Pie in the Sky...: A Reply-

...How then shall the government see to it that it does not "interfere with the prejudices and discriminatory practices of society" and at the same time exercise its right and "duty to make sure that these practices are not legally enforced...

...But why reach them at all...

...And for these vibrations, of evidence and proof, Miss Arendt re• veals no affinity whatsoever...

...Can these be eradicated...

...We are told by Miss A. that the results of a public opinion poll in Virginia showed that 79 per cent of the persons denied an obligation to accept the Supreme Court decision as binding...

...For there are no two ways about it...

...They don't have to send them to integrated public schools...

...Nor is her tri-valence trivial...

...But where are the unavoidable correlatives in bitter social relations...

...Let all of us who care the least bit about what happens to Negroes and to our country, let us all immediately declare a moratorium on any action which might produce further equality...

...If not that warning, then what...

...Suppose a Negro is refused lodging in a hotel or food in a restaurant...

...They lead to conclusions which simply defy elementary logic and human decency...

...How appalling indeed of Miss A. to ignore the most courageous people in the nation—excepting, always, the Negro school children of Little Rock—in the interest of shoring up her decrepit metaphysics with even more decrepit non-facts...

...Sad, dreadful, incredible, but there it is...

...Does she mean only that the visible black skin color can't be altered...

...The conclusion would seem obvious...

...Surely not when they produce a remark such as "While the Government has no right to interfere with the prejudices and discriminatory practices of society, it has not only the right but the duty to make sure that these practices are not legally enforced...

...But then America has to be put in its place...

...Not that surely...

...Because, says Arendt, the more equal people have become in every respect, and the more equalitypermeates the whole texture of society, the more will differences [all differences...

...More still: ...Oppressed minorities were never the best judges on the order of priorities in such matters, and there are many instances when they preferred to fight for social opportunity rather than for basic human or political rights...

...They are the qualities with which the equalization process must deal...

...But one has to doubt that Miss Arendt could have such a revelation...

...After all those hurricane warnings, all those ominous massings of portentous black clouds, out comes this tremulous and timorous pipsqueak of a conclusion...

...Suppose a policeman is called, and the Negro is ejected and beaten—or just ejected, just plain thrown out by a policeman...

...The puzzle remains, and will have to remain, unsolved...

...For if the schools were no more than the loci of moral catechisms repeated in unison with those recited in the home, where and how would any society in the world ever have gotten off the ground on which it originally was founded...

...1 reported that workers in a Peiping warehouse had [agreed to drop piece work for a fixed wage lowering their pay] after a protracted debate during which they had come to realize that to labor only for money, food and clothing was too narrow-minded and selfish...

...But every known system of education in the world, if it is worth a penny of the money spent on it, promotes conflict between home and school...

...Suppose he refuses to leave when told to...

...Or, again: To force parents to send children to an integrated school against their will means to deprive them of rights which clearly belong to them in all free societies—the private right over the children and the social right to free association...

...So goes the hard-bitten Southern type of argument...

...This of course does not have to happen [Gott sei Dank] but it would be only natural if it did, and it would be very surprising if it did not...

...How likely is it that this danger will materialize...

...No, then, we cannot take Miss A.'s conception of the separate terrains and dominions of society seriously...

...Why the utterly incongruous conclusion...

...In the first instance, it is American equality which needs to be exaggerated and burlesqued, because it is American...

...And how doubly unenlightened and misguided are Negroes in those states where there are no laws against intermarriage...

...Are we to infer from that that she prefers mob rule to law abidingness...

...But every decent reporter who has visited the South and talked with school children reports that the children are far more ready and able than their parents to work side by side with Negroes, and share their common school facilities...

...What the article really wishes to say is said succinctly, clearly and unmistakably, finally, in the last sentence...

...The paper said that the Peiping warehousemen had agreed to a much lower fixed wage than they had previously received and had abandoned the bourgeois concept of legal rights characterized by haggling for less work but more pay...

...The so-called liberals and moderates of the South are simply those who are lawabiding, and they have dwindled to a minority of 21 per cent...

...Let Arendt tell us herself: It is therefore quite possible that the achievement of social, economic and educational equality for the Negro may sharpen the color problem in this country instead of assuaging it...

...But that's not true either...

...For what then, one wishes to whisper, what then of Negro children and their parents and their rights...

...Or at least Miss A. would do well to deny that she meant these to be the main theses...

...That, as in education, tradition and authority have been eliminated and hence we are having all the troubles we now confront...

...Poor, unenlightened Negroes, for whom Miss A. feels such sympathy...

...See Dwight Macdonald's pieces on teen-age public opinion in November 22 and 29 New Yorker...

...Because there is an Arendt-type force which even America can't beat, the force of her conviction and that, I must add, of many Southerners, that the differences between Negroes and Whites are ineradicable...

...Six lines later...

...Why not simply reverse the "happy" trend of the last fifteen years...

...Instead, either out of timidity before her own ideas, or out of a reflective recoil from the sense of what she has advocated, we are told that any further government intervention ought to be guided by "caution and moderation rather than by impatience and ill-advised measures...

...Even political rights, like the right to vote, and nearly all other rights [why only nearly all others...

...But why then remind us time and time again that there are some things that even American-style equality can't equalize...

...Granted her sympathy with the Negro...

...As some Southern Whites view the matter, the ineradicable differences are in character, intelligence, morality, ambition, responsibility, passion, etc...

...For here, Miss A. would have to agree, tradition and authority make the problems...

...Her words: "the proportion of people who prefer mob rule to law-abiding citizenship...

...It would be hard to find more severe criticism and rejection of the Supreme Court's decision than Miss A. herself expresses...

...The best with which we can credit Miss Arendt in this context is ig norance...

...Surely we are not expected to take her distinctions between the public and private domains of life seriously, at least not when they lead her where she has gone with them...

...There we read: Hence it seems highly questionable whether it was wise to begin enforcement of civil rights in a domain (e.g., public education) where no basic human and no political right is at stake, and where other rights—social and private —whose protection is no less vital, can so easily be hurt...

...it cannot equalize natural, physical characteristics...

...Moreover, these are tied to the same genes which give the stereotypal Negro his kinky hair, pitch black skin, doliocephalic skull, and everted lips...

...JUST WHAT, after all, does Miss A. mean to tell us...

...On one page: In its all-comprehensive typically American form, equality possesses an enor mous power to equalize what by nature and origin is different...

...For there we are told that even prior to the arrival of Federal troops, "law-abiding Southerners had decided that enforcement of the law against mob rule and protection of children against adult mobsters were none of their business...

...That would really be a masterful piece of adult education...

...For that we don't need all the rest...

...The nightmare world of Orwell's Animal Farm has been brought into being...

...Granted...

...Does she merely want to warn us that injudicious exercise of government power, at the wrong time, and some nine months too late, and with no previous preparation of the groundwork is not likely to be very effective and may even make the problem worse...

...Miss ARENDT is obviously of three minds on the subject of the differences between Negroes and Whites...

...But not strange that in so doing she should use among the worst polls and misinterpret them through exaggeration...

...And finally one is led unmistakably to the conclusion that the argument is meant just as it is stated, with all its metaphysical mumbo jumbo, all its disregard for basic facts of sociology and history...

...Where in the fabric of Miss A.'s minimum government do these rights get respected and protested...

...And this, Arendt assures us, is not some ghoulish fantasy, but rather, a condition which is "well known to students of history...

...Phrases such as "natural, physical characteristics," "those who are visibly and by nature unlike the other," and "what by nature and origin is different...

...Now, we are told, parents are foisting on to children the problem of desegregation, a problem they have "for generations . . . confessed themselves unable to solve...

...What of her intellectual version of the Negro as a human being...

...That's a lie...

...A little touch of miscegenation or of that intermarriage of which Miss Arendt is such an ardent champion, will take care of the visible differences too...

...Pie in the sky when we die...

...My emphasis: MT] What then should we do...

...But the question nags...

...What Miss A. finds to be a cruel dumping of a problem on tender children turns out to be instead a process which even segregationists recog nize, and hence fight bitterly, namely, that school children can get on together much better than their parents, and that if their parents let them alone, they will work out ways of working and living together in the schools...

...Minimal respect for the facts calls for us to consider the contrary cases of Hawaii, Brazil, Mexico, France and Puerto Rico...

...Then, today's visible, superficial differences persist...

...any differences?] be resented, the more conspicuous will those become who are visibly and by nature unlike the others...

...And may I immodestly refer Miss A. to my own study of desegregation in North Carolina, where about the same per cent of the people as in Virginia advocated a constitutional reform or amendment to reduce the power of the Supreme Court, but less than 25 per cent said they would be willing to use force if necessary to keep the schools segregated...

...We are back, full circle, at that point where self-anointed Pastors of the Spirit, now in secular disguise, feel it their moral obligation to tell us peasants, the crude and ignorant and untutored ones, that all this earthly struggle is in vain...

...Four lines later: But the principle of equality, even in its American form, is not omnipotent...

...Just credit Miss Arendt with a self-destroying contradiction in the central portion of her argument, and let the matter go at that...

...why not all others...

...Surely Miss Arendt can't mean the same thing, at least not all of the same things...

...How does one possibly equate the statement that one does not feel an obligation to accept the Supreme Court rule as binding with the statement that one prefers mob rule to law abidingness...

...This is what Miss Arendt means...

...So one then looks for the obvious clues one has missed, the clues which will reveal the convoluted level of irony on which the argument was deliberately put...

...IT IS STRANGE, too, that Miss A. should use public opinion polls to inform herself regarding Southern attitudes...

...Again, we quote Miss Arendt: The right to marry whomever one wishes is an elementary human right compared to which the 'right to attend an integrated school, the right to sit where one pleases on a bus, the right to go into any hotel or recreation area or place of amusement, regardless of one's skin color or race' are minor indeed...

...that it is eternal salvation and damnation we must worry about, and not what happens to us here, in this brief moment of earthly existence...

...Yet the puzzle remains...

...There it is...

...Does she know anything of the courageous fight which numerous people in Little Rock, in Norfolk and points South and East have waged, against the most bitter of hostilities...

...New York Times, November 12, 1958...

...Surely this cannot be an article on educational theory...

...Granted her self-imposed special responsibilities in virtue of being a Jew...

...which ones not?] enumerated in the Constitution, are secondary to the inalienable human rights to 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness' proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence...

...For a woman who has experienced fascism as thoroughly and as bitterly as Miss A., the failure to understand the impotence of respectable middle class people in the face of naked violence in the streets is simply unforgivable...

...We too can read the newspapers...

...But no, Miss Arendt will not come along with us on this retroactive historical journey...

...For we see clearly the reasons for the shift in attitude...

...Miss Arendt appears simply to have run out of nerve...

...If equality produces these disastrous events, then there is nothing to be done but to call an immediate halt to desegregation of any type, restore law and order, and denounce as enemies both of the Negro, and of the country as a whole, all those misguided persons who persist in bringing a crisis upon us by their advocacy of equality...

...and to this category the right to home and marriage unquestionably belongs...

...WHAT IS ALL THIS, anyway...

...In other words, the arrival of troops did no more than change passive into massive resistance...

...Miss A. obviously knows little or nothing about what actually happened in Little Rock and cares even less truly to understand the troublesome events...

...And by what token can Arendt possibly hold the equalization of the past years to be a happy trend...

...How could she have written this...

...The more conspicuous will those become who are visibly and by natureunlike the others...

...But those clues are not there...

...Is it because by some new Arendt-type logic, it is better to reach crises slowly and patiently rather than quickly and impatiently...

...The moment this question is brought out into the open, certain phrases, which slipped by one's attention, now demand that they be read and re-read with care...

...For here with the road wide open and no legal barriers, they have refused to take advantage of this glorious opportunity...

...It is rather, our author assures us, a danger point which invariably emerges...

...And if they can't afford private schools...

...The Negro is what he is because he is Negro and nothing we can do can ever change that...

...The youth newspaper Chungkuo Tsingnien Pao of Oct...

...Why only caution our government to be well-advised and patient...

...Nor is it only a matter of small likelihood...

...Granted her moral convictions, about which she assures us...

...This is precisely the basic source of optimism in the whole picture...

...The "bourgeois concept," that is, which has been the basis of every free labor organization in modern society...

...No, the article is about none of these...

...What, then, is she up to...

...Miss A. trembles at the idea that if the schools are desegregated and the homes segregated then, at one stroke, the authority of both the teachers and parents is abolished, replacing it with "the role of public opinion among children who have neither the ability nor the right to establish a public opinion of their own...

...There, differences are more ubiquitous, sometimes more startling: that is, physical differences...

...Indeed, if the logic of the argument were to prevail, we should all immediately work to reverse the trends of the last two decades, and get back quickly to some condition of more widespread inequality so that we keep as far away from that ominous and highly probable danger as possible...

...Where is the evidence that ever since the existence of the school systems, the authority of parents and teachers have been abolished at one fell swoop because they have been at odds with each other...

...Where are all the hundreds of millions of little mob gangsters of whom Miss A. speaks so threateningly, and all of them, miraculously, caught in that one photograph of one ugly, sick White girl from Little Rock...

...The NAACP clearly has an immediate and urgent responsibility to call meetings of Negroes all over the United States so that Miss Arendt could explain to them why they ought to stop fighting for equality, in general, and why, if they are going to work on anything, it ought to be on intermarriage...

...Which differences...

...Could it be that Miss Arendt had a moment of revelation, during which there appeared to her the truth of what scientific research has shown over and over in the past twenty years, namely, that Negroes and Whites manage best to live in peace with each other and with respect for each other when they view each other as peers, and at relatively high levels of status...

...Ah, how sad indeed...

...It is all there, incredibly arguing that further desegregation of the schools can only cause trouble, most of all to Negroes...

...But doesn't Miss A., obviously a great partisan of private schools, know that parents may send their children to private schools if they wish...

...Above all, the authorities must help, at a minimum, by not inviting crude and naked violence to come in off the streets and take over the school rooms and hallways...

...Moreover, does Miss A. know anything about the pain and the shame which apparently thousands of decent people in Little Rock felt at the violence committed against the Negroes and schools...

...How does one work that bit of magic...

...But assuming no miscegenation and no marriage between Whites and Negroes...

...How misguided of them to press for equality of opportunity on jobs, housing, health, voting, and all these other trivia, instead of wising up to their own best interests and demanding the repeal of the laws against intermarriage...

...From this she concludes that 79 per cent of the people of Virginia believe in mob rule...

...Does this mean that these unavoidably persist as pegs on which social discriminations are hung...

...For this would require some sympathetic concord between one's intuition-receiving apparatus, and the wave frequency on which such research revelations are broadcast...

...The more equal people become, the less equal, because the remaining inequalities, no matter how small, take on much more psychological meaning than ever before...

...AND HOW CURIOUSLY Miss A. reads the newspapers and diagnoses the trends...

...Shining Progress in China Dept...

...For what can this mean...

...For then we would have to take stock of such comments as "The only public force that can fight social prejudice is the churches," or, another statement, to the effect that the states' rights to prescribe minimum requirements for future citizenship involve only the content of the child's education, not the context of association and social life which invariably develops out of his attendance at school, otherwise one would have to challenge the right of the private schools to exist...

...This misunderstanding and exaggeration of the findings of public opinion polls is carried on in true Arendt style in the next paragraph...

...All of these refer to the Negro...

...Is Miss A. totally unaware of the fact that a large majority of persons in the South would no more engage in mob rule than would she...

...Could such an article have been written by Hannah Arendt, the author of the book on totalitarianism...

...What, then, of her theory of rights and her priorities of morality...