THE GREAT actor Morgan Freeman, one of the most renowned American artists of the last 40 years, has long regarded Black History Month as patronizing and divisive.
Nearly 20 years ago, in a "60 Minutes" interview with the late Mike Wallace, Freeman dismissed Black History Month as "ridiculous." When a nonplussed Wallace asked why, Freeman indignantly replied: "You're going to relegate my history to a month? . . . What do you do with yours? Which month is White History Month?"
The actor went on to make the eminently sensible point that "Black history is American history," not some segregated adjunct to it. The most effective way to get beyond racial divisions, he said, is to "stop talking about it. I'm going to stop calling you a white man, and I'm going to ask you to stop calling me a Black man."
That was in 2005, when Freeman won an Academy Award for his portrayal of Eddie Dupris, the ex-boxer who narrates "Million Dollar Baby." All these years later, his view hasn't changed. Speaking last April to the Sunday Times, he repeated the point: "Black history is American history; they're completely intertwined."
Freeman is not the first Black artist or thinker to insist that American society would be better off if we stopped pigeonholing each other by race and acting as if racial categories are endowed with moral meaning.
Frederick Douglass, the most formidable abolitionist and civil rights leader of the 19th century, consistently maintained that "the color line" should "cease to have any civil, political, or moral significance" in America. "There is no moral or intellectual quality in the color of a man's cuticle," he declared. When his marriage to Helen Pitts, a white teacher, provoked comment, Douglass wrote to a friend: "What business has the world with the color of my wife?"
In an interview with The Washington Post, he was unequivocal. "I conceive that there is no division of races; God Almighty made but one race," he said. "You may say that Frederick Douglass considers himself a member of the one race which exists."
 Zora Neale Hurston |
A generation after Douglass's death, Zora Neale Hurston, the author and anthropologist who became a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance, expressed the same distaste for racial chauvinism. "Why should I be proud to be a Negro?" she wrote in "Dust Tracks on a Road," her 1942 autobiography.
Why should anybody be proud to be white? Or yellow? Or red? After all, the word "race" is a loose classification of physical characteristics. It tells nothing about the insides of people. . . . Race Pride and Race Consciousness seem to me to be not only fallacious, but a thing to be abhorred. It is the root of misunderstanding and hence misery and injustice.
Not for a moment did Hurston deny her Black identity or the richness of Black American life. A trained scholar who studied at Barnard and Columbia universities, she immersed herself in Southern Black folk culture, researched African American musical traditions, and interviewed survivors of the slave era. She also created some of the most memorable Black characters in American letters — especially Janie Mae Crawford, the protagonist of her finest novel, "Their Eyes Were Watching God."
But she consistently refused to see herself as "tragically colored" or to adopt the view that race confers meaning. In a famous — and funny — 1928 essay, "How It Feels to Be Colored Me," Hurston described her childhood in the all-Black town of Eatonville, Fla., and remarked that it wasn't until her family moved to Jacksonville that she became aware of the racial label society assigned her. "I was not Zora of Orange County any more," she wrote, "I was now a little colored girl."
In her own mind, however, the color of her skin — or of anyone else's — was a matter of no relevance. "I belong to no race nor time," she averred. "I have no separate feeling about being an American citizen and colored." When someone discriminated against her because she was Black, her reaction was less anger than astonishment. "How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company!" Hurston marveled. "It's beyond me."
In an introduction to a recent edition of "Their Eyes Were Watching God," Zadie Smith, the celebrated British novelist, observes that Hurston was incapable of being "color-struck." Blackness was "as natural and inevitable and complete" to Hurston, writes Smith, as Frenchness would have been to Flaubert. "It is also as complicated, as full of blessings and curses. One can be no more removed from it than from one's arm, but it is no more the total measure of one's being than an arm is."
That is beautifully put. The human arm is undoubtedly a wonder, but no one would make it the essence of their identity. Why should the color of that arm be any different?
To be sure, in our era influential opinion-makers insist that color is supremely important. But that is not the classically liberal American view, the view espoused by Douglass, Freeman, and Hurston, the view encapsulated in Martin Luther King Jr.'s most famous quotation. Given our nation's difficult history, true colorblindness is still only an aspiration. But surely the path to a society in which racial labels will be truly irrelevant is to act, whenever possible, as if we are already there.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Remembering Larry Henry
Fifteen years ago this month, my friend Larry Henry died of kidney failure. If in those days you were a reader of The American Spectator, a conservative journal of opinion founded by R. Emmett Tyrell Jr., you were almost certainly one of Larry's fans. He wrote a regular column for the magazine and periodic blog posts for its website. Between his extraordinary range of interests and experiences and his extraordinary gift for language, Larry's prose was irresistible — humane, shrewd, amused, thoughtful, and wholly irresistible.
I wrote a short piece about Larry when he died and I spoke at his memorial service at Saint John's Episcopal Church in Boston. The anniversary of his death brings thoughts of him to mind, and I want to share some recollections of that good man.
In the course of a decade or more, I don't think Larry and I actually saw each other in person more than a dozen times. We spoke on the phone even less often. It was through writing that we got to know each other — through our public columns and private emails. Larry the Musician, Larry the Golfer, Larry the Youthful Hellraiser, Larry the PR-and-Advertising Guy, I never got to know. But what a blessing it was to have known the friendship of Larry the Writer.
He could write about anything, and did. He had an astonishing talent for generating clear English prose about the most incredible assortment of topics: About flying in the Goodyear blimp. About why you see more dimes and quarters than nickels. About memorizing "Old Ironsides." About why he refused to view the video of Saddam Hussein's execution. About the glories of the Stratocaster guitar. About the ridiculousness of Massachusetts politics. About the year he spent in Wasilla, Alaska. And about being sick — very sick, over and over again.
Larry and I traded emails frequently. Often we wrote to each other about the news of the day, but he was just as apt to share a passage in Isaiah that had moved him, or to fill me in on the latest in his quest for a kidney transplant. Above all we corresponded about the delights and puzzles and frustrations of fatherhood. It may have been politics and current events that first sparked our connection but it was the common experience of raising sons that turned our acquaintance into a friendship.
I asked Larry one time what he thought of suspending reading privileges as a punishment for a bright, book-loving kid — my older boy, Caleb — who had misbehaved in some egregious way. He replied by describing the sort of discipline that had worked with Bud, his oldest — and how completely flummoxed he was to discover that it had exactly the opposite effect on Joe, his younger son. "Obviously, I don't know a thing," Larry emailed.
"Don't know a thing"? Larry knew more things, and lived a life brimming with more experiences, than any three people I can think of offhand. From writing ad copy to running a local paper, from playing in a rock band to OD'ing on the Golf Channel, from losing his kidneys to finding God, there seemed to be nothing Larry hadn't done, nothing he couldn't turn into a timely and topical column.
For years I have ended each issue of Arguable with the last line of a book, a poem, a song, or some other creative work. Of all the last lines I have ever read or heard, I think my very favorite is from "Charlotte's Web," the beloved children's novel by E.B. White: "It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer."
Larry Henry was both.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
What I Wrote Then
25 years ago on the op-ed page
From "A convert to peacemaking," Feb. 11, 1999:
An extraordinary moment occurred in March 1997, when [King] Hussein visited the grieving families of seven Israeli girls shot dead by a deranged Jordanian soldier. He knelt before the mourners, tears in his eyes, words of comfort on his lips. It was an act of humanity and poignancy unprecedented in modern Middle East history.
The greatness of King Hussein was not that he devoted his life to peace. It was that he was able to rise above himself, to break through a mindset of violence and become an apostle of reconciliation. That is what the world has lost, and why Israelis lowered their flags to half-mast when their former enemy died last Sunday.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
The Last Line
"Good-bye, Mary Poppins. Don't stay away too long." — Bert the chimney-sweep (played by Dick Van Dyke) in "Mary Poppins" (1964)
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe).
-- ## --
Follow Jeff Jacoby on X (aka Twitter).
Discuss his columns on Facebook.
Want to read more? Sign up for "Arguable," Jeff Jacoby's free weekly email newsletter.