In The Magazines
Bensman, David
Orlando Patterson, "On the Fate of Blacks in the Americas," PUBLIC INTEREST, Spring 1972. Simple slogans of black separatism and black power have faded with incredible speed since the...
...In sum, "while certain critical features of the slave experience were shared by all who suffered it, this experience has little relevance for the present, either as a shared memory binding all the black peoples of the Americas, or as a sociohistorical continuity shared by them all...
...Patterson sees the 20th-century urbanization of American blacks as crucial to the development of black protest, for only in the city could blacks as a group look inward...
...Simple slogans of black separatism and black power have faded with incredible speed since the riot-torn 1960s...
...Patterson's article undoubtedly will arouse angry protest, both from blacks to whom the growth of "black consciousness" has been the only hopeful sign in a time of prolonged frustration, and from whites who have rediscovered and begun to celebrate ethnicity in "white society...
...Only by de-ethnicizing the black movement and moving to a class alignment with poor whites, Mexican-Americans, Puerto Ricans can change be accomplished...
...Yet the assumption of "an underlying unity in the New World black experience" still lies at the heart of much discussion of strategies for black emergence...
...And meanwhile blacks "must abandon their search for a past, must indeed recognize that they lack all claims to a distinctive cultural heritage, and that the path ahead lies not in myth-making and in historical reconstruction...
...Parallel developments have taken place in the Caribbean...
...In Latin America, on the other hand, there was an elaborate racial terminology describing and differentiating shades of color, a terminology respected by whites as well as blacks...
...Looking to the future, Patterson argues that black-power ideology cannot meet the challenge of radically reordering American priorities, so as to rescue blacks from postindustrial redundancy...
...Ironically, the ghettoization of the black population led to a de-ethnicizing of black culture just at the time when "blackness" became the rallying cry of the black movement...
...Black activism is now more political and sophisticated than it was just a short time ago...
...Orlando Patterson, "On the Fate of Blacks in the Americas," PUBLIC INTEREST, Spring 1972...
...Unfortunately, black urbanization occurred at a time when the economy's need for a cheap labor force had diminished...
...European values are reinforced, not by the crushing presence of the carriers of the alien `superior' culture, but mainly by fellow black and brown role models who have mastered the art of performing in accordance with the `superior' cultural models...
...But Patterson's response is clear: that ethnic identity no longer provides a basis for penetration into postindustrial society...
...The result has been to hinder race solidarity, and deprive the black population of leadership...
...Consequently, elite sections of the black community were usually forced to identify with the mass of black people...
...The West Indies, with an overwhelmingly black population, were different again...
...Though the superiority of "white" metropolitan culture was accepted by the masses, there were few, if any, white role models...
...The culture of poverty, which is a poverty of culture, is fast becoming the lot of all black Americans...
...but in accepting the epic challenge of their reality...
...In North America, persons having any trace of black ancestry were lumped together as black by the whites...
...In his powerful article Orlando Patterson, a black writer and professor of sociology at Harvard University, surveys the historical experiences of blacks in the United States, Latin America, and the Caribbean, and concludes that the differences greatly outweigh the similarities...
...The middle-class black elite has been co-opted into elite roles, but this only accentuates the difficulties of the unskilled black population in the national economy...
...Here, pressure existed for blacks to increase their status by marrying persons of lighter skin...
...At the very point when blacks in the U.S...
...While it is true that blacks throughout the New World, in a limited way, share certain common remnants of the original African cultures, "it is precisely these cultural features which have been the first to disappear as a result of modern developments among blacks in the New World...
...approach a kind of cultural identity, they cease to be black in any meaningful cultural sense of that term...
Vol. 19 • July 1972 • No. 3
