The Rage of a Privileged Class.

THE RAGE OF A PRIVILEGED CLASS

Ellis Cose

HarperCollins, $20, 192 pp.

In his novel The Fall, Albert Camus puts into the mouth of his narrator the story of "that little Frenchman at Buchenwald who insisted on registering a complaint with the clerk, himself a prisoner, who was recording his arrival. A complaint? The clerk and his comrades laughed: 'Useless, old man. You don't lodge a complaint here.' 'But you see, sir,' said the little Frenchman, 'my case is exceptional. I am innocent."'

That story came to mind repeatedly as I read Ellis Cose's essay on the contemporary middle-class black experience. Maybe it was their actual testimony or maybe it was the way Cose presented it, but most of his interview subjects seemed baffled that, lo these many years after the high tide of the civil rights struggle, racism and inequity continue to limit the lives and fortunes of African-Americans, themselves included. In their different ways, they all seemed like the naive little Frenchman at Buchenwald. Except that, instead of "I am innocent," their protests ran, "I went to Harvard," or "I paid my dues," or "I was a loyal employee."

The jacket of this book should carry the line, "As immediate as today's headlines." Surely one variant or another of each of these stories has appeared somewhere in the New York Times and other newspapers over the last few years. That probably accounts for the shopworn feel of them--at least to this black reader. It is hard for me to believe that many of the whites who may buy this book will find them new--much less newly disturbing--but anything is possible.

Give Cose credit. He took on a formidable challenge--scarcely less formidable than that undertaken last year by those who argued in Washington against higher taxes on the wealthy. Cose, a Newsweek contributing editor, wanted to give expression to the genuine and, doubtless, justified anguish and "rage" of those who, like him and me, have enjoyed the finest fruits of the civil rights struggle and of those who gave their lives and labor to it.

At one level he succeeds. He does, indeed, give faithful, credible expression to the anxieties and dilemmas of that group. But the unspoken second part of his project--to create sympathy, or at least empathy, for them--is a failure. It could hardly have been otherwise; these are, after all, the dilemmas and anxieties of a "privileged class." And in a world where there are infinite claims on people's attentions and concerns and consciences, the problems of the privileged are understandably low on the priority list.

Cose does not help his cause with some of his arguments. His discussion of crime--rather, of the tendency to identify blacks with crime--struck me as particularly disingenuous. Not that his facts are wrong: It really is a tiny percentage of the black male population that is responsible for the crime that has created the identification in popular thought between blacks and crime. (That identification is not solely a phenomenon among whites. The Reverend Jesse Jackson's recent startling remarks on the subject indicate that blacks themselves often make the same equation.)

But in refuting whites who deplore the black crime problem and the problem of guilt-by-racial association that it creates for middle-class blacks, Cose employs an old and not entirely honorable debater's trick. The white critics' assertion of a public perception becomes, in the course of Cose's discussion, advocacy of that perception. Thus, he can write:

"Not even most bigots would argue that since the Mafia is dominated by Italians, crime is an 'Italian problem' that can only be solved by Italians....Yet that is precisely the approach many reputable people [he previously had mentioned Daniel Patrick Moynihan, James Q. Wilson, and Edward Koch as examples] are now recommending in regard to blacks. And it is a most pernicious proposal. To contend that we should penalize all members of a racial or ethnic group because some members are engaged in egregious behavior is to enter into a pact with the devil whose evil has no end."

Thus does Cose set up and destroy a straw man. Meanwhile, the real point and the genuine fact go unrefuted: Much of the hell being caught by middle-class blacks is the result of a public perception that black equals criminal, and the hell-catching won't diminish appreciably until the crime does. And no amount of intellectualizing will change that, because this has become an issue not of the head, but of the viscera.

The problem with a book as immediate as today's headlines is that it is as quickly outdated as yesterday's headlines. Ironically, however, it is one of yesterday's headlines--Colin Ferguson's apparently racially motivated shooting rampage on the Long Island Railroad-- that may make Cose's book worth reading for a while to come. Sometimes, the rage of the privileged boils over into violence.