Black Like Me

I recently read two very different mysteries built on a premise of race relations.

This interests me, because my first book, Red Crush, is built on that same foundation. Rex Stout’s Right to Die was written in 1964, around the time that the civil rights movement reached a fervent peak. Walter Mosley’s Little Scarlet, while written in 2004, takes place during the Watts riots in 1965, while my book, Red Crush, takes place after the 1967 Detroit riots.

Each story places a white person at the center of a predominantly black culture. Stout’s character, Susan Brooke, is a dilettante from Racine, WI who works at a civil rights organization until she is murdered in her Harlem apartment. Mosley’s Easy Rawlins follows the trail of a mysterious white man who was beaten up in Watts, but is implicated in the death of a black woman who took him in after the beating. My own Frank Healy is dropped into the bosom of black laborers at a Univers Industries plant as people are dying in industrial “accidents.”

The contrasts among the black characters in the stories reveal much about the times they were written and the perspectives of the respective authors.

Rex Stout portrays his protagonists as liberal and race blind. The principal black characters defy the stereotypes of the times, being highly educated, well-spoken, and deeply prejudiced against white people. The white people are wealthy, well-educated and liberal, but still deeply prejudiced. Everyone is opposed to the expected marriage of white Susan with black Dunbar Whipple. After parading a host of seemingly liberal murder candidates, white and black, all of whom oppose the marriage, Stout springs a racist murderer who rages because her son, jilted by Susan, committed suicide. How dare she fall for a lowly black man, after rejecting her son?

Stout seems bent on destroying stereotypes. We are all racist, no matter what we say or do. Right?

Walter Mosley seems to have stewed on his story for a long time. Black Easy Rawlins is sent into riotous Watts because the white police are afraid that none of the potential witnesses will cooperate. While the plot twists slowly in the smoky wind, Mosley parades a cast of characters only a sociologist could love. They all distrust the police, but casually engage in flagrant disregard for the law, dealing in looted goods as if they are the rightful spoils of war. The police earn their distrust by hassling Rawlins despite his free pass from the commissioner. In the end, it is the same story as Stout tells: someone is outraged that a white man and a black woman could be in love.

My story tries to put the blacks in a subordinate, but sympathetic light. They are an oppressed class bent on seizing their rightful place in modern society. Only the minions of the callous, amoral corporation stand in their way. Frank obliges them by removing the principal impediment.

You might think that America is a post-racial society, but the conflict is deeply ingrained in the American psyche. Fifty years after civil rights legislation passed, we are still fighting for equality and dignity. 

Nothing has really changed.