White House Race, Negro Style

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31760, 17 August 1968, Page 13

White House Race, Negro Style

(N.Z P.A.-Reuter —Copyright) NEW YORK, Aug. 16.

While white America battles over the Presidency, black Americans are running their own version of the race for the White House. The black Presidential race is enacted in a new fireside game called “50 Easy Steps to the White House,” one of a crop of politically-orientated black laughter-makers marketed in America. The game, basically a vari-

ation of monopoly, satirises the social and political situation in which the Negro finds himself today. Each of the 50 steps to the executive mansion is a square on the game-board—many of them fraught with the kind of pitfalls and blocks to progress which many black Americans have experienced. The starting point is one of four black United States trouble spots—New York’s Harlem, the Watts area of Los Angeles, and the cities of Mississippi and Newark. Up to four players take turns rolling the dice, advancing their markers according to the number they throw. If a player manages to overcome setbacks like landing on square three (detained by police for loitering while waiting for a train), avoids gaol and arrives at No. 13, he is faced with two avenues of advance, moderate or militant

The moderate road has such traps as landing on 16 (caught reading a Black Muslim paper—go back to 13 and become militant) or 21 (seen lunching with the Black Power advocate, Mr Stokely Carmichael—go to gaol). The militant way is. booby-

trapped with No. 20—going to gaol for inciting a riot. The last lap is even tougher as the black aspirant nears the prize. He can lose two turns for “going too far” by opening a charge account at Tiffany’s, the Fifth Avenue jewellers, if he lands on 32. On 42 he loses one turn for running for mayor and getting defeated, with an admonishment for being “too pushy”.

But there are some unexpected shoves up the Presidential ladder, too. The lucky player who lands on 26 finds he has just been made vicepresident of a bank after 15 years as a guard. He is rewarded by a seven-step advance to Detroit’s plush white suburb of Grosse Pointe. On 36 he gets an extra turn for hiring a Jewish lawyer, Puerto Rican house-boy, Polish nurse, Italian accountant and an Irish press agent. Finally, Presidential nomin-

ation comes at No. 46, and three steps later—within an ace of the White House—the black Presidential candidate chooses the Conservative third party candidate, Mr George Wallace, as his running mate. Step 50 is the jackpot, the executive mansion itself, and the centre of the game-board has a picture of a painter at work making the White House a colour more appropriate to its black occupant.