The Issue Before Us
Goodman, Susan
"If whites were to stop all discriminatory practices tomorrow, this alone would not solve 'the Negro problem.' To be sure, an end to discrimination is a prerequisite to any solution. But...
...On education, Silberman is for "integration later" and "separate but better" now...
...SUSAN GOODMAN...
...And Silberman's fascinating and often sensible analysis of the way in which the Negro's social neurosis keeps him from entering American middle-class society makes this an important work...
...Silberman's desire to turn the Negro child into a white child with a black skin (and why not some of the reverse...
...This callous remark ignores the fact that the white man also needs money and status for self-respect...
...Silberman asks why, after all these years, the Negroes haven't "made it" as myriads of immigrants have done...
...The apathy acts as a screen for the Negroes hatred of himself, a hatred inculcated by white society which instructs him from the moment of birth that he is inferior...
...But too many Negroes are unable or unwilling to compete...
...Silberman correctly argues that the only solution is for the Negro himself to take political and economic power by militant tactics...
...The solution probably involves a more drastic change in American atti tudes than Silberman, with his easy dismissal of the automation problem and his peculiar confidence in our "booming" economy, is willing to envisage...
...they're as thrifty, self-reliant, hard working and puri tanical as Ben Franklin could wish...
...Similarly, the Negro man denied the rights of the marriage bed by the slave system, lost all sense of family responsibility...
...The Black Muslims, Silberman claims, are the only Negro group squarely to face the double question of race pride and race responsibility...
...Given the current middle-class hysteria about getting into the "right" college, this is probably the only politically feasible answer...
...The Negro community, he observes, is characterized by an inordinately high rate of crime, addiction, illegitimacy and broken homes...
...If whites were to stop all discriminatory practices tomorrow, this alone would not solve 'the Negro problem.' To be sure, an end to discrimination is a prerequisite to any solution...
...It is true that the Negroliberal coalition has broken down on the two issues of jobs and education...
...The Nazis, he comments, systematically destroyed the inmates' sense of identity, with the result that many acted like fawning children rather than like adults...
...One suspects that the proponents of the Triple Revolution, who advocate a massive public-works program plus a guaranteed income for all, may be closer to the heart of the problem...
...The answer, he suggests, is to beef up the Negro schools along the lines suggested by Kenneth Clark in the "Haryou" proposal...
...While I'm sure Silberman would welcome a Negro as a fellow Fortune editor, I'm equally certain that he'd howl like a trade unionist if that Negro was given his job or was given preferential treatment for advancement...
...Granting more jobs to Negroes may mean fewer jobs for whites, particularly if unemployment remains high," Silberman coolly comments in the midst of an otherwise useful discussion of the problem...
...A more radical solution, however, would be to put the kids together, but in small classes with experienced teachers...
...He is as invisible to himself as he is to others...
...Most important, they have undercut the matriarchy by preaching male supremacy and relegating the woman to the home...
...Although heroin addiction is not a practical solution to the Negro's "identity problem," neither is adopting the character structure of a society that drives one out of every ten of its members to the booby hatch...
...Silberman draws a telling parallel between the "perverted paternalism" of Southern society and that of the concentration camp...
...Insead they have apathetically accepted the conditions imposed by "the man...
...The matriarchy this set up continued after Emancipation for a variety of reasons, mainly that the Negro woman could always find work as a maid...
...and, on the second, he himself lines up with a de facto segregationist position...
...Nobody can know his name, for he does not know his own name...
...His point, and it is rather well taken, is that nobody will gain if a Negro child scoring scholastically two years behind the national average is bussed to a Queens school where the kids test two years above the national average...
...The Negro man, kept "in his place" like a child, acted like a child—expecting "his white folks" to care for him down South and the white liberals to finance his social revolution up North...
...True enough...
...Yet, ironically these WASP-haters have become the very model of the Protestant ethic...
...Remarkably few Negroes have tried to pull themselves up out of the slum by establishing their own businesses or their own self-help organizations...
...They have labeled the white man "devil" and the black man "divine...
...The slum Negro and the suburban white kid could probably learn more from each other about how the world goes round, than either could from an IBM test...
...The Negro, Silberman argues, who straightens his hair and bleaches his skin, does not know his own identity, his own worth...
...segregation is an affliction, but for many it is a crutch as well...
...Unfortunately, Silberman becomes trapped in racist rhetoric when he attacks the white liberals for backing integration "in someone else's trade union and in someone else's school district...
...Doing this would involve giving up the educational status race for a while in favor of a different and potentially far more valuable form of education...
...For behind it lies the snobbish assumption that "white is right," despite the mass of evidence to the contrary...
...Unfortunately, the author—an editor of Fortune —fails to question whether the goal of economic and social "respectability" is worth it...
...The white liberal, he warns, must give what aid he can and then gracefully retire from the scene, as he reports Saul Alinsky did in the Woodlawn neighborhood of Chicago...
...This, Silberman writes, constitutes the Negroes' "Negro problem...
...But on the first, Silberman's own solution is morally and factually wrong...
...is the key to what's wrong with this otherwise excellent book...
...The Negro will simply feel more inferior, the white more superior and somebody will get beaten up after school...
Vol. 11 • July 1964 • No. 3
