Salon | Swamp Fever

S W A M P   F E V E R   |   B Y   J A M E S   C A R V I L L E

Can we talk?

Sure, Jackie Robinson and Tiger Woods
and Ellen are signs that the times are changing.
But there's only one way to heal America's
racial wounds: face to face.

i am one of the last men on the planet you could call politically correct. Howard Stern won't stop blabbing on his show about how he saw me get busted ogling a singer's boobs while we were waiting in the Tonight Show's green room. So when I start going off about intolerance, don't go thinking I'm getting all multicultural on you. I'm not. I don't give a rat's ass whether kids at Yale read books by dead white guys or Asian women or gay Ethiopian rabbis.
It's much bigger than that. It's about the fact that this nation still looks at times like it might split open at the seams.
For sure, we aren't where we used to be. Thanks to Jackie Robinson and folks like Lee Elder, who paved the way for Tiger Woods, abominations like segregated baseball leagues and golf tournaments are a thing of the past. And yep, Ellen, too, has shown us that barriers are breaking down all around.
But we ain't anywhere near where we should be, either. The lines of racial division are still visible in every city and town in America. Those lines remain this nation's deepest and ugliest scars.
Last week, 54,000 fans jammed into Shea Stadium to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the day Jackie Robinson sprinted across baseball's color line. President Clinton, who spoke to the crowd from home plate, waxed on about the milestone. After noting that Robinson scored the go-ahead run in his first major-league game, the President reminded us, soberly, that "we've all been trying to catch up ever since."
The President is getting fired up to preach and bully from his pulpit on just this issue. And he happens to be the perfect guy to do it. When it comes to the subject of race, without a doubt he is the wisest and bravest white person I've ever known. It cracks me up every time I hear a wing-nut claim that Bill Clinton is nothing but a conniving political hustler. Come on! Just look at the man's early political stands in Arkansas: He stood up with every fiber of his being for civil rights. As a political consultant, I can't reckon a worse way for a guy to position himself for public office in Arkansas back then.
I know how hard it must have been. I grew up in the South, too. In my hometown, where whites were the numerical minority, blacks and whites didn't have much to do with one another. We didn't go to school together -- even after the 1954 Supreme Court's Brown vs. the Board of Education decision. (It wasn't until 1969, when I was in my first year as a high school science teacher, that integration became a reality in our backward and stubborn corner of the world.) We didn't hang out together, either. Blacks and whites alike would walk over the levees and swim in the bar pits below, but we always kept to ourselves. That was just the way it was. Unlike Bill Clinton, I didn't question it nearly enough.
To be honest with you, I don't know what ideas the President and his staff are cooking up to get us all talking and thinking about our divisions. I do have a few ideas of my own. Frankly, commissions are all well and good, but we need to start something much bigger. We need to get everyone involved, and we need to talk about more than just race alone.
Let's pick one weekend during which every house of worship in America buddies up with another house of worship. Half of each congregation would stay put, the other half would travel to its buddy congregation. I'm not talking about two churches in the same neighborhood, but rather a black Baptist church and a conservative synagogue or a lily-white Episcopalian church and a Buddhist temple. The services wouldn't have to be Kumbaya kind of affairs. They could be anything their leaders wanted them to be. The point is, people of different beliefs and walks of life would have a chance to pray, think, meet and talk together. If that works out all right, how about the two congregations coming up with joint projects, like fixing up a baseball field or painting a school? Manual labor's a great way to break the ice.
Why not do the same kind of swap between different kinds of schools in different parts of town? Some schools have tried something like this already, but not nearly enough. I kid you not: In Washington, D.C., there are thousands of black kids who have never seen a white kid, except maybe on TV. Of course, one day would not be nearly enough, but it might get the ball rolling. Most of us self-important bigmouths with exorbitant speaking fees are not exactly role models, but for what it's worth I'd bet you'd get a hell of a lot of us to come to school for free and share our own experiences.
If these exchanges were going on all over the country, there would be enough "human interest" stories to get the media to jump into the act. And maybe some members of the press would do more than just cover the events. I keep hearing about this thing called "public journalism," where reporters supposedly get off their high horses, change out of their seersucker suits, and help make a difference in the community. Maybe they can do some of the highbrow, high-concept stuff like holding town hall meetings and panel discussions.
And then there's Hollywood. Showing "Schindler's List" on network TV was a great idea. Why not have the studios waive royalties for a week and let movie houses show damn good and provocative movies like Spike Lee's "Do the Right Thing" or Mike Leigh's "Secrets and Lies" for free and get everyone talking about them afterwards?
I say, forget symbols like ribbons. Let's meet and greet. Let's look into each other's eyeballs. Let's start talking.
April 21, 1997

I've got no particular corner on ideas. What are your suggestions for getting these long overdue conversations going? Send me some e-mail me at carville@salonmagazine.com and let me know. I'll be glad to pass on the best ideas to the president. I'm sure he'll appreciate the help.