Revisiting The Roots Of Black Rage And White Guilt At A Party At Lenny's

A 1970 grand fête at Leonard Bernstein's reveals the self-victimizing seeds planted for today's antiracist Uncle Toms

The Black Panthers doing that Scary Negro thing. They were good at feeding poor ghetto kids, better at scaring white people. Photo courtesy of the State Governors’ Negative Collection, 1949-1975, Washington State Archives. CC0 2.0 image from Wikimedia Commons

New York Magazine writer Tom Wolfe coined the term ‘Radical Chic’ in his hilarious, derisive dissection of an oh-so-fashionable-daaaaaahling party for chi-chi white liberals in 1970. Those who attended called it a ‘meeting’, (sounds so much more serious than 'party’, you know) at Leonard and Felicia Bernstein’s posh Park Avenue apartment. Guests included Barbara Walters, movie directors Otto Preminger and Sidney Lumet, Julie Belafonte (Harry’s kid), and the rest mostly celebrity names from their time we’ve forgotten, or the insular New York high society socialites whose names we hoi polloi never knew.

The purpose of the party/meeting (‘happening’?) was to raise criminal defense funds for the Panther 21, those flamboyant ‘revolutionaries’ of the early Black Power movement who were done with the well-dressed early civil rights ‘chumps’, those ‘Toms’ in suits ‘three sizes’ too large—Martin Luther King, Philip Randolph, James Farmer, Whitney Young, Roy Wilkins. The time for talk was over and the time for action was now. The Panthers, who whipped out their big guns and looked badass and mean and preached that the Black Man should use violence if necessary to defend himself from Whitey’s racist power structure, had been accused of plotting to blow up five New York department stores, some Connecticut railroad facilities, a police station and, for some weird reason (a hate-on for the White Man’s horticulture?) the Bronx Botanical Gardens.

Wolfe was not invited but managed to slip in anyway like Jeffrey Goldberg on a Signal chat. He sat in a chair observing all that went on while taking notes in shorthand. Five months later, his essay Radical Chic appeared in New York Magazine, reviving the hubbub that had ensued days after the party when a fellow slick reporter, from the New York Times, reported it and drew hellacious wrath from social critics. Wolfe’s article lampooned the Beautiful People who seemed more interested in what we today would call ‘virtue signalling’, whose First World challenges included the very serious problem of trying to find white servants because it just wouldn’t do, darrrrrrling, to have Negroes serving at an affair like this! Wolfe’s scene-setting illustrates them with his frighteningly detailed knowledge of haute couture, ridiculously expensive imported furniture and architecture, and ingredients in fancy hors d’oeuvres that’s rivalled only by cheesy New York Boring Rich People novelist Domenick Dunne.

He lampooned, further, Panther ‘mau-mauing’; a slang term with a murky etiology, meaning intimidation tactics designed to scare white folks. Mau-mauing consisted of violent rhetoric, divisive language and gun-waving, although Lenny’s guests left theirs at home. Scare honkeys, don’t actually hurt them. Wolfe went into greater depth of such tactics in a similar essay entitled Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers about bullying well-meaning bureaucrats—‘flak catchers’—trying to help poor blacks in San Francisco, hobbled by obstructive bureaucracy and corruption.

The radicals chose a more moderately aggressive style to solicit the defense fund donations on this fine afternoon at Lenny’s, as Wolfe repeatedly referred to his clueless host.

Just being the Panthers mau-maued the hoity-toity crowd plenty, nevertheless impressed with Real Panthers. Wolfe compared it to a century-old French idea—nostalgie de la boue, ‘nostalgia for the mud’, or an attraction to lowlife culture and degradation. It’s slumming for the rich, cultural appropriation for the privileged. Think of Marie Antoinette’s fake on-premise ‘village’ at Versailles. Think of middle-class white kids adopting ghetto lingo and rap talk and pretending to be ‘bangers. Think Rachel Dolezal.

In all fairness, the Panthers had gotten a ridiculously bad rap for crimes whose alleged plots were found to have been instigated by undercover infiltrators. Their bails were insanely high—$100,000 in some cases, which is over $800,000 today. And they hadn’t even tipped over a cow or an old white lady. The Panthers had too-successfully mau-maued the entire U.S. Justice Department.

They didn’t have to engage in violence; and they mostly didn’t, except against the police; they just had to convince white people they might, or they would, or that they had already, because there was no Google or Snopes back then to call them out on their radical affectations. All they had to do to pry moolah out of these bored rich shits was to talk like South American banana republic revolutionaries.

These were the early seeds of black self-disempowerment and self-victimization exploiting white guilt to unravel the ‘Tom’s’ sense of maturity, cooperation with others and above all personal responsibility to seize the day and make the most of loosening racial discrimination bonds. Today’s ‘antiracism’ has since raised self-victimization to an art form. ‘Antiracists’ pretend to be violent and revolutionary, but are mostly a threat to statues; they otherwise threaten to ‘tear it all down’ and claim it’s the only way to fix a ‘hopelessly racist society’.

Just like the Panthers did, yet didn’t.

In 1970, testosterone-fueled youth rioted in cities around America without recognizing that tearing and burning down their own communities hurt only themselves, rather than a Bloomingdale or Bonwit Teller, which would have brought home black frustration to cloistered whites in their own ‘hoods. One young radical from that time, although not a Panther himself, was a fellow named Shelby Steele, whose own greatest act of defiance against the White Man was impudently sprinkling cigarette ashes on the rug of a college president as he and his young stud friends issued demands.

Steele grew up to become a leading author and documentary maker who criticized his callow youth’s militants for relying on affectatious black rage to cajole handouts given to assuage white guilt rather than develop black communities and themselves. He condemned the militants’ intellectual laziness and self-crippling beliefs that he sees today in his weakened college students. He wrote a whole book about it: White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era.

Black Power’s grandchildren now mouth the same tired lines from their middle- and upper-class homes, attending elitist schools that cost more per semester than their sharecropper granddaddy made in a lifetime.

‘Toms’, as black militants derided the earliest civil rights activists, dressed up for marches and protests, to demonstrate to the white system that black people were worthy of dignity and respect.

Black Power thought that was for ‘chumps’ and, with the help of well-meaning white liberals, rich or not, worked together to disempower American blacks as they held out their hands once again like ‘Toms’ from decades past, asking white people for more favors.

Steele preferred white help rather than white intervention to right the wrongs. Blacks were not, as the ‘Toms’ taught, helpless in the face of monolithic white power doled out in small, nonthreatening packages by liberal politicians and swanky celebrities and socialites. White help is holding out one’s hand to help someone up from the ground; she still has to engage her muscles to impel herself up and stand on her own.

Although Black Power encouraged black pride and self-determination, it seemed to believe it couldn’t be accomplished without a lot of white intervention.

Saturday Night Live satirizes ‘radical chic’ in a 1982 sketch about a whitey-hating black poet

Anger, injustice and opportunity

‘Tom’-my guilt-tripping for money, like reparations, suggests an aggrieved group is childlike, incapable, simply, of handling their affairs themselves.

Steele admired the MLK ‘Toms’ rejection of violence as a sign of their power of ‘moral witness’. These well-dressed Negroes embodying white respectability were cruelly beaten on camera; a little black girl in a pretty dress walked to school surrounded by towering white men protecting her from a lengthy, blocks-long gauntlet of screaming white faces.

The middle-class optics didn’t look good on the six o’clock news. These ‘Negroes’ seized the day.

These were adults, children, just trying to be normal Americans, prevented by suburban crazies deeply wounded at kids just trying to get an education like their own. What angered the Black Power militants was its passivity; letting redneck sheriffs attack you in your respectable clothes without fighting back.

The anger they felt, Steele argues, “is chosen when weakness in the oppressor means it will be effective in winning freedom or justice or spoils of some kind. Anger in the oppressed is a response to perceived opportunity, not to injustice.” He further noted that anger escalated not with more injustice but with less injustice.

Let that sink in for a moment.

The less oppressed the Angry Black Person becomes, the angrier s/he gets, because “weakness in the oppressor calls out anger even when there is no wound or injustice.” [Last italics Steele’s]

Sound familiar? Have you seen this white guilt-driven mini-movie several times before? Maybe even in one day?

Lenny’s liberals’ hearts wanted to understand, others already did. Plenty of Lenny’s guests were Jews who already supported black civil rights because they identified with their struggles. They’d been shut out from polite society too; they had been pogromed and murdered too and excluded from all the good jobs. Ironically, the Panthers offered in return gratuitous antisemitism and anti-Zionism, which didn’t amuse their host and several of his Jewish guests.

There was a place for militancy in 1970 America where many white people were still just wrapping their heads around the fact that maybe it was a little unfair that all the American Dream required was European genetics.

But the militancy mindfucked white liberals to surrender their moral authority while they did the same to black communities to reject their power by re-assuming the victim role. The Tom.

Black anti-white racism grew, as Steele noted, in direct proportion to each legal and policy reduction of genuine black grievance.

Today’s ‘antiracists’ are so little oppressed they’ve had to invent ‘microaggressions’ to feed the cultural need for rage rather than recognize a helping hand is all most black people need anymore. Adults can stand on their own.

As Steele noted, “We also have never allowed our performance in sports, music, literature, or entertainment to be contingent on whether or not others helped us.”

The real story

As I wrote this, Michael Shermer’s Skeptic Substack featured an article on recent research on American social mobility and fairness. Here’s a shocker: It’s better to be born into a rich family than a poor one. Regardless of race, kids from better-off families face more lucrative futures than kids in poor communities. The presence of black fathers is important, but, the research found that growing up in a neighborhood with many active black fathers mattered more than a two-parent household. In ‘hoods with a high percentage of fatherless single parents, kids do much more poorly and are less inclined to earn highly, regardless of color. The worst birth lottery disadvantage is poverty and disappearing dads. Not color.

Pretending it’s all about racism lets whites off the hook so they don’t have to address the real root cause: Economic privilege. Asking the white power structure to do something real—change laws and policies that would result in reducing tax breaks for the middle class and wealthy, and raising property taxes to fund better schools, and elimination of elite private school legacy admissions (‘DEI’ for rich white C- kids), would accomplish real economic equality.

Social justice too often stops at the wallet. For everyone.

Had the later black civil rights movement stuck with the messaging of the older black nerds in dorky suits, it could have lifted all the boats rather than leaving the rich to conclude the more money you have, the less tax you should pay, and dole out handouts as required, sometimes.

Economic empowerment has to lift all boats. Not all America’s ‘oppressors’ are white, and not all the oppressed aren’t.

Woke up and smell the opportunity!

When I’m not wielding my verbal chainsaw against wokeness left or right, I help women and others reclaim their power here at Grow Some Labia.