BLACK DREAMS: DEFERRED INDEFINITELY?

...It is all too possible to be "for" black people, women's rights, etc...

...Another sign of classism was the apparent belief by Movement people that it was for them to bear witness and communicate moral imperatives, but for someone else, a lower-middle-class stiff, perhaps, to incorporate this axiom into his routine life...

...One doesn't come home from a grueling week at the office or factory to run race relations seminars in one's spare time...

...All speak at once, all claim superiority, all quiver with sincerity...

...Harold Cruse has pointed out that Black Power and Black Capitalism are resurgencies of "Bookerism" in more militant guise, while the civil rights marches were extensions of N.A.A.CP...

...Polarized values really are the enemy...

...They had to act in the world but not in a way that denied their original calling...

...Such black businesses as had survived into the Sixties were often built on segregation, e.g., funeral homes, barber shops, hair-grooming products and cosmetics, ethnic newspapers, etc...

...If civil rights had been a meteor, they were fireworks, embers and ashes in a few short months...

...It soon became evident that opportunities aplenty could be found for a small segment of the black elite, and white employers fell over each other to offer high-paying jobs, to the few "known" and "certified" blacks, with the result that much of the leadership class was creamed off, leaving the ghettos more desperate than ever...

...while finding the actual assertion of these rights in specific instances emotionally threatening and disturbing...

...They appeal not to a liberal constituency of conscience but to the everday appetites of commerce...

...The real significance of this requires that we compare it with the more traditional style of valuing which uses polarized moral constructs...

...To press its hideous crinkles against your body and claim its rights...

...This applies to a large variety of opposites, Individualism-Cooperation, Secular- Otherworldly, Tough-Tender, etc...

...To you that might mean aspirin, pure and honest...

...Most persons construe moral behavior in the simple linear terms of good-bad, thus Courageous-cowardly, and Cautious-foolhardy...

...In short, the Movement often resembled a moral consulting service, whose members were on leave-of-absence from their universities and churches...

...If Black dares to make a move for the Courage end of the polarity he is ferociously slapped down...

...Whatever brief impacts they made upon national attention, owed much to the original civil rights struggle, of which each claimed to be a new, decisive phase...

...It also became apparent that the preaching and professing sectors in both black and white communities had converted each other into verbal and symbolic ties of unity, but that, beneath the media blitz, the underlying economic realities were little changed...

...The Black Power and Black Capitalism factions were the inevitable result of a civil rights movement which had exacerbated the historical lopsidedness of black advancement...

...There are two important principles in the art of reconciling oneself with others and in achieving an internal reconciliation, or integrity...

...For is it not the nature of ghosts to defy definition...

...We are now in a position to understand the ferocity and rage with which civil rights marchers were resisted by sheriffs deputies, wielding dogs and electric cattle prods, and to see why the non-violent advocates of moral synthesis are so frequently murdered...

...In fact black liberation movements have been historically split into economic and socio-political factions...

...The resentment of poor blacks mingled with the resentment of marginal black businessmen who have rarely enjoyed the status of ministers or even politicians within their communities...

...It used economic tools from time to time, the boycott especially, but it had no means for accumulating economic power...

...Let me explain...

...But I regard all these as minor compared with the one most basic flaw, the lack of any substantial economic infrastructure to the civil rights movement...

...King's Synthesis Martin Luther King continually synthesized rather than polarized moral constructs...

...Here the separated vision of Washington and DuBois, King and Carmichael can come together in a synthesis that includes all aspects of black competence, and does not sever class from class...

...If "value polarizers" are thus alarmed and disgusted by the ambiguous appearance of "value synthesizers," a loathing superimposed upon prejudiced attitudes towards blacks in general, then this might account for the phobic convictions voiced at this time, about nuns in high heels, whores in habits, and race-mixers who had miscegenated in every ditch from New York to Montgomery, Alabama...

...Even the conversion of general into specific dangers is a plus because danger can be dealt with, while anxiety disables your very capacity to function...

...Many people go to church on Sunday for their one day of unanimity, only to find that their minister, bored with holding people's hands, is keen to plunge into controversy...

...Much of the paraphernalia of escapist religion was now directly counterposed to the source of anxiety to delegitimize it...

...Beliefs must be acted upon and the body must experience and tolerate the anxiety of belief-in-action...

...Black displays Caution (it would be foolhardy to do more...

...It was King's genius for generating new meanings out of highly familiar and conservative language, that enabled his followers to experience the Movement, literally a movement of unbroken skeins of continuity stretching from the past, through the present to an aspiring future...

...There's no difference...

...But King and the Movement bore witness to both ends of such polarities simultaneously, Courage- Caution, Toughness-Tenderness, etc., all incorporated within non-violent action, and they calmed their own anxieties by a series of reconciliations of "opposite" behaviors...

...He was defiant, yet just as you tried to club him, he was orderly...

...Will those of us who believed soon become part of the nostalgia boom, sighing over video cassettes of "The Sizzling Sixties" or "The Way We Marched...

...To mix up King's life and purpose with thatl" I wondered how many thousands of employees came to work in the grease and grime of his engine company, which made the parts, which made the profits, which this precious gentleman then dispensed on a Higher Moral Plan, above commerce...

...For Southerners who had often donned white sheets to haunt superstitious blacks, this was a terrifying "reverse haunting...

...As a social psychologist I will be adopting a particular and perhaps a peculiar viewpoint...

...It expects assorted housewives, consumers, clergy, teachers, students and social agencies to be Selfless, Cautious, Tender-minded, Cooperative, "Feminine," and Loyal, so as to complement its own behavior...

...I do not intend to disparage those who risked and even gave their lives...

...Both reduce their anxiety sharply by falling into patterns of complementarity...

...DuBois was perceptive enough to see that blacks must advance in all areas of competence simultaneously, he in effect threw his weight against Washington into the legal-political strategy of the N.A.A.C.P...

...He hears the train go by at night and dreams of faraway places he would like to go...

...I see another child" (himself...

...There are many causes alleged...

...It is the middle-class "spectator section" that is free to move from role to role, to practice with one commitment after another, and to listen to all sides while postponing action...

...It would have been truer to say that they had largely given what they had to give, verbal and moral support...

...A courageous wife and loyal children stood by him in victory and defeat...

...The face of crumpled linen that looms out of the darkness is both mundane and otherworldly, an object customarily close to your body, yet in this instance utterly remote from your experience, resembling a face but not a face, seemingly wispy and vulnerable yet possibly indestructible...

...But he is helped on his journey through life...

...The Movement of the Sixties was a revolt of the support sector...

...By now any reader of radical literature is used to denigration of Martin Luther King and the civil rights campaigns...

...What is recognized are the old, separate elements newly organized, and perhaps related for the first time...

...Nowhere is this clearer than in Richard M. Nixon's acceptance speech at the 1968 Republican Convention...

...While W.E.B...

...It took place almost entirely outside the economy, with minimal participation by workers or executives, black or white...

...Value synthesis of word with deed, of succorance with assertion, was the attempted solution of those pledged mainly to words and succorance...

...That it will take to our television screens to tell us of the people behind the products it makes, their aspirations, needs and souls...

...Unfortunately the middle-class bias of the Movement has introduced into civil rights legislation a subtle "class-ism...

...It was as if the groaning Greek Chorus on the edge of the national stage, long accustomed to doleful commentary, suddenly decided they had to act as well as groan, and invaded the stage to alter the course of the tragedy...

...We're fed up with having our airwaves polluted with this silly babble when there are so many urgent problems...

...I see the main source of hope for continuing King's work of reconciliation in the three hundred or so Community Development Corporations that have sprung up in poor urban and rural areas across the country...

...When you reach for Just Aspirin, you reach beyond pills to free us, you reach beyond pills to people, and people need each other...

...But, of course, there is an inherent contradiction here, since Courage and Caution, both ostensibly good, are op-posites, thus: Courage foolhardy Caution cowardly Frequently this contradiction must be resolved by'force as when one "Courageous" person beats another into realizing that he was "foolhardy" and should have been "Cautious...

...The mountain belly of moralization labored and brought forth a mouse...

...Because of lack of an economic component the civil rights movement could do very little for the millions of poor blacks who were "beneath" the economy, in the sense of lacking marketable skills...

...The feeling seemed so strong only a few years ago, the feeling that something new had been injected into the political process and that men of moral vision had at least a handhold upon the wheel the steered this nation's destiny...

...In this movement, there came together change with continuity, the ideal with the real, tenderness with toughness, self-assertion with an openness to influence, marching (as in war) with kneeling (as in prayer), courage with caution, self-discipline with passion, tension with relaxation, human law with natural law, body with soul, belief with action, means with ends, and strength with vulnerability...

...Each "strong" polarity commands its opposite "weak" polarity, as war commands peace, men command women, whites command blacks...

...Was this only one of the many moral spasms that shake American politics from time to time only to pass like a fever...

...It's called 'Just Aspirin...

...He fell to his knees but not in submission...

...But when you do get a headache-remember our brand...

...They could sit at integrated lunch counters but not have the money to pay...

...Then you hear a Voice Over: "They're lying you know...

...Behind the Break-up What went wrong...

...Once it was known to occur, it was used in the politics of indignation and to confound the myth of white civilization menaced by black barbarism...

...It suddenly became fashionable to denounce all liberals as hypocrites...

...If we assume that the objective is equal status contact (and there is no evidence that unequal contact between, say, a white master and black mistress does anything to reduce prejudice) then whites near the highest socio-economic levels need only associate with a tiny percentage of blacks, while whites nearer the bottom must associate with a very large percentage...

...Their ethos was "moralistic," "middle-class," and (ugh...

...Think about that-come and visit us-you may even get fewer headaches, when you see what we're doing...

...For many Southerners, Martin Luther King was a spook, a kind of hideous hybrid, a Tom-sounding preacher, but with precisely the opposite effect...

...The two levels of meaning were brilliantly interwoven as he led an escapist religious tradition into the promised land of political emancipation, and gave to the smoke-filled rooms of political operators the fresh breeze of moral and religious purpose...

...We often confuse creativity with novelty and change, but were I to write this, in new words, with new punctuations and new spellings, I'd either be ignored or hustled off to an asylum...

...Especially for blacks, the prototypical encounter with Southern racists takes the form of a "tension contest...

...The reason is not far to seek...

...liberal...

...Imagine a TV screen divided into quarters, within each square an earnest, white-coated gentleman lecturing you on thinly disguised equivalents of Excedrin, Bayer Aspirin, Anacin and Bufferin...

...It only wants to love you...

...In behavior therapy these are known as "relaxation responses...

...So long as one stands back, whether in contemplation or "objective" observation, there will be a tendency for the social world to appear atomized and polarized...

...Yet the various black and white factions into which the movement split-community action, Black Power, campus revolt, Yippies, Weathermen, Black Capitalism, charles hampden-turner, the author of Radical Man: The Process of Psycho-Social Development and From Poverty to Dignity (Anchor Books) is on the staff of The Wright Institute in Berkeley, California...

...If you have an exaggerated and phobic dread of something or someone, you have to relax yourself in its presence to "teach your body" that it is less dangerous than you supposed...

...Instead of in these pairs subtracting from one another, as in the old linear morality, they synergised with one another (syn-ergo, to work with...

...His decision to "humbly reflect" God-given reality or to manipulate that reality experimentally, casts its shadow of submission or domination upon human society...

...It is an error to believe that racial integration is equally difficult at all socio-economic levels...

...Creative work gives us the well-known "shock of recognition...

...That all, now, is so deathly still, and that moral crusades can vanish so suddenly from the national scene only proves that those who sally forth from their sanctuaries can return...

...White in any encounter with Black displays Courage (it would be cowardly to do less...

...If American Air was a more fetid breath than he had supposed, it seems that he conceived of no alternatives beyond witness...

...Was all the pomp of yesteryear one with Prohibition and Free Silver...

...In this way whites in the "support sector" of the economy can realize a power that is more symbolic, the power to shop selectively from those who are rebuilding our society...

...I have a dream for the community development movement, that some day it will proclaim itself to be a moral synthesis between self-assertion and social concern and between economic and political purposes in the style of Martin Luther King...

...Almost alone in our national landscape these institutions combine economic with social purposes and legitimize their synthesis...

...the unsuitability of demonstration tactics outside the South, the shift of Congress to the right after the 1966 mid-term elections, the Moyni-han Report and similar attempts by the federal government to wrest the initiative away from the Movement and get events under its own control, and, of course, the war in Southeast Asia to which conservatives were willing to give support-at a price...

...It is relatively easier for the media to synthesize belief and action, social concern and self-advancement since their jobs consist of selfexpressions and interpersonal communications...

...It resounds with numerous virtues, but family, self-sacrifice, gentleness, passion, peace, quietude and loyalty is what Nixon receives from others, assorted parents, clergy and teachers, while the opposite virtues, faraway places, self-advancement, toughness, reserve, militance, eloquence and origination are claimed by Nixon as his own...

...But while we make it, we build a community, bring hope to thousands who never had hope before, and we're going to make our part of the city a livable place again, with safe streets, decent homes and self-respecting people...

...This is because the separation of the spectator from what he sees helps to produce the separateness in what he sees...

...Owned by their local communities, these corporations use the profits from their business and their employment policies to develop socially, culturally, politically and economically their local areas...

...The entire ideal of value synthesis stumbles over the uncompromising fact that our economy and its support sector are structured according to conventional value-polarities...

...A great teacher, a remarkable football coach, an inspirational minister encouraged him on his way...

...Tonight he stands before you . . ." Notice the moral "division of labor" in this passage...

...Disgustingly emotional, he yet kept his cool while you lost yours...

...etc., were conspicuously shorter-lived...

...For example, they would march and go limp, stand to confront their oppressors and sit down, expose themselves to danger while embracing and singing...

...White has traditionally forced Black to back down, not by force although this was in reserve, but by raising the inner anxiety of Blacks to unbearable levels, until he is induced to disparage himself by flight, humility, ingratiation, playing dumb, etc...

...a foundation executive exclaimed to me...

...Persons in the "support sector" often forget that while social relationships are their work, for most people in the economic sector social relationships are play and relaxation...

...Thirdly, I want to discuss how its major virtues and dynamics could again be set in motion...

...Business proclaims itself Self-interested, Cour-rageous, Tough-minded, Individualistic, "Masculine," and Innovative...

...As Martin Luther King explained from Birmingham Jail We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive . . . Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light . . . It is clear from this passage that King had only the vaguest idea of the action that should follow his exposure of injustice...

...Three black neighbors on Nob Hill and five thousand downtown are quite a dif-ferent proposition...

...If black businessmen regarded a civil rights movement dominated by ministers and community organizers with modified rapture it was understandable...

...Right...

...But in order to minimize violence, what generally happens is that one class/race/sex gets to personify Courage, while the lower class, blacks and women, get to personify Caution...

...I believe the civil rights movement to be the best example of civic virtue in this century...

...For people who believe in 100 Percent Americanism, Red-Blooded Masculinity, and Pure Southern Womanhood, linear constructs all, it is alarming to see clergy active, students organizing instead of learning, nuns marching, and everyone acting in ways that contradict their accustomed roles...

...That moral synthesis, a style of valuing that grows out of varied experiences in human relationship, should have made such selective progress mostly within the support sectors of society is regrettable, but not entirely surprising...

...The second in each pair becomes the "virtue" of the oppressed group...

...He spoke humility but came on and on...

...Obscene...

...The F.T.C...

...We have yet to transcend the dichotomy between "do goodism" and "business as usual...

...Since violent street crime rises very sharply as the average per capita incomes fall below $7,000, it is exceedingly unfair to lecture whites for fleeing neighborhoods in transition...

...Why did the synthesis break up...

...I submit that Martin Luther King's greatest gift to a renewal of American values was his skill at moral synthesis-what some social scientists have begun to call "synergy...

...I do contend that one final synthesis is yet needed, and that it eluded the Movement, that is a permanent structural synthesis between the economic and support sectors of our culture...

...The comforters had been speaking to the comforters over the heads of industry and labor...

...Here, I want first to consider what was of lasting social value and moral significance about the civil rights movement...

...Having seen the face of a black child, he turns to a more agreeable subject...

...Second, I want to summarize its shortcomings and its incompleteness...

...If anything it promises an extraordinary person with unusual and interesting experiences...

...He even appears to have gone to war for Quakerism, Motherhood and gentleness...

...It was as if aesthetic and transcendent elements of experience had qualified interest-group liberalism...

...As you lash out at it in frenzy, TV cameras whirr, and forty million viewers laugh or frown at your antics...

...has said so-four times...

...The split between the economic and support sectors was especially marked within the black community...

...I don't believe that stampeding their opposition into loutish behavior was premeditated by the Movement, and it was too dangerous to be welcomed...

...The FDA has said it-twice...

...policies...

...Even at his most otherworldly, when he was speaking in the cadence and rhythm of the Southern Baptist churches, and was going to the mountain top to see the promised land, every religious metaphor had a clear political or social referent...

...He understood and communicated through action and witness the truth that integration among different people required integration among different ideas, which in turn required a mind-body integration, wherein your body was "on the line" with your convictions...

...Action is also essential if the body is not to belie the mind...

...Booker T. Washington's advocacy of economic skills training ("let down your buckets where you are") was financed by whites at the price of accommodation on political issues...

...It seems like an impossible dream...

...A gentle, Quaker mother, with a passionate concern for peace, quietly wept when he went to war but understood why he had to go...

...They tend to avoid politics and the media in favor of a Bookerish yearning for humble tasks...

...Besides, at upper-middle-class levels a black skin has little predictive value for what an encounter with this person will be like...

...The dynamics of anxiety help to explain the survival of polarized value constructs...

...The burdens and the benefits of busing and court-ordered integration are most inequitably distributed...

...If I have reservations about most existing Community Development Corporations, it is that they are still pro-economic, anti-civil rights in their general sentiments...

...We make aspirin, too, just aspirin, no better and no worse than those few...

...They streak across the heavens, dominating for a short time our entire view of the firmament, and then they are gone, burnt up perhaps, or passing cold and lightless into a great void...

...To us it means a just society, with social and racial justice...

...All that "politics of the body" was possibly useful in "raising consciousness" and in exposing the ultimate rottenness of everyone except the People (a vaguely defined group of seemingly dormant persons who would awake as the rhetoric escalated...

...But at lower economic levels black skins do often predict the presence of a lower-class life-style, and neigh-borhoods in transition to greater poverty...

...A word should be said here about creativity in general...

...The vast majority of Americans simply do not live like this, but are forced to obey the polar structures of a competitive economy...

...A father who had to go to work before the sixth grade, sacrificed everything so that his sons could go to college...

...But above all he would not be pushed to the "weak" end of your value construct, and neither would he fight you "like a man," for the "strong" end of it...

...The Harlem Hotel was forced to close when black groups found they could meet in the Sheraton Hilton...