A White Homeboy Wannabee Comes To His Senses In The Ghetto - Progressivism Has Its Limits After All

Franchot Roberts, a lifelong progressive, had a long and engaged relationship with black people.  His father, Leonard, had travelled on Freedom Rides to Selma and Birmingham, and his mother, Lutece, had been in the Free Speech movement at Berkeley and a revolutionary guard of the Weathermen. She never admitted it, but it was received wisdom that she had been the lover of Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown. 

The Roberts left town before the Berkeley campus was cleared and before Brown, Carmichael, and their colleagues were arrested, exiled, or went underground. The couple maintained an overt civility and temperance as they entered the mainstream and settled into a middle class existence in a suburb of New York, but they never lost their political fervor and continued to be progressive activists.  

No cause was beyond their interest or reach, and they became well known in progressive circles.  Leonard was often seen at the protests against war, capitalism, and Jim Crow; and Lutece was an early pioneer of gay feminism. 'My cunt is my property', she said, introducing herself to a West Village audience. 'Suck it, lick it, finger it; but it is mine and mine alone'.

So it was no surprise that their son, Franchot (Frankie) Roberts, was a slice of the same cheese, a committed, activist liberal who was as heartfelt and deeply passionate about progressive causes as his parents.  He however, had more focus.  Instead of his parents' generalized socialism, Frankie was singular in his desire to improve the lot of the black man who had been long oppressed, discriminated against, and suffered for two centuries under the yoke of white racism.   

 

The problem as Franchot saw it was that he was white, and no political animism could possibly change that.  In his earlier years he affected ghetto slang and intonation, everything was about the 'hood, his brahs, and the life of the street.  He drank malt liquor, smoked Kools, shucked and jived, but never arrived.  That seminal, apocryphal, defining moment of true brotherhood escaped him.  'Goddamn my whiteness' he shouted to no one in particular, but vowed to supersede the confines of color and become as black as any of the homeboys in Anacostia.

 

'Whatchoo doin' up in here, white boy', said Pharoah Jones, the 'Boss of Blackness' as he was known in the ghetto, the man whose hatred for the white man exceeded any of Stokely, Malcolm, or Rap.  He was the black devil, the African savage, the unhinged black terror. 

Black people were not supposed to be so scary, but Pharoah, all silver-grilled, pimped out, Caddie-wagon pure ghetto scared the living shit out of Franchot.  He fumbled and stumbled but managed something about solidarity and caring; but the oversized black man only laughed.  'Off this fool', he said to his crew.  

Of course since anybody white in the 'hood meant largesse, easy money, entitlement, walkin' around money, maybe this ofay had some, so Franchot was given a temporary pass. 

'Empty yo' pockets, boy ', instructed Pharoah to which Franchot dug deep and came up with seventy-five cents, a Metro ticket, and a pack of Dentine. Not enough for the price of admission; but Frankie, schooled in the high art of political rhetoric - chicanery by another name - gave it a whirl, making a case for progressive solidarity, good will and new financial instruments which were as undetectable and promising as Enron's had been. He was a white man with black interests at heart and cards on the table. 

 

Black and white hearts beat to the same rhythm - both attuned to cons, advantage, and suckering.  Pharoah, his stable of women, his accountants, his entrepreneurs, and his pimps had taken whitey for a ride for years, now this fool, with clear desires to be one of the brotherhood but with money in the bank was the mark.  

For years Frankie wondered what it would be like to eat black pussy, the nectar of Africa, the juice of the forest gods; and, carried away, he added sexual delights to his racial ambitions.  Once one got over the kinky hair, as tight and wiry as a scrub brush, he would be home free in the Garden of Earthly Delights.  

He had never had the desire or the inclination, but he knew that true brotherhood and solidarity had to be annealed by sexual union.  At some point in his conversional journey, he would have bed down with a black woman. 

Disparagement and adulation were the crossbeams of whites' view of blacks. N-word on the one hand, forest-dweller, a direct descendant of Lucy, one of the chosen on the other, and Franchot was no different; but he could change sides, elide and slide with ease.

He never got that far, for after spending a few hours picking his way through rat-infested trash, needles, burned out cars, hookers, pimps, and nasty, empty-shelved stores, he had had enough.  Nothing had prepared him for reality, the stinking, foul reality of the ghetto. Progressivism had its limits after all. 

Whoa!, insisted his good, tolerant, inclusive side.  These people have been put upon for generations, oppressed, abused, and marginalized.  No time period is enough to right the moral ship, to recalibrate the racial algorithm, to restore dignity and trust, to let opportunity gain traction. 

But the years of progressive cant, harping insistence, and anti-historical notions of blacks' high natural endowment had taken its toll.  Franchot, although primed to see a new Eden in the making, could only see indifference, bullying ignorance, and social riot.  Had the contrast been any less sharp, he might have squeezed in a bit more tolerance; but as it was, he couldn't spend one more hour in this benighted, awful place.  

'Whiteness is where it's at', he said as he turned his back on ghetto-worship, tribal idolatry, and black racial superiority.  Not only were the progressive propositions about race as false as could be, but the whole progressive premise of social reform on which cries of racism were based was outed as folly, nonsense, and complete fol-de-rol. 

'Traitor...apostate...turncoat...' were the kindest words his progressive colleagues could manage when cancelling Franchot.  His turnabout was unthinkable, given his long history of progressive faith and fidelity; but there it was, left for others to ponder.  Like most progressives who become conservatives if given enough time, Franchot could only ask, 'What took me so long?'

It was the time of Trump, so as convinced as he was of the folly of progressivism, he couldn't quite make the leap to the other side; but the more his former colleagues turned into whirling dervishes, mad, apoplectic St. Vitus dancers, the more he cottoned to Trump's political purpose.  He turned the corner and signed up, and like Catholic converts who become more Catholic than the Pope, Franchot became an unintimidated, passionate spokesman for the conservative cause. 

'It's a good thing your parents are not alive to see you now', said a second cousin, mighty in her undiluted progressive passion, but a volte face when it comes to inane things is no shame, and although Franchot was canceled by former colleagues and friends, he made new ones, white ones, rich ones, happy ones - not one among them mired in black-worship, or tangled in racial weeds.