10.
Africa has grown tremendously over the last twenty years, They have an
awful lot in common. They are pariah states in the world, including also
Taiwan. They are pariah states that are virtually recognized and
supported nowhere outside of the western community. Israel feels itself
besieged by Palestinians that they have disinherited in the same way
that South Africa has done with blacks. They have a connecting Jewry.
The South African Jewry is the largest per capita giving Jewry to Israel of any in the world, including the United States. And the Jews in South
Africa sort of struck a deal with the state that they have gotten away from the cause of blacks at home if they are allowed to continue their
support of Israel. We've seen a relaxation of restrictions on the exportof
capital and other things because of this sort of deal they struck with
the government, and their support of Israel has been lavish. So I think
that is a part, too, just as an aside, of the sort of coming apart of the traditional Black American-Jewish coalition in the United States.
X: In the presidential campaign President Carter suggested that President
Reagan has racist sentiment and is a warmonger. Looking at the new president's record, the last three months especially, do you tend to
agree with President Carter?
R: Sure I do. Racist probably in an absent-minded sense too. Itis sort
of like Gerald Ford. They used to say that Gerald Ford couldn't walk
past a fallen person in the street without offering his coat and picking
him up and taking him to feed them, but if they don't have to look at the victims, conservatives can just as easily wipe them out. I think,
in meetings that friends of mine have had with Reagan recently, they describe him as a man who'd been wealthy for so long that he really
doesn't have any appreciation for those who don't have those capacities.
They are not a part of his reality. He doesn't even think like that, he
doesn't even see you. You just don't register, and you're not in that crowd, we're not in the White House, we're not in the State Department.
It was bad enough under Carter. I used to walk into the State Department,
they have pictures on the board there of all the top level people, the
top hundred, and during Carter's best days there were only four or five blacks on the board. No ; the board is white, all white. So that's what
welre operating with here. And again, if you're making foreign policy
out of that kind of situation, you've got to be insensitive because you've
excluded from the process other points of view that would help sensitize
you, help you to make better policy. But threats a lot to be said in a
relationship between domestic policy and foreign policy. It is a policy that is insensitive, that is callous, that is cold, it doesn't care about
the human rights of people across the board. We got from Carter, just
before he went out of office, an executive order to ban the export of
hazardous waste. You remember they had the idea last year, some of the stuff you're scared to bury in the ground of this country, and a lot of
it was being buried in black communities in the south, this stuff that'll
bubble up in twenty years and kill everybody in town. This is the stuff
that they wanted to ship to Sierra Leone and other parts of the world.
The first thing Reagan did when he got into office was to rescind that
executive order. So we can start shipping that stuff again. Just completely knocked out the law of the sea understandings. I mean, across