Although black culture today is accorded more respect, the tendency to view blacks principally as victims persists. It is part of the symbiosis of white and black cultures, in which the belief is asserted (by whites) and internalized and acted out (by blacks) that black suffering is "authentic" and black success is "selling out."

It's like the call and response that I imagine might have been echoed between an overseer and his slaves, or that which a sergeant and his new recruits might share. The call is "You are doomed, oh yes you are," and the response is "We are doomed, we sure 'nuf are."

Over time, this call and response becomes a silent racial dynamic: The rhythm comforts and the words hypnotize and black students succumb to the Pied Piper's lure of low achievement. In doing so they are answering the call not of black authenticity, as they often believe, but of white racism.

At Harvard College I remember a bitter argument with a Jamaican student who told me that to understand the black experience, I had to be poor. In effect, he was telling me the same thing that Mr. Swenson had: Without failure -- because that's what poverty is in this society -- you are not black. Our identity lies in our powerlessness. Success makes you something other than black -- but not white. And over the years it has surprised me less that, perceiving this, many young blacks choose hell over purgatory. It's still a shame, though, because it keeps black talent mired in low standards, which become low expectations, and the cycle continues.

Recently, a young black mother, educated at MIT, reassured me as our children played in the park that the public schools in our integrated town, Montclair, N.J., were much better than those in New York City. I laughed, "That's like saying purgatory is better than hell."

Her response floored me: "Well, it is," she said.

We do not even think of heaven, much less reach for it.

In the mid-1980s, I attended Harvard Law School, and I remember an impromptu gathering of black students to watch the new, controversial "The Cosby Show." Afterward, one woman proclaimed the show "unrealistic" because the mother had bought her daughter a new dress for a party. Others disagreed.

"Now, you know black people be buyin' a new outfit for a party, whether they have the money or not," someone shouted to general laughter.

I believe that the source of the woman's objection was not that Clair Huxtable had bought her daughter a party dress, but that the Huxtables were a functioning black family, portrayed in celebration and not in crisis. This woman's understanding was that this was, simply, impossible.

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