CONFESSIONS OF A WHITE RACIST

by Larry L. King ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 25, 1971

Larry King has written what he calls ""a gratuitous admission of guilt on behalf of all white racists past and present, malignant and benign."" Sorrowful and full of forebodings he is haunted by a sense of historical retribution that promises to rain ""a racial Armageddon"" on red-neck and liberal alike. A night watchman's son from a small west Texas town, he did a postwar stint in the army, hacked out a career as journalist on various small southern newspapers, and served as aide to a mildly liberal Texas legislator before coming north to Babylon -- Harper's Magazine and Harvard University. As a personal odyssey it's modest enough, but then King sees himself as a kind of white racist Everyman. When a small child ""I often sat on my father's knee while he sang 'The Nigger Preacher and the Bear,'"" and so forth and so on everywhere he travelled meeting the ubiquitous racial slurs, stereotypes, embarrassments, reflex resentments: no one raised in America can escape the contamination. Now, after the murder of Emmett Till and the lynching of Mack Parker, after the lunch-counter sit-ins and the freedom rides, after Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott, Autherine Lucy at Little Rock and James Meredith at Ole Mississippi, he suspects that little enough has changed; the ghettoes fester and the guilt has not been expunged. ""You name it, we deplored it, and said somebody should do something about it. And nobody much did."" But today young blacks cultivate their own hatred of Whitey, judging ""as arbitrarily as I once judged them."" Wearily, he confesses that he and most of his white liberal friends have ""run out of crusading gases."" Free of breast-bating, this is a muted mea culpa which peters out irresolutely, draws no conclusions, provides no answers, offers no promises of a new day. Everything about King's coming of age in America seems very familiar, even unto banality. But then, that's exactly his lugubrious point.

Pub Date: May 25, 1971

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1971

Categories: NONFICTION