One of the most insistent pressures to fake it big occurs when we are ashamed of what we are seen to be. Shame can have a salutary social effect when it pushes us to be lawful, mannerly, and civil. Or it can become rather morally suspect when it tempts us to disavow our religion, nation, race, or some aspects, not all by any means, of sexual desire. In those cases in which there may be grounds for distrusting the moral quality of the shame felt, we can blame the person as a self-hater, as someone culpably not at ease with himself, culpable because he is cowardly and disloyal to what we say he is. (Funny how we are often so much surer of the identities we impose on others than of the ones we feel we can claim for ourselves.) Or we can blame the unjust order that makes him have to mobilize courage simply to be black, a Jew, gay, or a member of some other group condemned by the dominant order to be pariahs. Or, as is often the case, we blame both – the pariah no less than the unjust order.

Hard to believe that turning my attention to self-hatred, very mild forms of it, will be my amends for the bitterness that leaked out in the preceding chapter. I undertake to present a lighter heart, and a droller tone. There is significantly less temptation now for a Jew to pass than there was fifty years ago.