspect). But at the same time you are totally unaware of the racist stereotyping
concerned people in such societies constantly try to avoid. As a Scandinavian
you find it shocking to meet the high crime rate in the black community,
or are amazed at the apparent contradiction of finding so many Cadillacs
in the poorest part of the ghetto. But as a black or liberal white American
you tend to overlook or downplay these aspects, well aware of how they
have been used maliciously against the black race as a whole throughout
history. So with my tendency as a foreigner to call a watermelon a watermelon
no matter who eats it, many blacks will thus react
to this book in a negative way. Furthermore they know the content of the
book all too well and do not necessarily wish to be reminded of it again.
As an oppressed race struggling against a negative image they have an
enormous need for positive reinforcement. As a vagabond I only had a little
contact with the "black bourgeoisie," who as a rule did not
show me the same hospitality as the underclass.
One better-off black couple
in Alabama picked me up one day and were going to take me home, but when
I showed them my pictures of the sufferings I had seen in the underclass
I was let off with the words, "Don't you see anything positive in
black people?" I quite simply didn't understand them then and was
just as hurt as they since I felt that my photos clearly showed blacks
as oppressed rather than incompetent - a positive view of them
and a negative view of their society, the way I had been brought up to
see "social losers." Ironically, these are the same words you
hear when white Americans are exposed to my book in Europe: "Doesn't
he see anything positive in America?" Its subject doesn't exist within
that ideal picture they are brought up to have of America. That it exists
subconsciously is shown by one of the first things they usually say in
Scandinavia: "How nice it is to be able to walk safely in the streets."
While Americans sometimes almost proudly admit crime and violence are
problems at home, most would not admit the most important principle that
violence is directly the result of poverty, which in turn is directly
the result of individuals (and consequently society) not caring about
those less well-off than themselves. Of this violence I can
certainly speak from experience. To travel in a country which like
America is founded on colonial violence inevitably becomes an experience
characterized by violence. The miracle of my survival I owe to my stubborn
belief in the words of Jose Marti which helped me out of the following
situations: four times I was attacked by robbers with guns (but managed
in three cases to make good friends with them and be invited home, by
pulling out my hidden beard; if you can make attackers laugh with you
as equal human beings it is almost impossible for them to work themselves
up again afterward to the position of executioners from which they can
victimize you), twice I was attacked by men with knives, twice the police
in fear pulled their guns on me, several times I was surrounded by angry
blacks in dark alleys and only a hairbreadth from being killed, once I
was ambushed by the Klan, several times bullets were whistling around
me in street shoot-outs, as well as at Wounded Knee, twice I was arrested
by the FBI.
I arrived in San Francisco
with $40 which lasted for five years. My travel expenses were therefore
around $8 per year. In Canada I had bought a sleeping bag and trained
in sleeping outdoors on the ground. During all my vagabonding in the US
I never slept outside and never got to use the sleeping bag (which I soon
sold for lack of money) due to American hospitality. I doubt that there
is any other country in the world where I could arrive with only $40 and
travel for five years entirely as a result of people's hospitality and
generosity. I have stayed in 434 homes scattered in 48 states. I have
hitch-hiked 113,750 miles - or four times around the globe. This doesn't
include the number of miles I hitch-hiked in cities, where I hardly ever
took buses. One reason I traveled so much was that I only had a tourist
visa. Therefore I had to travel every three months to the American consulates
in Canada or Mexico City in order to have my visa renewed. (This was also
possible in the Immigration offices in most big American cities, but there
it cost $10, which I rarely had.) The only problem was getting into America
again, as the border police usually don't let longhaired hitchhikers in
without money. I solved the problem by borrowing a bank account from Canadian
friends and borrowing a Cadillac on the Canadian side of the border which
I filled up with Jesus literature. Dressed in my short-hair wig, white
shirt and a tie covering up my long beard I usually slipped across the
border with no problems, after which American friends drove the car back.
This perhaps sounds like a troublesome way to stay in the US - millions
of foreigners certainly live underground with few problems - but it must
be remembered that it was necessary for me to have my papers in order
at all times, since as a hitch-hiker I was stopped by police and checked
on their computers at least three times a day. This is to the vagabond's
advantage, since drivers then never have to fear picking up a wanted criminal.
With a tourist visa I also couldn't take any work. A single time in New
York I did get free lodgings and a small amount of pocket money for working
in a folk club called the Gaslight as a doorman. I had to throw out drunken
Negroes and other undesirables, but by mistake one day I threw out Bob
Dylan who had walked in without paying the cover charge. So I was on the
road again. Almost all my film was thus financed by selling blood
plasma twice weekly for $5 each time. First they took the whole blood
out, centrifuged it, kept the plasma and injected the red blood cells
again, then repeated the process. It took four hours. Here in the blood
banks I met many of the poorest people I got to live with. But in 1974I
had my financial breakthrough, when an elderly woman gave me $70 to drive
her car down to Florida. I used the money to make prints from some of
my best slides so I had something to show people. From that moment I started
getting frequent small gifts of money from people, $5 or $10 and in one
case even $30 from a wealthy woman in Boston. As it finally turned more
and more into a project about the black underclass I imagined I would
end up giving my photos to the Schomberg collection in Harlem, which has
hardly anything on present-day poverty.
Yet I hope that the book will inspire you who are more well-off to invite
home every single one of the vagabonds you see and to pick up all hitch-hikers.
Yes, this is naturally only a beginning, but if people do not even manage
to stop for that human being who stands out there on the roadside asking
for help, how is it then possible to imagine that they will ever be capable
of being human toward the ghettos or the Third World? There is no excuse
for not doing it. As a vagabond you soon discover that the worst thing
is not your fear of other people, but other people's fear of you. When
you have seen drivers' fear of you as a vagabond you begin to under-stand
for instance how difficult it must be to be black in a white society.
Your own fear of people can be overcome, because it is irrational and
unfounded in reality, but you are powerless in the face of other people's
fear of you: it immediately locks you up in a ghetto. Therefore start
small. Invite every single hitch-hiker or tourist home, not to speak of
others who have a need for a roof over their heads or human togetherness.
You will discover that they are far more interesting than books like this
one. And if you already have all your floor space filled up or for other
reasons are not able to have them staying with you, then please send them
to me.
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