I Will Not Call Shots Based on Skin Color

feel I have to give a response after receiving a good deal of red-hot mail on the column I wrote about Alex Haley and the hoax that made him whatever he turned out to be.

The basic idea of those doing the scolding is that it is my duty as a black writer to speak only well of the Negro. I should never engage in "doing the white man's work" by "tearing down" other Afro-Americans. To do otherwise is only to curry favor from "that old pale thing," as Malcolm X described the white man.

I don't buy any of that. I do have a duty, but it is not to somebody's skin color, regardless of what they do. I'll give people a bouquet or a boot to the backside — or, as is sometimes the case with the Rev. Al Sharpton, both at once — depending upon how outstanding or out of whack their latest public moment has been.

Haley ran a game based on the vulnerability of those he hustled. He stole material. He made up ancestry. This has been proven. He was a fraud.

But, some say, "Black people need heroes." This means that because Haley has been made into a hero, he should forever remain in place on his pedestal. Not where I'm coming from, not if he steals someone's material to buttress what must be the biggest literary con in history. This is particularly absurd because we have so many black people who are actual heroes — so many that we can throw a rotten fish back into the water and still have plenty of nourishment when we get home.

Some say Haley's "Roots" did more good than bad because of the attention it brought to slavery and because of the work it gave to so many black actors in the television miniseries based on the book. There is a point to that argument, because our country still has not adequately addressed slavery and because it is still a surprise any time the Negro is depicted on screen as a human being, not a buffoon, knucklehead or hoochie.

At the same time, I would say the book and miniseries helped the pointless Afro-American romance with Africa — a romance that lets Africans off the hook. This has been consistent for about 30 years, but it seems to be abating finally in the face of the truth that Africans were not a bunch of noble savages overrun by the demon white man, but were indispensable to the success of the slave trade.

The reality that should be made clear to those who still want to bow down before "the motherland" is harsh but true: Given our having grown up in — and helped create! — a very sophisticated society, and given the fact that, as of now, American Negroes are the most remarkable black people in the world, we have much, much more to offer Africans than they have to offer us.

Right now, droves upon droves of African girls are being raped because African men believe that having sex with a virgin will cure AIDS. I won't even mention the mutilations and slaughters resulting from tribal hatreds and the multitudes stricken by diseases because of the ignorance of what a little boiled water can do.

We will help Africans, no doubt. But we will surely help ourselves even more if we call the pitches as we actually see them.

The 'Roots'
Of Haley's Great Fraud

Stanley Crouch n the early 1980s, when Alex Haley, the author of "Roots," was speaking at Lincoln Center, investigative reporter Philip Nobile asked him a straightforward question. Since he had paid Harold Courlander $650,000 in a plagiarism suit, why shouldn't Haley be considered a criminal instead of a hero?

Haley had no answer. Well, what would you expect from someone who had pulled off one of the biggest con jobs in U.S. literary history?

Yet the "Roots" hoax has sustained itself. Every PBS station in America refused to show the 1997 BBC documentary inspired by Nobile's reporting on the book. And tomorrow night, NBC will air a retrospective on the 25th anniversary of the popular TV miniseries.

There are a number of reasons the truth about "Roots" is still ignored. One is that black Americans, primarily because of the influence of Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam, became obsessed with being a "lost" people in America, people who had "no knowledge of self." Younger black people were told they were not Americans, but victims of Americanism. Their true identity, Malcolm X said, was African and Islamic. The truth had been hidden from them by the white man, who was the Devil.

Another reason the hoax has held is that Haley, riding on the success of "The Autobiography of Malcolm X," for which he got "as told to" credit, knew how to hustle. He had already been accused of plagiarizing an interview with Miles Davis for Playboy.

So he traveled the country for years promoting a forthcoming book on the Haley family history, which he had miraculously traced back to Africa. Black college students, swept up in the black power movement and romantic ideas about "the motherland," were thrilled at the idea that Haley had proved it was possible to hold up a lantern in the historical darkness and find one's way home.

But the most important reason for the durability of the hoax is white folks. Those at Doubleday who published "Roots" had a best seller and were not interested in people knowing it was phony baloney. David Wolper Productions created the most successful miniseries of its time and was not interested. Federal Judge Robert Ward, who presided over the plagiarism case, protected Haley's reputation.

Ward urged Courlander — the man whose novel "The African" Haley pillaged — to be quiet about his huge settlement. Ward thought that Haley had become too important to black people to be torn down in public. As I said once before in this column a few years ago, that was paternalism at its very worst: Treat them like children; they can't handle the truth.

Haley called Nobile in February 1979 at New York magazine when he was reporting on the federal case. Haley said he shouldn't report on the case because the Ku Klux Klan could use the outcome against his people.

On another occasion, I heard Haley protest on the radio that "they" were trying "to say that black people have no history." At another point, according to Nobile, "He compared the truth about him to those people who attacked Anne Frank and said that there was no Holocaust. He would resort to anything."

Since "Roots" has brought millions of black tourist dollars to Gambia, one Gambian said to me, "Yes, it is a lie but it is a good lie."

The book remains an opportunistic insult to black people, and no amount of excuses will change that harsh fact.

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