Black Nationalism and Conservative Politics

...Wanted: May—June 1966 DISSENTS ce needs copies of the May/June/1966 issue of DISSENT...

...For the division between management and labor does not disappear if the parties involved happen to be black...

...Marcus Garvey is a hero of today's nationalists, as though it is forgotten that one of his own heroes was the moderate, yet nevertheless separatist, Booker T. Washington, a figure whose place in current nationalist historiography rivals that of Trotsky in the Soviet Union...

...It has not taken hold among a majority, but the minority advocating it is vocal, visible, and well publicized...

...Furthermore, Garvey was an admirer of the Ku Klux Klan which shared his commitment to racial purity...

...When conditions make it impossible to achieve change in the world, radical energy is turned inward to the self...

...In the last election, for example, they voted overwhelmingly for Humphrey, and in local elections throughout the country this cohesiveness has been maintained...

...But if it is defined more broadly to include all those blacks who favor separatism, either in the form of racially exclusive Black Studies programs, community control of all ghetto institutions, or other programs, then nationalism is a growing movement...

...The DISSENT office DISSENT 509 Fifth Ave., New York, N.Y...

...its illusion enables a psychological adjustment to existing socioeconomic relations to appear progressive...

...And in a letter to the Board of Education protesting their exclusion from the planning of the 1969 graduation exercises at I.S...

...By ignoring social and economic interests that threaten the logic of their racial analysis, nationalists have taken some strange positions...

...They sometimes indulge in the "fantasy" of a separate black nation (ignoring all of the contradictions in this position Theodore Draper so brilliantly analyzed in the September 1969 issue of Commentary...

...For the very isolation of the black community which nationalists seem to desire would widen, rather than narrow, the inner divisions among Negroes...

...10017 Moreover, to the degree that it encourages the creation of separate Negro communities, black nationalism must sooner or later undermine itself, for it will destroy black unity by transferring the focus of economic and political conflict from the whole society, in which opponents are generally white and wealthy, to a segregated community, in which opponents are inevitably black...

...In this sense, community control means that some group of individuals, whether elected, appointed, or self-designated, will control the community...

...Such divisions of power and opinion are likely to occur in an independent local school district, but they would inevitably occur over economic issues in a separate black economy— assuming, for the moment, that such an economy is possible...

...The emergence of racial politics during the present conservative period is not surprising...

...The profits of the one side would most likely be smaller and the wages of the other side correspondingly lower than if both parties were white...

...but names are changed, militant postures assumed, myths created...

...Was it merely a parade bringing together for the purpose of pageantry individuals who, in their everyday experiences, have little in common, or was it symbolic of the unifying force of race in the lives of black Americans...

...Conditions of employment, health, and housing remain the same...

...but their broader version of nationalism retains a strong element of reality—they are merely proposing the extension and institutionalization of the patterns of segregation which already exist, hoping thereby to increase the power, as well as the racial pride, of Negroes...

...In the context of the whole society, Negroes will tend to act as a group to secure advantages for themselves...

...A leader of the opposition to the governing board was quoted in the New York Post (January 28, 1969) as saying, "We community residents are getting the same treatment from the governing board that they say they got from the central Board of Education...

...YET WHILE the realities of social conflict can be excluded from nationalist rhetoric, they have their way of intruding into the daily transactions of people's lives...

...Thereby they have tried, well or not, to exert some power within the society...

...BLACK NATIONALISM is likely to remain an important force within the Negro community, particularly in the absence of broad reforms...

...The result is a strange mixture of racial militancy and political conservatism...

...What is going on here is not education but a systematic brainwashing detrimental to the education of our children...

...We will pay $2.00 for each copy received...

...271 (also listing other complaints against local school officials, including the breakdown of discipline at the school and the "appalling" loss of teachers), members of the school's Parent Association wrote that One can readily understand why parents of graduating elementary school students feeding into I.S...

...We in the Parent Association do not intend to stand by and watch these conditions continue...

...They're not giving community people any chance to have a voice...

...and the strike against the Harlem River Consumers Cooperative by Local 388 of the Retail, Wholesale, and Chain Store Food Employees Union...

...The question is relevant, for during the past three years black nationalism has become an increasingly popular ideology among Negroes...

...Its realism consists of resignation...

...Just mail it in to us with your name and ad dress and we will reimburse you...

...His hostility to trade unions has been inherited by CORE, which has cooperated with the National Right-To-Work Committee, and by the Republic of New Africa whose VicePresident, Milton Henry, has proposed to ban trade unions from the black nation he hopes some day to create...

...This point was sharply illustrated by a recent strike of a Newspaper COMMENTS AND OPINIONS Guild local against the Amsterdam News...

...271 have protested to the Board of Education about sending their children to this school...

...Spokesmen for community control, for example, may use the rhetoric of narrow nationalism when they speak of independent black communities, but they have not yet gone so far as to propose COMMENTS AND OPINIONS secession...

...Miss Black America and Adam Clayton Powell were on hand, as were a marching band from a Southern college and about 35 Black Panthers...

...The panel would have had considerable control over the use of the money...

...And it would make the goal of a genuinely equalitarian society, which now appears to be so elusive, recede even further from the realm of political possibility...

...but the relationship necessarily leads to a certain amount of conflict...

...Yet it will continue to be, as it was in the past, more an emotional release during periods of stagnation than a political program for social change...

...It will isolate Negroes from political allies and, consequently, reduce their influence in determining the direction of national policy...

...ON A PLEASANT SUNDAY last fall, 150 black groups marched up Seventh Avenue from 111th Street in New York City's first AfroAmerican Day parade...

...But in a racially exclusive situation, where all the available power is exercised within a self-contained community, political and economic divisions must soon assert themselves...

...Such a "legal" repression of trade unions is, one cannot help but think, symbolic of the tendency among all black nationalists to repress psychologically a consideration of the social and economic factors which clash with their world view...

...The two groups of black nationalists I have identified are not entirely distinct...

...One obvious consequence is the kind of bitter in-fighting that has developed in Ocean Hill-Brownsville, where the local school board refused to permit community elections for an advisory panel to help run a $4 million state education project...

...The Afro-American Day parade was more an expression of racial pride here and now...

...Many of us fought for community control, not community dictator ship that is being perpetrated by a small minor ity who do not live in nor reflect the feelings of this community...

...Racial issues—based upon "genetic verities"—become prominent, while issues relating to social class —which deal essentially with environmental problems subject to change—are deemphasized...

...The occasion was reminiscent of the parades Marcus Garvey led almost half a century ago, though it lacked the extravagant costumes designating the orders of African nobility which Garvey created, and little reference was made to going back to Africa...

...To what degree does such a parade reflect the social and political realities of Harlem or any other black ghetto...

...the refusal of the management of Chock Full o' Nuts to permit unionization of its employees (Jackie Robinson argued the case for management in this dispute...

...That this position is realistic does not mean it is without illusion...

...And pervading every aspect of this new psychology is the notion of salvation through heightened racial awareness...

...In the absence of concrete gains, people seek symbolic victories...

...Such a situation, far from benefiting impoverished Negroes, would only compound the injustices from which they suffer...

...If black nationalism is narrowly defined as a proposal for establishing a separate black nation, either in Africa or the U.S., then black nationalists represent a tiny fringe element...