Black Separatism: Shock of Integration

...Second, they assume that the evils leading to such a polarization are irremediable: the society, even if in the past it has accepted significant reforms, is seen as no longer capable of responding to the demands now being made upon it...

...It is a natural human reaction, and it occurred among white ethnic groups as well during their adjustments to new social conditions created by upward mobility...

...If administrations and substantial numbers of students and faculty members support —either out of fear or condescension or uncritical goodwill—the violent tactics and separatist goals of some black students, then there may well be a reactionary resolution of the present crisis...

...We can thus understand the call to "buy black"—even if it costs more—and the demand to reestablish an economically protective form of separatism...

...Those blacks who consider it in their interest to promote separatism are, as a rule, not workers but members of the middle class...

...At the moment there is much that is indeterminate in the situation of black students...

...expenditures can be increased so that democratization will not threaten standards...

...One key to the explosiveness in the ghetto is that blacks are passing through a dignity revolution—but without an economic revolution...

...The United Negro Labor Community Council in that city has been primarily responsible for bringing the labor movement into a coalition with the black community in the effort to get Bradley elected...

...Social change can come about nonviolently, but rarely without tension and stress...

...When the blacks carried guns at Cornell while some liberals watched and New Leftists cheered, one result was that George Wallace gained new supporters...

...They are highly sensitive to the dignity revolution and are rightly impressed by the new pride blacks are exhibiting...

...Their direction in the near future will depend largely on the response of the entire university...

...It has been the wisdom of men like A. Philip Randolph—even at a time when it seems unfashionable in "advanced" circles—to continue to point toward the common interests of black and white workers...

...But liberals have never really ceased to be influential in the affairs of blacks...

...The former course is being charted today by those who propose separate black unions...

...The black militant protests against schools, universities, unions, and churches have been most successful in those instances where liberals have been neutralized...

...The worst is predicted by those who often act in such a way as to encourage the fulfillment of their own prophecies...

...And it is because of their work that the labor movement, in some instances, is responding progressively by forming alliances with civil rights forces...

...America is more racially polarized today than at any time in its history, and one result is that there hardly exists a political consensus that the country needs a massive social reconstruction...

...By supporting—or, at least, refusing to oppose—any tactics used by blacks, they have often given legitimacy to the very worst forms of confrontationism...

...But one difficulty with this analysis is that it underestimates the forces for democratic social change within the black community...

...In our society, separatism or passivity for any group is an impossibility...

...9.4 percent of the newly enrolled apprentices came from minorities in 1968, as opposed to only 2.5 percent in 1960...

...What is important is not that an economic revolution might solve the race problem in America—it is the well-off blacks, as we have seen, who tend to be the most pronounced racial chauvinists—but that its failure to take place will exacerbate the racial situation to the point of disaster...

...Blacks will become more frustrated and violent, whites more resistant and repressive...

...But if this is to occur, the majority on campus, particularly among the faculty, must repudiate expedient solutions that undermine the legitimate academic function of the university...

...Demands are made out of frustration and satisfied out of expediency...

...Without an employment program for these youths, the predictions of the pessimists may well come true...

...There is some truth in each assumption...

...And the pessimists, sometimes with ill-concealed delight, fail to recognize the processes of change to which the overwhelming majority of black people are responding today...

...Much of the ideology for separatism has been provided by whites like Richard Cloward, W. H. Ferry, and Joseph Alsop...

...It may seem that I am attributing too much importance to the actions and attitudes of liberals, especially since many of them have "dropped out" of the civil rights struggle so that blacks could have the movement to themselves...

...The former helped produce the Wallace movement and the latter gave rise to a coalition of groups supporting school decentralization in New York...

...At Colgate, for example, 40 Negro students, who occupied the faculty club in order to press demands for an Afro-American Center, explained that "the psychological trauma that black students face in a school such as this is criminal...

...Yet this very shock of integration, despite its short-range troubling effects, is evidence of mobility...

...Competing social groups continually interact and influence each other's development...

...This phenomenon of withdrawal is, of course, by no means the only explanation for the separatist mood, for students at predominantly black Howard University are acting in a similar way...

...They wanted the Center because they needed a place were "we can retire from the white community...

...Consider the turmoil over black studies on campus...

...Where separatism has been supported in the past by middle-class blacks, it has enabled them to assume positions of leadership (in churches and universities) that would be denied them in integrated situations, and it has also enabled them to monopolize the Negro market...

...Largely because of their work, Negroes have continued to build a power base within the Democratic party and have generally resisted the formation of separate unions...

...The competition between blacks and lowermiddleclass whites is real—as is an alliance between blacks and elite whites...

...Again, this adjustment can take a reactionary or progressive course...

...black studies can be developed into a major area of scholastic inquiry— as opposed to a psychic palliative—that will be integrated with programs in American studies...

...What all these students share is a new bitterness and militancy which result because of a genuine liberation from old racial stereotypes...

...Without such a reconstruction, polarization will probably increase...

...The further institutionalization of separatism during a period of confusion will make the task of dismantling it that much more difficult in the future...

...Liberals often fail to understand this point...

...They desire a new order, not the absence of order...

...It is a confusing time...

...In its stridency and contempt for complexity, as well as in its tendency toward an indiscriminate rejection of established patterns of behavior, this response resembles the generational rebellion of the New Left...

...This means viewing each racial group as an undifferentiated mass that is not subject to internal conflicts out of which might emerge new and unforeseen political strategies...

...Much of the conflict we are seeing is likely to have reactionary consequences, but some of it is also a response to improved conditions and, thus, to a new relationship between the races...

...Black trade unionists are now playing an important role in determining endorsements made by the Committee on Political Education (COPE), and they are becoming more active and visible in leadership positions within individual unions...

...It is most essential in areas undergoing rapid and unsettling changes to oppose retrograde steps, such as the separatist demands on campus...

...It also indicates a need to preserve a sense of identity in the midst of a changing world...

...the whites, guilty though they may feel toward the blacks, must resist the temptation of patronizing them...

...Certainly in the South, where Negroes have made tremendous gains in winning the right to vote and where they are COMMENTS AND OPINIONS now assuming positions of power in local communities and within the Democratic party, there is little enthusiasm for bringing back a militant segregationism...

...IF MOST BLACKS are not separatist, they certainly are angry and frustrated...

...In the context of the overall assault now being made upon professionalism and objective standards by black and white student protesters, it is not inconceivable that the university could be transformed into a political playpen...

...Moreover, the actions of the United Negro Labor Community Council (UNLCC) and similar groups in other cities have stimulated the unions to pay more attention to the Negro leadership potential within their ranks...

...Andrew Brimmer, the only Negro member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, has written that "With the progress of desegregation, the considerable protection which segregation provided for Negro businessmen has been eroded substantially...

...But they fail to perceive that this pride can turn into a destructive and self-destructive force if it is not met with major improvements in the economic conditions of blacks...

...The violence at Cornell and CCNY seems certain to be counterproductive for the blacks themselves...

...Even in the skilled trades, where discrimination is still a major problem, there have been significant gains...

...Many blacks demanding separatism on campus would thus like to recreate, in the small, the ghetto from which they have sought to escape...

...Separatism will become institutionalized, academic freedom will be curtailed by black and white pressure groups, and political and racial criteria will be used to determine the content of curriculum and the quality of scholarship...

...The main stress, for those who wish to avoid a racial apocalypse, must continue to be on political integration and economic equality...

...They point to the competition for jobs between unionized white workers and nonunionized blacks—while all but ignoring the close to 2 million black workers who do belong to unions and profit from union achievements...

...Such a resolution would threaten the university's elitist role, not its scholastic one...

...This has occurred not only in the strikes of the Memphis sanitation workers and the Charleston hospital workers, but also in the campaign of Thomas Bradley for mayor of Los Angeles...

...Thus, a new black professional elite is demanding all-black schools so that they can monopolize the jobs in those schools, and black entrepreneurs are calling for a separate black economy which they can dominate...

...Progress has been slow here, but it is significant enough to reinforce the vast majority of black trade unionists in their opposition to separatism...

...And this, in turn, is creative and may serve as a basis for future social progress...

...Which is also to say the blacks, out of self-interest if nothing else, must resolve their crisis of adjustment without seeking shelter behind a separate and second-rate educational program...

...THE LABOR MOVEMENT, like the university, is undergoing a profound adjustment in response to the racial crisis...

...Such political phenomena are designed far more to increase racial hostility than to alter the economic status quo—which may be one explanation for the position taken by elite whites...

...When the idea was conceived to turn over the schools of New York to local control so that each ethnic and racial group might wash its hands of every other one, a state of near-anarchy was created and a city was almost brought to its knees by racial hostilities...

...But underlying the separatist mood on campus is an adjustment process, one aspect of which has been called the shock of integration...

...Many black students have literally been uprooted from the ghetto and placed in an alien and threatening environ COMMENTS AND OPINIONS ment...

...And then, rather than support programs that might increase the number of jobs and thereby reduce the competition for them, they encourage a struggle over those that presently exist...

...And indeed, it is impossible for any group to remove itself from the racial crisis today...

...Hence, the exaggeration of blackness in behavior and attire, the desire for separate living quarters, and the demand for a separate program of black study which is, in effect, an attempt to transfer the ghetto school—with its lower standards, less qualified teachers, and less exacting academic requirements—to the university...

...But they are also motivated by an attitude of contempt toward lower-middle-class whites and of whites' noblesse oblige toward blacks and of a certain amount of misplaced idealism...

...The Bureau of the Census recently pointed out that unemployment among Negro teenagers was 30.4 percent in 1968, as compared to 22.7 percent in 1960...

...The demand for separatism among some blacks is not a true indication of Negro sentiment...

...And their response to this liberation is, like the phenomenon of withdrawal, a process...

...But there can also be a creative resolution...

...Most polls have shown that 85 percent of Negroes still desire integration, a figure that has not diminished in recent years...

...The goals of this Negro-labor coalition are integrationist because its political base is integrationist...

...It reflects a tendency in all individuals who encounter a challenging new reality to withdraw and revert back to an environment that had previously provided them some security...

...But the black students, unlike some of the white New Left students, do have concrete and definable ends in view: larger Negro enrollments and black studies programs...

...We can also understand the interest black entrepreneurs have taken in separate black unions, which would not be strong enough to demand the same wages as their white counterparts...

...The university can become a more integrated and democratic institution that will serve the needs of faculty and students, not corporations and the military...

...Such proposals are supported by right-wing organizations, but also by some liberals and blacks who identify the labor movement as "the major en COMMENTS AND OPINIONS emy" of the Negro...

...This is particularly true of young Negroes whose new sense of pride and aspiration, because it is given no constructive economic outlet, turns into violent frustration...