Accepting individual responsibility for racism

Last Sunday, Bill Clinton attended the opening in Washington of a musical based on E.L. Doctorow's novel Ragtime. The show deals with the intertwined lives of three families in America early this century. One is white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant, one Jewish immigrant from Latvia, and one black from Harlem.

It's an unusually tough and honest piece of theatre, all the more so because it comes, not from the subsidised art world, but from the realms of commercial entertainment. In it, the Jewish immigrant becomes a successful movie director. But the black family is destroyed. The father and mother die violently. Their baby survives, but is brought up by white parents.

Clinton was there, as I was, because the opening had been tied in with a meeting of the Democratic National Committee, which brings together the Democratic Party organisations in the various states. The show deals with race, a subject about which Clinton has been trying to spark national debate. So before the opening, the DNC held a symposium on the racial issues raised by Rag- time, which I chaired.

The idea was to kick around certain questions: how much has changed since the turn of the century? How come the US is so extraordinarily good at absorbing wave after wave of immigrants and so bad at affording equality to its own minorities, especially blacks and American Indians? Why is it that groups who experience discrimination in one era then go on to discriminate against others in the next?

This last question, of course, is especially relevant to the Irish. Walking to the hotel where the symposium was to take place, I came across two statues. One was of Robert Emmet, a great believer in equality. The other, not far away, was of another Irishman, Gen Philip Sheridan, who is the man who said "the only good Indians I ever saw were dead".

Between them, they might have formed one good monument to the nature of history: demanding justice for oneself doesn't necessarily attune you to the just demands of others. These are sharp questions, and I expected to have a hard job trying to restrain the debate. Instead, I had a hard job getting it started, and I'm not sure I ever quite succeeded.

The first problem is that, in order to make any sense, a debate on race in America has to include so many voices. We ended up with a panel of speakers composed of a Hispanic American, an African American, a Native American, an Asian American, a Jewish American, a Greek American, a Canadian, and an Irishman. This is right and proper as the discussion has to be inclusive. But it is also utterly unwieldy.

The second, related problem is that when you array people in carefully categorised groups like this, it is hard for them not to talk primarily about their own histories. Or, rather, it is relatively easy for them to avoid discussing racial attitudes in their own communities by talking about the racial attitudes of others towards them.

Then, perhaps most seriously, there's the immense difficulty that in order to have a debate about realities you have to have some consensus about what they are. And increasingly, basic perceptions of important events in America divide along racial lines. Take for example, last week's death of James Earl Ray.

Was this man the lone assassin who killed Martin Luther King? King's family think he wasn't and recently asked Attorney General Janet Reno to start a new investigation.

Here is an editorial in New Republic, a magazine close to the liberal, white establishment: "Janet Reno should indeed treat the King family's request as a historic opportunity, not to make amends for some imagined federal murder plot, but rather to take a stand against one of the most debilitating ills of our political culture. She can do this by stating forthrightly that the Clinton administration will not launch a new King assassination investigation and that it will not do this because it will not be a party to paranoia."

Here, by contrast, is the view of black politician Charles Evers, whose brother Medgar Evers was, after King, the most prominent martyr of the civil rights movement: "Martin's killing was a well-greased conspiracy, white-run, and whitewashed. James Earl Ray was paid to murder Martin by folk much bigger, richer and smarter than he was." Within one culture, it is unimaginable that James Earl Ray was part of a wider conspiracy. Within another, it is unimaginable that he wasn't. When such contradictory beliefs are held about such events in the recent history of race relations, it is not so surprising that it is hard to get constructive debate on the subject.

Certainly, the one I chaired in Washington last weekend was interesting and intelligent, but never really engaged.

And then later, after the show, Bill Clinton did something impulsive and corny, and strangely eloquent. He was on stage with the cast of Ragtime and was talking in his relaxed, impromptu way. He mentioned the Irish peace process and how it suggests that people could overcome old hatreds.

That seemed to remind him of a book he had been reading, Noel Ignatiev's How the Irish Be- came White, a provocative historical study of the way the Irish in America used racism to transform themselves from an oppressed group equated with blacks to a part of "the white race".

Clinton then returned to Ragtime, and the fact that the bigots who destroy the lives of the blacks in the show are Irish firemen, or as he put it, "my ancestors". The actor who plays their leader was standing behind him in his costume, conspicuous in the scarlet shirt of a volunteer fire chief.

Hearing the President's words, he playfully ducked behind another member of the cast, as if to hide. Sensing the commotion, Clinton turned around and saw him. He walked steadily towards the actor, the villain of the piece, and threw his arms around him, holding him in a fierce embrace.

It was the most brilliant piece of stagecraft I've seen in a long time. But it also made a critical point with extraordinary directness. It said, more powerfully than words, "racism is part of my Irish heritage; it's not just about them, it's about us; the bad guys are not monsters but our kith and kin".

The President of the United States took a hate figure and, in a sense, accepted responsibility for him. In its own way, this silent, momentary image said much of what needs to be said about race.

Fintan O'Toole is temporarily based in New York