The Tightrope of Color
BELL, DANIEL
THINKING ALOUD The Tightrope of Color By Daniel Bell Mr. William F. Buckley Jr. is of the "radical right"—not in the political sense of an extremist who would disrupt constitutional processes,...
...and his theory of nonviolent resistance the Negroes found a new symbol and a new method of effective combat...
...Finally, there has been a new competition for leadership among the various Negro organizations...
...In six states, the Negro vote is a virtual balance of power...
...is of the "radical right"—not in the political sense of an extremist who would disrupt constitutional processes, but in the original literal paradox of the term...
...the NAACP had taken the leadership in pressing for legal redress of Negro rights...
...And in his far-out fashion, Buckley concludes: "Pass a law that forbids bartenders from being rude to Negroes and you have passed a law forbidding human beings from being human beings...
...A different kind of "radical right" (with apologies to Mr...
...If a policeman is brutal to an individual, one can strip him of his badge...
...But can they be...
...Telling a storekeeper that he must serve everyone is an infringement on his use of property...
...true, it may not stop him from being sadistic, but it restricts his opportunities for being so...
...Is there not in this instance the rival claim of human personality not to be degraded by considerations (of race, color and class) which negate a person's right to be treated as an individual...
...He seeks to go to the root of the matter (as a radical does) and (as is the conservative habit) always comes up with the same answer: "You can't change human nature...
...Speaking to a gathering of Black Muslims in Los Angeles, Malcolm X declared: "I would like to announce a very beautiful thing that has happened...
...He cites two instances of Balwin's humiliations—the first involving an Irish policeman who yelled at him as a child, "Go back to Harlem where the Niggers belong...
...Such comparisons are inexact...
...America's ardent courtship of the new African bloc at the United Nations could only, after all, increase the sense of discrepancy between the actions of the Government abroad and at home...
...With President Kennedy's speech on civil rights, the issue has shuffled back from the streets to the "legislative halls...
...So while one does not "cure" meanness by legislation, one certainly can penalize those who are guilty of it, just as one penalizes any act of cruelty...
...By lending respectability to such a movement the Negro intelligentsia is badly compromising itself...
...Today, different rights are restricting the exercise of older, established property rights...
...When one searches for the answer to the relevant question about the Negro agitation—why at this time and not before?—it becomes apparent that several elements have conjoined to precipitate racial tensions...
...But the continuing high Negro unemployment rate of the last five years, which no one has wanted to notice until recently, has eroded these gains and increased the anxieties of the Negro community...
...The problem of discrimination is a problem of law because it involves the cardinal principle of the "rule of law"—the principle of generality...
...And the issue has been joined not only politically—and sociologically as Mr...
...What we have, then, is not a loss of freedom, for we are being asked to choose freely between two rights...
...When the President proposed that all private establishments catering to the public be forced to serve all comers, Senators Goldwater and Dirksen raised the question of "infringement" upon property rights, and therefore of "freedom...
...Today, Professor Clark is quiet...
...The present Negro mood has been compared to a revolutionary situation...
...The failure of Congress to act can only compromise the moderate elements (already they fear the label...
...Last winter, Kenneth Clark, the Negro psychologist of the City College of New York, opposed Malcolm X, the Black Muslim leader, on a television program...
...Yet the movement constitutes a latent danger that could prove far more serious because it preaches a "righteous violence": When one can harness anger and aggression that derive from deep frustrations and resentment with an ideology that erases any guilt for murderous acts, one has all the passion of a jehad, or holy war...
...Reflecting on James Baldwin's essay, The Fire Next Time, Buckley says that what the Negro wants is an "evanescence of color" and that this is an impossible demand...
...None of these conditions are true of the United States today...
...He has felt a new—and perhaps ominous— sense of the changeability of history, with the color issue coming to the fore on the world political scene...
...In their litany, property rights is an absolute and freedom is an abstract noun...
...Prejudice is an "attitude" which is not easily changed, whereas discrimination is an "act" which can be barred...
...In a public place, or a place open to the public, every individual should be treated equally...
...The context is economic...
...And Adam Clayton Powell, that political chameleon, has openly allied himself with the Black Muslims...
...It is an index of the fever pitch of the color issue that few Negro spokesmen are now willing openly to condemn the Black Muslims, although they were six months ago...
...They preach a rhetorical militancy, but at no risk to themselves, since they will not engage in sit-downs, or demonstrate for jobs or voting rights, or conduct any other "integrationist" activity...
...Wait, all right, well somebody came and told me that he really had answered our prayers in France...
...But how ludicrous an infringement when weighed against the rival claim of equal treatment in a place of commerce...
...among the Negro leadership...
...In Martin Luther King Jr...
...There was a new sense of expectation among Negroes for the education and advancement of their children, particularly as more Negroes came North...
...In a subtle sense, and not for the first time, the "right" is learning the old lesson that democracy is always a choice between relative rights...
...The movement North has increased the Negro's political weight...
...He dropped an airplane out of the sky with over 120 white people on it because the Muslims believe in an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth...
...This is Buckley's finding, in a recent issue of the National Review, concerning the color question...
...In this respect, like every form of lower-class milIenarianism, Black Muslimism's twisted hate creates an elan for its followers by an inverted form of superiority...
...Since the white man is the son of the devil, the white man himself is a devil by nature and incapable of doing good...
...It promises to its adherents a new order which will arise after the spilling of blood...
...It is more to the point to shoot human nature, whence the troubles really come...
...I got a wire from God today [laughter...
...it is an abridgement of property...
...By penalizing discrimination, one is asserting the moral judgment of the community against these wrongdoers...
...Then Buckley asks: "How can such meanness be cured by legislation...
...The Kennedy victory (due in no small part to the rigged balloting in Chicago's colored South Side, which gave the Illinois electoral votes to the Democrats) gave the Negro leadership entree to the new Administration, but then they were told that civil rights would have to take a back seat to other political reforms...
...In the dramatic action of the Freedom Riders and such revivifying organizations as core, the Negroes have found new leadership...
...But economic opportunities are increasingly difficult to find and legal progress has been slow, and both organizations have been unwilling, until recently, to mobilize the restive Negro community...
...In a paper he delivered to the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, Lincoln cites press reports of Malcolm X's reaction last June to the news that 120 people from Atlanta, Georgia were killed in a crash on a flight out of Paris...
...In Muslim mythology, Black Man— 'the Original Man'—was created by Allah, the one true God...
...For more than 15 years—during the period of relatively high employment from 1943 until roughly 1959—the Negro had begun to make economic gains, which were reflected in the increasing stability of Negro working-class family life...
...Revolutions usually occur when governmental authority has broken down, either because of corruption, an inability or unwillingness to act, or loss of support from the people...
...Buckley) is the Black Muslim movement...
...Buckley failed to see in his elision of prejudice and discrimination—but philosophically as well...
...For the moment, the Black Muslims are in an enviable position...
...The white man, however, is a 'made thing,' a beast, a synthetic man called into being by Yakub, the evil principle...
...James Baldwin has expressed some sympathy for the Black Muslim movement...
...The Urban League had staked its claim to leadership on the grounds of increasing economic opportunity...
...Ideologically, Black Muslimism is a form of "chiliastic racism...
...Shoot them...
...and the second, which occurred more recently, involving a bartender at a Chicago airport who refused him a drink on the disingenuous ground that he was under 21...
...This is not an abridgement of freedom...
...What shall we do in the new order to that policeman and that bartender...
...The answer, though, is not to shoot him (which is what a Russian has seriously proposed) but to fire him...
...The new states of sub-Sahara Africa have heightened the color consciousness and pride of the American Negro...
...To the Black Muslims, as C. Eric Lincoln has pointed out in his book, The Black Muslim in America, "every white man is a devil—the personification of evil...
...The political promise made to Negroes has not been realized...
...But thanks to God, or Jehovah, or Allah, we will continue to pray and we hope that every day another plane falls out of the sky...
...so has Gordon Parks in a recent article in Life...
...The trouble with this reasoning is that it elides a basic distinction between prejudice and discrimination...
...Similarly, one can say that a teacher who is mean to a child is not fit to be a teacher...
...Unfortunately, what is true about protest movements, such as the Negro civil rights movement, is that when legitimate demands are thwarted and long overdue reforms that have been morally sanctioned are not made, then extremist elements take over...
...But the change has come about through free debate and through democratic consensus, and the legislative means of redress are still open...
Vol. 46 • July 1963 • No. 14
