REVIEWS

...He assesses forcefully the difficult task of overcoming internalized negative self-images...

...Moreover, parental repression of hostility was a model for the children...

...The children reacted to parental hostility with hurt and hostility of their own...

...The arrogance bred by elite status caused many to overlook this...

...This self-hatred was undoubtedly produced by a variety of social and psychological factors...

...Even so, her ideas are refreshing: "I think our best chance for a decent society is to hawk more tickets for our side: to spread out and imbed ourselves with all our demands and visions, incomplete as these may be, in every institution in the country...

...Their language was that of political interest rather than of moral righteousness...

...We are warned, however, that blacks must achieve a personal moral transformation as a precondition to, or at least a correlate of, political revolt...

...Here, I think, she mistakes what Marxism is, or can be...

...The parents, most from humble social origins, had reached high status by devoting themselves, for the sake of "the family," to long years of remunerative but boring or morally corrupting work (including housework...

...They made us into a secret society...

...Langer recalls an incident in which one of her friends in the women's movement came to her "waving a copy of Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectics of Sex . . . crying out, `At last we have an analysis...

...These twin problems expressed themselves most graphically in the women's movement...

...By its very nature, a deterministic framework accepts and accentuates the moral superiority of the victimizer...

...To some extent, this hostility was also repressed, because the parents were sacrificing so much to provide their children with opportunities...

...Workers threatened with unemployment or mortgage foreclosure, city dwellers frightened by crime, ghetto blacks struggling for stability, all these surely were not content with their lot, but they did not share the perspective of moral condemnation with the privileged young...

...To assume responsibility for oneself is to assume responsibility for one's past, one's present, and one's future...

...Those in Elinor's circle were not radical—they viewed radicalism as a symptom of intellectual shallowness...

...People at war with themselves cannot be effective political leaders, nor friends, nor lovers...

...What does this responsibility entail...

...These are "successful blacks...

...For the first time, she recognized another of The Movement's major errors—the idea that "it was impossible to be happy in an unjust country" and that one therefore need not deal with personal problems...

...The first women's group she joined, one of the early ones, turned out terribly...

...For instance, Langer explains her leaving Science magazine, where some of her work on chemical and biological weapons had brought her success, partly because she did not feel that being a successful journalist was compatible with being a virtuous revolutionary: "I did not trust myself or my motives...

...In all his writings Patterson treats an issue that is crucial for the contemporary black American: the interdependence of personal life and political action...

...We used "language most Americans did not understand, and tactics that they feared, on behalf of a goal they did not desire...

...These themes reemerge in Patterson's novel of West Indian slave culture, Die the Long Day...

...But, first, there must be the necessary realistic understanding of society at large, if black Americans are to focus their political activity...

...For the present, it means an acceptance of one's responsibility for all the failures—the poverty, the political impotence, the occupational lowliness —of the group...

...DAVID BENSMAN q "The Moral Crisis of the Black American," by Orlando Patterson...

...Langer points to the adoption of a "class analysis" that placed movement people outside of the class struggle and thus forced them to find revolutionary "vanguards" with which to ally and identify...

...Elinor Langer implicity points out an answer: self-awareness...

...Anything we "privileged" women 100 IN THE MAGAZINES might somehow have needed or felt good about (a piece of work, a job, admission to graduate school) we came to despise and distrust...

...What then, for Patterson, requires change...

...Langer's answer is fascinating: "I do not think that we as a movement wanted to hook into the American political system and miscal99 culated, but that at some level we did not want to do so...

...Subjectively we felt lost, discredited by privilege, and not capable according to our own ideology of being the "agent of change" we believed we needed...

...But when I go outside and talk to people again, it all seems useless...

...Logic, evidence, proof—the tools of our training—came to seem attributes of social class alone, therefore immoral, therefore, useless...

...Langer admits that few of her friends seriously applied Marxist-Leninist ideas...

...We used "false consciousness" cheaply, to explain away the inconvenient phenomenon that Americans were in fact bound up with the culture and the system...

...Why are many young and militant black sociologists turning -against the research conclusions put forth by their white, liberal teachers, and against the progressive explanations of black "failure" in America they presumably should embrace...

...The answer, says Professor Orlando Patterson, rests with an understanding of `The Moral Crisis of the Black American": for one's position on the issue of "black failure" carries with it assumptions about the psychological set of the black American...

...the parents were hostile or resentful toward the children for whom they had made their sacrifices...

...In an apparent reversal of his position, Patterson remarks: "It may well be that the only way in which any meaningful change can take place among a substantial number of black Americans is through a total, almost revolutionary change in American society" (italics added...

...Patterson is now saying, blacks can explain and change failure by owning up to their responsibility for its existence...

...If they can, on the other hand, overcome their guilt about their privileged origins, accept themselves as the product of a class subculture, with the virtues and vices that subculture carIN THE MAGAZINES 101 ries, then they can be more productive...

...There are, says Patterson, black Americans who have achieved self-autonomy through existential rebellion...

...Just as Langer joined The Movement, it was undergoing an important transition from its "American" stage to a second stage that proved to be "sectarian, irrelevant, and self-destructive...

...Despite these differences, he plausibly argues, the contemporary economic dislocation of blacks generates a basis for a cross-national unification...

...If the black American is to treat himself, and is to be treated, as responsible for his own actions— including personal failure—then, to be consistent, he must reject sociological theories that point to external obstacles to success...

...If the New Left developed authoritarian political tendencies because of flaws inherent in its own moral impulse, how can New Leftists hope or be expected to learn from their mistakes...

...Instead, the black American is obliged, through a "leap of will," to accept "sole responsibility" for her or his failure...

...and we never suspected we, with our All-American masks and our premature anxieties, were the coming evidence of the philosophers' anxieties...

...PUBLIC INTEREST, Summer 1973...

...I pulled away because the weight of a public identity was too heavy for me and in part because it was important to me as a women not to succeed in too flashy a fashion...

...Langer believes that Marxist class analysis is outmoded because currently social mobility is real enough in America, so that workers do not think of themselves as a class...

...Langer was once an activist in The Movement, a friend of such leaders as Tom Hayden and Rennie Davis...

...When a black person arrives at a breaking point—because of the actions of others—and reacts rebelliously, has this autonomous action been "willed...

...The political analysis the New Left made of itself as a privileged stratum did reflect the social and cultural situation that produced the New Left...

...They demanded that others share their outrage with America's corruption, without being able to understand that most Americans could not afford what they felt to be the luxury of moral purity...

...Since this hostility ran counter to their value system, it was repressed...

...Sometimes when I am puzzled, I consult a small pamphlet by Ernest Mandel...

...She was also a victim of some of The Movement's characteristic illusions and delusions and, as such, she writes to gain an understanding where "we" went wrong, politically and personally...

...I will return to this point later...

...The radical women's movement in New York was like a permanent purge in which we always identified with those who confessed...

...Patterson also uses such concepts as determinism and self-autonomy as if they were personal reactions to external events that are exclusive of one another...

...I knew the revolution could not rest on timid neurotics like myself and powerful lunatics like the men and women I feared...

...Can the acceptance of responsibility for their own actions be achieved—for both kinds of blacks—through a "leap of will...

...it appears to be 'a sequel to his earlier Public Interest piece, "On the Fate of Blacks in the Americas...

...Even the theories of such liberal scholars as C. Van Woodward, Gunnar Myrdal, and Thomas Pettigrew provide him with convenient justifications for explaining away both a lack of achievement and social pathology...

...Surely, here Langer misses the motivation for that choice of a particular form of "class analysis...

...At the root of Patterson's argument is a mistaken notion...

...created a sense of placelessness...

...For about 15 minutes I am happy and relieved...

...They did this partly in response to the Depression experience, partly in response to a new cultural ideology...

...Only by violating his own dogma —only by acknowledging this vital link between the personal and the political: the interdependence of consciousness and society RONNIE STEINBERG RATNER 104...

...First, they were forced to search for a revolutionary strategy in the works of ideologists who lived in very different circumstances...

...There are conditions under which a black person who is primarily oriented toward the black culture sees white values as a peripheral constraint—and there are different conditions under which white values serve the black person as the sole basis for self-definition...

...It was like living in space, beyond the reach of gravity...

...The realization of autonomy and self-will does not occur in a vacuum...

...At Swarthmore, Langer learned that she was indeed one of America's elite, intellectually and morally superior to America's business-oriented society...

...Langer's current approach to politics is intensely personal, and she realizes that such writing runs the danger of presenting a fragmented, idiosyncratic view of social life...

...PATTERSON'S ARTICLE IS both provocative and opaque...

...Langer says, "Don't force yourself to be what you're not...

...It was in fact the moralistic ideas of the movement as a whole brought into my own and my friends' living rooms...

...A demonstration of self-autonomy, or responsibility for one's own actions, requires two steps: the refusal to accept conditions as they are (presumably both personal and social), and a commitment to change existing personal and social arrangements through personal action...

...One was the idea of "false consciousness...

...In reaction to arguments that falsely blame the black "victim," many black activists and intellectuals point to white "conspired" conditions and thereby rationalize and try to * Reviewed in this column, by David Bensman, in our Summer 1972 issue...

...Can it be an implusive reaction...

...Banfield has said that the poor continue to be poor because they are unable to defer gratification...

...But the half-baked Marxism that most New Leftists adopted "gave us several ideas that I think impeded the development of a productive Left political movement...

...And, again, There can be no help from others, none whatever, not even from the kindest, most genuinely liberal hands, [for] he must solve it alone because he brought it upon himself...

...For the experience of existential rebellion has, first and foremost, political significance...

...Langer's analysis is weakest in its explanation of why The Movement went wrong—why Movement people circa 1963 adopted a political perspective contrary to their own perceptions and experience...

...Here we witness the dynamics of the master-slave relationship in all of its complexity...

...A black person in Mississippi could have decided in 1960 that he was going to vote for John Kennedy—but if the registrar of voters refused to register him, he would most likely have been prevented from voting...

...LANGER THINKS that it was the New Left's use of "class analysis" that was its biggest error...

...indeed, they felt themselves to be not-part of a class, largely because they did not need money, consumer goods, or jobs...

...After leaving her first job at the Washington Center for Foreign Policy Research, she began a career in journalism, becoming political editor of Science magazine and friendly with a group of people "more or less the left wing of the Kennedy Administration" who were founding the Institute for Policy Studies...

...Surely not society—if all black failure is a result of black consciousness...

...Born at the beginning of World War II, Langer grew up in an affluent, Jewish, liberal home, in Newton, Mass...

...Is overt rebellion the necessary evidence for dignity—or is it a futile act of desperation...

...It is certainly important, in these years of political resignation, for a black intellectual like Patterson to prod his brothers and sisters to assert and hold themselves responsible for their own liberation...

...At the dawn of the New Frontier, they developed a "romantic" radicalism, based on a love of history, not on political experience...

...The upper-middle-class family, with its ideology of parental sacrifice for the children's opportunity, an ideology that became dominant (especially among Jews) after World War II, was a crucial element in the self-hatred of young leftists of the '60s...

...And is it "self-autonomy" or solipsism to take responsibility for the reality of slavery, even in a metaphorical sense...

...Since one's failure," says Patterson in a paraphrase of an argument he rejects, "is entirely the consequence of another group, or of a set of circumstances created by another group, then it follows that only that group can change one's conditions...

...The "vulgar-Marxist class analysis" they adopted had a wonderful ability to simplify political analysis...

...We fancied ourselves divided into "working-class women" and "middle class women...

...orking Papers for a New Society now has published three issues—not enough to have assumed a definite character...

...For Patterson, blacks, "as the most oppressed group...

...You, as you are, can do any number of useful things...

...For the past, it means, to take the most extreme example—assuming the burden of responsibility for even so horrible an experience as slavery—not its causes, not its explanation, but its responsibility...

...the children of the upper middle class hated themselves because their privileges came at such a cost...

...The argument that this individual must accept "sole responsibility" for that outcome because he or she let it happen is indeed baffling: either this is a peculiarly confusing way of saying that one must accept but not acquiesce in one's experience—or else it is completely wrong-headed...

...In this case, the gains outweigh the possible distortion...

...In this earlier essay, Patterson clearly and convincingly traces the differences in the condition of black communities in the Western hemisphere to sharply divergent patterns of slavery...

...The magazine is published quarterly by the Cambridge Policy Studies Institute and serves as a forum for innovation in social policy...

...First, while the New Leftists felt themselves to be morally superior to the cynicism, materialism, and corruption of American society, which in large part was there, they did not understand that adopting such an elevated moral stance depended on secure and numerous privileges...

...Within a loose Left framework, proposals in such areas as community organizing, workers' control, and income redistribution are discussed...

...While its experimental format may or may not prove viable, Working Papers already has justified its existence by publishing a brilliant article by Elinor Langer...

...excuse away demoralization and passivity...

...Patterson is also on target in isolating the importance of a personal selfimage for effective political action...

...When an assignment brought her to Berkeley, to cover the Free Speech Movement in 1965, her identification with The Movement became complete...

...Inevitably, this took a toll...

...How, exactly, can such a `leap of will" occur...

...The result was that around the whole New Left, in 1967 and '68, the tendency to dogma and posture was replacing thought and analysis...

...I took for granted that I was meant for the cafes and barricades, and I was sorry to live in a country where affairs were so peaceably settled...

...Is discussing the successful black American in terms of existential conflict a psychological explanation and, therefore, psychological "determinism...

...Part of Patterson's problem stems, perhaps, from his use of such terms as "moral," "selfautonomy," and "determinism" when treating such issues as the impact of social science research on the black mind...

...Instead, the process of accepting responsibility for our actions should be treated as an individual posture toward the world that serves, in turn, as a social context (as in Die The Long Day...

...Newton equipped her to enter Swarthmore College in 1957, with "detached precocity," "immunized" from politics, disciplined for adulthood...

...Need they be the only blacks to transcend their negative self-image...

...LANGER'S ARTICLE is better on analysis of past errors than on suggestions for the future...

...Indeed he raises this rejection to the level of an ethical obligation, both for them and for their fellow black Americans...

...The moral dilemma of the slave turns on the issue of rebellion and self-dignity...

...Yet, it remains unclear why an ethic of selfresponsibility must conflict with an acceptance of the empirical findings of sound research...

...The results of our groping for a "vanguard" were, if history is gentle with us, ridiculous...

...If, as a black man, you blame others for your failure, you relinquish your selfautonomy and subjugate yourself to white America...

...Why did the New Left adopt an analysis that singled out the working class as the motive force for revolution...

...And there was "false internationalism": We assumed our identification with third world countries was self-evidently justified because we had a common enemy: U.S...

...it also reflected the guilt and self-hatred that privilege engendered...

...This restructuring of society will result from certain political actions that Patterson terms "constructive public rebellion...

...Patterson specifies a variety of paths to personal moral transformation while isolating the act of existential rebellion—in the image of Camus's rebel—as the most authentic mode...

...SDSers could not come up with fresh perceptions because "we hated intellectuals...

...In my group, we tyrannized ourselves with ideas that could only destroy us...

...who defy deterministic theories of black failure, . . . having gained their humanity, [accomplished] the much easier rebellion against their social and economic environment...

...Her account indicates that the failure of the student leftists to come to grips with themselves as a social group had two important negative consequences...

...imperialism...

...Yet the black American leadership—rather than develop a political strategy that aims to transcend the lifestyle in black ghettos—has chosen to idealize that life-style by 'proletarianizing" itself...

...His discussion of the need for the kind of responsible black political and intellectual leadership that arises from a positive self-valuation is indeed crucial in an environment plagued by demoralization, passivity, and retreat into individual violence...

...But, as Patterson acknowledges elsewhere, the internalization of the values of a dominant group by a subordinate group is a complicated process of change and tension...

...Langer's answer seems to be that New Leftists did not feel themselves part of a class...

...Patterson writes that The advantage to the victim which determinism seems to offer turns into a Pyrrhic moral victory...

...How can Patterson envisage or even deem necessary a revolutionary transformation of the social order...

...In doing so, they had to give up their desires for creative or interesting work...

...Our failure to admit that was the source of the idea that they could be dislodged in single, dramatic acts of terror...

...Can the slave think of himself as heroic for enduring a brutalizing experience—or is this merely a rationalization for the mere survival of a submissive self...

...let me isolate one that seems particularly compelling...

...Why did SDS adopt a "Leninist" strategy of revolution...

...We made little progress in discovering what the real relationship between a U.S...

...Feeling inexplicable, if not worthless, we began our search for an agent of change...

...Some of the contributions are quite ingenious and sophisticated, others decidedly naive...

...radical movement and foreign countries ought to be...

...In progressive Newton High, the students were reading existentialist literature of alienation and despair, decrying "organization men" and the dismaying prevalence of other-directedness in our culture...

...Does the negative self-image of the blacks arise only out of a "moral" dilemma or does it also point to a deep and devastating "psychological" conflict...

...Our words armored us against the very people we needed...

...Thus Patterson sees individual moral transformation as an essential prerequisite for social and political transformation...

...Because of this connection, he regards as entirely legiti102 IN THE MAGAZINES mate his black colleagues' rejection of white, liberal theories of race relations...

...The ensuing rejection of class...

...will assume the initiative in bringing about the revolutionary coalition" of ethnic groups around issues of class...

...They were, however, disaffected with American culture and viewed their intellectual training as a tool to "understand" social change, not bring it about...

...In turn, if the successful black is the one who exemplifies existential rebellion and defies determinism, is the prescription for success of all blacks only the rejection of determinism...

...From this standpoint, blacks themselves can best assess to what degree the possibility of self-realization is blocked by self-distortion and IN THE MAGAZINES 103 to what degree by social barriers...

...Certainly not...

...Guilt remained, and self-hatred...

...Langer's explanation here is interesting, but not adequate...

...Our internationalism was chiefly worshipful...

...At last we have an analysis.' It reminded me of Peter Pan and Wendy: `We have a mother.'" Second, New Leftists were unable to understand their own lives or trust their own experiences...

...Beneath this inappropriate existential language, there seems to operate a new twist on the culture-of-poverty thesis...

...Patterson argues that sociological "determinism" is incompatible with the quest for moral autonomy...

...The moral impulse behind the rebellion of the young leftists was flawed at its foundation, in two important ways...

...I understand the classes, forces, categories...

...In his attempt to echo existential literature, the terms become like bats, slipping out of one's grasp...

...Her childhood was "a fifties childhood, neutral and sentimental, separated from [her] later life by geologic fault...

...As the group dissolved, Elinor Langer came to see the need for self-repair...

...But this very arrogance was mixed with selfhatred, bred by a guilty sense of privilege...

...To what degree can it be deliberate...

...But surely, to assert that X affects Y is different from arguing that only X affects Y. Even if black "failure" results entirely from circumstances created by whites, is it only up to the whites to stop the ball they started rolling...