Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism

The narrator has a strange vision on top of a mountain. A voice much like James Earl Jones’s (known as the voice of Darth Vader) declares that it has been waiting for him. In a room there is a computer bearing a message; the message is at first a command for the professor to express himself. The command is taken from a dialect poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar, an African American poet of the late 19th and early 20th century. The machine transmits into the narrator’s head five rules governing when white people accept African Americans’ right to speak and be heard. The professor wakes to find the rules have been transcribed to paper and that Geneva is standing nearby. He shares the rules with her, and they engage in dialogue about the rules.

The first rule is that when African Americans talk about racism or speak positively about another African American person (especially as a recommendation for a job), white people will not take them seriously. African Americans need to take this into account since even an objective or mixed recommendation will lead white people to see the recommendation as negative.

The second rule is that African American victims of racism are discounted in the courts and daily life in comparison to white people because people assume African Americans cannot be objective about matters of race.