Those of you who have read the books Winds Of War and War And Remembrance by Herman Wouk were probably struck by the grandeur and panorama (not to mention the graphic details and dialogue) of novels which were meant to describe the world at war during World War Two.

In writing the books, Wouk took pains to place the compelling events (the Pearl Harbor attack, the Battle of Britain, the Holocaust, etc.) in the context of being actually experienced by his excellent ensemble of characters. One of the characters, Natalie Jastrow, a strongwilled and impetuous Jewish young woman, was one of the vehicles Wouk used to convey the horror of the Holocaust.

Wouk introduces Natalie as a person for whom her Jewish identity is almost an afterthought. Thoroughly secular and "Americanized", Natalie is sufficiently casual about her "Jewishness" that she heads into German-attacked Warsaw in 1939 and, in a rendezvous with the German troops who finally overrun the city, flippantly says to them that her name is "Mona Lisa".

As the two books proceed, however, something else is in store for Natalie. Through a series of mixups (many of her own making), Natalie somehow gets herself trapped behind German lines of control. Her status as a Jew becomes more and more and more problematic for her very survival. She moves from being merely inconvenienced because she is a Jew to being nearly destroyed in a German concentration camp. As these events move forward, Natalie's own conception of herself as a Jew changes and it becomes a central part of her psyche.

Clearly, one's own self-conception of one's ethnicity (or "race") depends on the things ("good" and "bad") which one does with other members of the same group. However, an ethnicity or a "racial" consciousness can be shaped by the negativity one receives from persons not in that group.

Being "black" in the United States has both, but, unfortunately, too many people seek a form of "black" unity based primarily on a common sense of being rejected and oppressed by someone else. No thinking person can conceive of a United States which did not, at critical junctures, do everything possible to keep African Americans out of the American mainstream (for starters, one should read Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma). However, as justified as African Americans may be in crying a collective shout of Foul! to their fellow North Americans, one's psyche is not helped by the notion that one's "racial" identity is shaped by someone else's rejection. As one of my African American students asked me a few weeks ago, "Dr. Nelson, what's wrong with us?"

In this type of social environment, One Droppers and their patronizing drivel can thrive. I am sure that many African Americans have heard a fair-skinned person claim that, although he or she is fair, to "The Man" he or she is "just another n-----".

I, for one do not need that kind of person, nor the patronizing tone he or she projects. Deal with me because you have something to share and rejoice in, not because we are common rejects from "The Man".

I have a very strong suspicion that the North American "whites" have a pretty good read on what their racism is all about. Does a One Dropper claiming to me that, although she's half-white, "The Man" looks at her as "just another n-----", help "whites" to be any more receptive to darker-skinned persons as human beings? Does that kind of thinking allow people to differentiate between that life that people create here and now in the U.S. and the one created in 1940s Nazi-controlled Europe? After we finish talking about The Man not liking us, what else is there to talk about? What are we going to celebrate together?

If there is going to be anyone "uniting" with me, it will be because of something positive that person can give me, not negative.

Let us continue to fight color prejudice and what passes as "racism" in the U.S. and elsewhere, but let's do it as selectors and bridge-builders, not rejects.

William Javier Nelson

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