BEYOND BLACK & WHITE CL

by MARABLE,MANNING

• ISBN13: 9781859849248
• ISBN10: 1859849245
• Edition: 00
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1995-10-17
• Publisher: VERSO

Summary

Confronted with a renascent right and the continuing burden of grotesque inequality, Manning Marable argues that the black struggle must move beyond previous strategies for social change. The politics of black nationalism, which advocates the building of separate black institutions, is an insufficient response. The politics of integration, characterized by traditional middle-class organizations like the NAACP and Urban League, seeks only representation without genuine power. Instead, a transformationist approach is required, one that can embrace the unique cultural identity of African-Americans while restructuring power and privilege in American society. Only a strategy of radical democracy can ultimately deconstruct race as a social force.
Beyond Black and White brilliantly dissects the politics of race and class in the US of the 1990s. Topics include: the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill controversy; the factors behind the rise and fall of Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition; Benjamin Chavis and the conflicts within the NAACP; and the national debate over affirmative action. Marable outlines the current debates in the black community between liberals, "Afrocentrists," and the advocates of social transformation. He advances a political vision capable of drawing together minorities into a majority of the poor and oppressed, a majority which can throw open the portals of power and govern in its own name.

Author Biography

Manning Marable is Professor of History and Director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University, New York.

Table of Contents

Preface
Introduction: The Prism of Race	p. 1
Black America in Search of Itself	p. 13
Race and Realignment in American Politics	p. 26
At the End of the Rainbow	p. 55
Race and Class in the US Presidential Election of 1992	p. 62
Politics, Personality and Protest in Harlem: The Rangel-Powell Congressional Race	p. 73
Affirmative Action and the Politics of Race	p. 81
Clarence Thomas and the Crisis of Black Political Culture	p. 93
Blueprint for Black Studies	p. 109
Black Studies, Multiculturalism and the Future of American Education	p. 117
Education, Faith and the Promise of Equality	p. 131
Malcolm as Messiah: Cultural Myth versus Historical Reality	p. 137
Memory and Militancy in Transition: The 1993 March on Washington	p. 142
Benjamin Chavis and the Crisis of Black Leadership	p. 157
Black Intellectuals in Conflict	p. 167
African-American Empowerment in the Face of Racism: The Political Aftermath of the Battle of Los Angeles	p. 177
Beyond Racial Identity Politics: Toward a Liberation Theory for Multicultural Democracy	p. 185
The Divided Mind of Black America: Race, Ideology and Politics in the Post-Civil-Rights Era	p. 203
History and Black Consciousness: The Political Culture of Black America	p. 216
Index	p. 230
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Chapter One

Black America in Search of Itself

Conspiracy theories always tell you something, if not historical truth. They abound at present in the black community. Many believe that AIDS, which has struck disproportionately among people of color, is some kind of white-supremacist medical conspiracy. Many African-Americans remember the perverse medical experiment conducted by the federal government in Tuskegee, Alabama; for forty years beginning in the 19305, 399 black men suffering from advanced stages of syphilis went untreated in this program.

In 1988, an aide to then-Mayor Eugene Sawyer of Chicago had to leave office after declaring that "Jewish doctors were infecting black babies with AIDS." In September 1990, Essence, a popular black women's magazine, featured an essay headed "AIDS: Is It Genocide?" When a New York Times/CBS News poll in August asked African-American and white residents of New York City whether AIDS "was deliberately created in a laboratory in order to infect black people," the differences in racial perceptions were striking Only I per cent of all whites polled thought this statement was true, and another 4 per cent thought it could possibly be true. On the other hand, 10 per cent of all blacks accepted the statement as valid, with another 19 per cent agreeing it could be true.

When blacks were queried about the reasons for the accessibility of crack cocaine and other illegal drugs within the African-American community, the results were similar. One-fourth of all blacks questioned agreed that the federal government "deliberately makes sure that drugs are easily available in poor black neighborhoods." An additional 35 per cent thought that this assertion was "possibly true."

When millions of people are absolutely convinced that they are being systematically destroyed, whether by an onslaught of drugs, criminal violence, or medical mayhem, any nascent racial polemicist can gather a constituency around himself and acquire a degree of legitimacy. Blacks ask themselves: Why is it so much easier to obtain crack cocaine and heroin in our neighborhoods than it is to buy fresh milk, eggs, and bread? Why are so many white educators so hostile toward the introduction of African-American Studies and multicultural requirements within the core curricula of public schools and colleges?

Dr Leonard Jeffries, Jr., chair of the African-American Studies Department at New York's City College, started a firestorm in July at the Empire State Black Arts and Cultural Festival in Albany by delivering a public address that included several blatantly anti-Semitic remarks. Jeffries, whose speech was broadcast over an Albany cable-TV station, asserted that blacks were the victims of a "conspiracy planned and plotted out of Hollywood" by "people called Greenberg and Weisberg and Trigliani." He claimed that "Russian Jewry had a particular control" over the film industry and that "their financial partners, the Mafia, put together a financial system of destruction of black people." He criticized those who opposed the inclusion of African and African-American history and culture in the state's high-school curricula. He particularly condemned Diane Ravitch, assistant secretary of the Department of Education, a Bush appointee, as "a Texas Jew" and "a sophisticated debonair racist."

The response from the white political establishment, the media, and educational officials was swift. Many Democratic and Republican politicians, including New York governor Mario Cuomo, denounced Jeffries. Democratic senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan deplored the speech, noting that "conspiracy theories about `rich Jews' are nothing new. What is new is for such things to be said by a professor at City College."

Moynihan insisted that Jeffries "ought to resign" and that if he was not removed the trustees of City College should resign. Harold Jacobs, a member of the City University board of trustees, declared that if Jeffries was "teaching bigotry in his classes, instead of African-American studies, that's consumer fraud being paid for by the state." The college's alumni association also demanded that Jeffries be fired as department head. Jewish leaders were particularly outraged. Michael Riff, local leader of the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, said the controversial speech had "the tinge of classical anti-Semitism: to create a web of conspiracy by suggestion, innuendo and half-truths."

The Jeffries controversy generated more heat than light, because no dialogue exists between Jeffries' critics and defenders over the real issues that divide them. Neo-conservative writer Julius Lester, who is both black and Jewish, reviewed a videotape of the speech and found that the media "misrepresented some [of] Jeffries' statements." The speech certainly contained anti-Semitic assertions, but it had little to do with Jews or black- Jewish relations.

Many black scholars suspect that the condemnation of Jeffries is actually a smokescreen for a more general assault on multicultural perspectives in education. Jeffries served as principal consultant to a state-wide curriculum-review committee for public schools in New York, which recently mandated a multicultural requirement. James De Jongh, chair of City College's faculty senate, admits that those who opposed the adoption of multiculturalism "are finding it easier to attack Jeffries on an obscure speech than to confront the curriculum."

Most black educators and leaders disagree with the expressions of anti-Semitism in Jeffries' public address, but they quietly question what the dispute is really about. It is difficult to take sympathetically the appeals of Moynihan, who a quarter of a century ago authored the notorious "black matriarchy" thesis, asserting that the black family is dysfunctional because it lacks patriarchal character. Blacks suspect that calls for the firing of the tenured professor, which in any case would be extremely difficult to accomplish legally, have little to do with anti-Semitism as such, and more with white hostility to affirmative action and the educational and political agenda of the black freedom struggle.

This perception hardened into certainty when another City College professor, Michael Levin, was vindicated by a federal court. Levin had made public statements declaring that African-Americans overall are "significantly less intelligent" than whites, and college administrators had established a committee in 1990 to investigate allegedly racist statements in his classroom lectures. The ruling said that the administrators were in error in ordering the investigation, and also erred in failing to discipline protesters who disrupted Levin's classes. Levin's statement following this decision targeted Jeffries as well as all other African-Americans who favor greater ethnic diversity within education. "This whole subject of Black Studies," Levin said, "is a made-up subject that shouldn't be at any college anywhere"; Jeffries and others teaching it only offer students "introductory resentment, intermediate resentment, and advanced resentment."

Many Jewish and white leaders were virtually silent about the Levin case and his legal victory, a fact not lost on black activists and scholars who reject both anti-Semitism and black chauvinism. The absence of media focus on Levin also seemed to reinforce the conspiracy thesis of Jeffries and other African-American nationalists. In this context, it is not difficult for some to ignore the objectionable and even odious elements of Jeffries' address and to insist that the attack against the black educator was racially and politically motivated.

Conversely, many Jewish leaders are upset about the apparent silence of blacks over the anti-Semitic smears of Jeffries. The Anti-Defamation League has recorded a 50 per cent increase in anti- Jewish harassment and violence on university campuses since the mid 1980s. Jewish stereotypes seem to be making a comeback in Hollywood: witness the Jewish-American princesses in White palace, or the untrustworthy Jewish characters in Bonfire of the Vanities, Class Action, and Regarding Henry. "Kill-the- Jew" computer games are now being sold in Europe. From the perspective of many Jews, the Jeffries incident is the most threatening of a series of events - including Jesse Jackson's "Hymie" smear of 1984 and the rising popularity of Black Muslim Louis Farrakhan among young inner-city African-Americans. If mainstream black leaders fail to condemn vigorously a demagogue such as Jeffries, some reasoned, it must be because they quietly embrace anti-Semitism themselves.

Simmering racial grievances finally boiled over into violence this summer in Brooklyn's Crown Heights neighborhood, where Hasidic Jews and blacks dwell in uneasy coexistence. On an evening in August, Yosef Lifsh, a Hasidic Jew, lost control of his automobile and smashed into several black children on the sidewalk, killing one seven-year-old boy. Witnesses reported to police that Lifsh had run a red light and was speeding; others spread the rumor that he had been drinking, and that ambulance attendants assisted him before they saw to the black children. Outraged, hundreds of young black people took to the streets, hurling rocks and bottles at police and Jewish residents. Apparently in retaliation, a group of twenty or so young blacks surrounded and killed a visiting Hasidic scholar from Australia, reportedly chanting, "Kill the Jew!"

To most blacks, both deaths were criminal homicides. To New York's Jewish community and most whites, the deaths were entirely different - the first a regrettable accident, the second a deliberate murder provoked by vicious black anti-Semitism. Many black activists were troubled when attorney Barry Slotnick, who had represented subway murderer Bernhard Goetz, stepped forward as a spokesman for Lifsh. When Brooklyn district attorney Charles Hynes announced that no charges of criminally negligent homicide would be filed against Lifsh, the grief and resentment of thousands of blacks turned into deep outrage.

Instead of trying to understand the origins of black anger and violence in poverty and a sense of powerlessness, many whites leaped to the conclusion that anti-Semitism and violent sentiments have acquired a mass base of support among blacks. Few white commentators were more vehement on this baseless theme than the New York Times columnist (and former editor) A.M. Rosenthal. Blaming the recent upsurge of racial violence on "the black political marauders who goad mobs into the streets against Jews," Rosenthal asserted that their "strategy is to blow up all political and emotional bridges between blacks and nonblacks." Rosenthal linked the Crown Heights incident with the earlier Jeffries controversy, which he characterized as "weirdo speeches of a Jew-baiting professor on the public payroll and by bigotry's apologists, supporters, and conveyor belts in the black press and radio." Rosenthal offered his own self-fulfilling prophecy and warning to New York mayor David Dinkins and other black elected officials, wondering aloud whether "any black will be chosen mayor for a long time" because "so many nonblacks have been antagonized."

Nowhere in Rosenthal's diatribe did he recognize that many black politicians, and especially Dinkins, have taken a principled, public stance against anti-Semitism throughout their careers. To blame them for the actions of a small minority is, in effect, a concession to the worst form of racist bigotry. Nowhere in this none-too-subtle linkage of Dinkins with Jeffries did Rosenthal acknowledge that Jewish political behavior in recent years has grown more conservative ideologically - and has specifically opposed blacks' interests on such issues as affirmative action.

The sources of genuine tension between Jews and African-Americans cannot be so simplistically attributed to the actions of anti-Semites within the black community. From the vantage point of blacks, bridges with the liberal Jewish political establishment were torched by other, far more significant events - the gradual shift in political sympathies from Israel to the Palestinians among America's black leadership and activists, the geographical flight of many Jews from the problems of the inner city to the affluent suburbs, the general Jewish hostility toward the Rainbow Coalition and Jesse Jackson.

Rosenthal's feeble appeals to interracial dialogue were disingenuous precisely because he and others like him in the white media and political institutions refuse to face the legitimate differences which have separated African-Americans and Jewish interests in the old civil-rights coalition of a generation ago. This failure is particularly difficult for blacks such as myself, who still feel a special sympathy and political kinship with the historical struggles of Jewish people and a keen opposition to all forms of anti-Semitism. Why is this happening? Why are these disturbing and disruptive social trends emerging now? What is their long-term significance for black politics and culture?

Deeply embedded within the fabric of black American culture is the messianic myth of Moses and the ordeal of the ancient Hebrews. Gleaned from the Old Testament and reshaped to fit the contours of America's plantations and slave society, it became a beacon of hope and faith for successive generations of African-Americans yearning to be free. The sons and daughters of slaves saw themselves as the children of bondage, oppressed by a wicked and unjust power. But a gifted, charismatic figure would arise from their ranks, a figure who would embrace both the spiritual strivings and secular ambitions of his people. This black Messiah would lead his flock across the barren wilderness to the blessed banks of the River Jordan and into the golden horizon of the Promised Land.

A century ago, the Messiah's mantle rested on the shoulders of Frederick Douglass, the great abolitionist orator. A generation ago, the weight of moral leadership was borne by Martin Luther King, Jr. King recognized that his powerful presence in the lives of African-Americans was due not solely to his sonorous rhetoric, but rather to his kinship to the messianic cultural tradition of salvation and liberation. "The Bible tells the thrilling story of how Moses stood in Pharaoh's court centuries ago and cried, `Let my people go,' King once declared. In identical fashion, he thought, the Southern desegregation movement demonstrated that "oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself." If the Hebrews found the courage to follow their convictions, African-Americans could do no less. But nearly a quarter of a century after the assassination of the civil-rights movement's Messiah, and after a decade of pain imposed by the Reagan-Bush conservative reaction, African-American political culture has taken a new and very disturbing direction.

The desegregation struggle had been informed by a political ideology of what I call "liberal integrationism." Its central tenets were the eradication of all legal barriers to blacks' gaining full access to civil society, economic exchange, and political institutions; an increase in the numbers of African-Americans representing their race in both real and symbolic positions of authority within the state; a strategic alliance with liberal whites, especially the national leaders of the Democratic Party, after the Great Depression. Several generations of African-American leaders were nurtured in this secular creed and unthinkingly accepted its implications. Blacks as a group could be guaranteed continued upward mobility within the system if the rules of the game were liberalized, as larger numbers of African-American elites were elevated into the federal judiciary, legislatures, and corporate board rooms.

Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 Supreme Court decision outlawing segregated schools, had created the legal framework for a democratic, "color-blind" society within the structures of liberal capitalism. This liberal faith in the system was employed to justify all the sacrifices and hardships by the children of bondage. In destroying legal Jim Crow segregation, African-Americans had escaped the clutches of a dictatorial Pharaoh; their experiences since the 1960s seemed to represent a sojourn in the wilderness. But all along this bitter path, the image of a promised land of racial equality and economic democracy seemed to loom just ahead. Then the myth veered off course. The messianic figure of the former slaves was murdered several days into the difficult journey through the wilderness. None of his closest comrades and lieutenants seemed able to bear the dual burden of political emancipator and moral guide. The creed of liberal integrationism and color-blind institutions, once affirmed with Talmudic certainty, began to be perceived as strangely anachronistic and even counterproductive.

The new generation of the oppressed, born and raised not under the old Jim Crow order but in the sterility of a political wilderness, inevitably challenged the faith of their fathers and mothers. Speaking for this lost generation, Anthony Parker, writing recently in Sojourners, questions the future identity of African-Americans as a people. "Unlike the generation of blacks who reached maturity before and during the early 1970s," Parker writes, "my generation has no memory of credible black leaders, such as Malcolm X or Martin Luther King, Jr. But the practice of integration created the illusion of equality with the wider culture, effectively wresting control of the black freedom movement by holding it hostage to Federal good will and weakening or destroying those institutions that influenced blacks' world view."

One major factor in the demise of black consciousness and identity was the materialism and greed inherent in the existing American political economy and secular society. By asking to be integrated into the existing structures of society, rather than demanding the basic transformation of the system, blacks became hostage to their own ideological demands. "Inoculated with secular values emphasizing the individual instead of the community," Parker observes, "young blacks rarely recognize each other as brothers and sisters, or as comrades in the struggle. We're now competitors, relating to each other out of fear and mistrust."

Other black intellectuals have also sensed that African-Americans have reached a secular epiphany, a moment of self-realization and uncertainty, when the old beliefs can no longer be sustained but the new insights into social reality cannot be fully comprehended. One of black America's most perceptive critics, Professor Cornel West of Harvard University's Afro-American Studies Department, describes the contemporary spiritual crisis as a "profound sense of psychological depression, personal worthlessness, and social despair . . . widespread in black America." West recognizes that "black people have always been in America's wilderness in search of a promised land. Yet many black folk now reside in a jungle with a cutthroat morality devoid of any faith in deliverance or hope for freedom."

On a national level, the mantle of leadership apparently passed to Jesse Jackson. Despite Jackson's incredible and largely unanticipated electoral success in the 1984 and 1988 Democratic presidential primaries, however, the promise of his Rainbow Coalition was never fulfilled. From its inception, the idea of the Rainbow brought together two contradictory currents: liberals who sought to make the Democrats a "social-democratic style" party, and leftists who wanted to launch a progressive third party from the bankrupt ruins of the New Deal and the Great Society.

In the wake of George Bush's election, Jackson tactically shifted to the right, siding with the liberals. He demanded and obtained the authority for his national board to veto all important political and legislative initiatives by local Rainbow chapters. In effect, the democratic grassroots leadership responsible for much of Jackson's electoral success was muzzled from above. Efforts to build a more structured membership organization with a formal dues system and a regular newspaper were silenced. The results were inevitable. In I989-90, the Rainbow Coalition's political action committee raised $549,973; in the first six months of 1991, the PAC raised only $33,657. Jackson's refusal to run for mayor of Washington DC reinforced perceptions that the "country preacher" has no stomach for the nitty-gritty work of actual governing.

Valuable state-wide leaders of the Rainbow defected in droves. In Louisiana, progressives bolted when Jackson ordered that all local initiatives be approved by his hand-picked lieutenant. Dissidents promptly created an independent group. In Vermont, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, core Jackson activists are building their own local alliances. Elsewhere, there is a bitter sense of frustration and betrayal. As Kevin Gray, the 1988 campaign coordinator for Jackson in South Carolina, declared, "The movement is not supposed to be a continual photo opportunity for Jesse Jackson for President, but that's what it's been ."

Unlike King, Jackson never succeeded in balancing his own personal ambitions with the broader goals of the democratic protest movement that thrust him into public prominence. But the real dilemma confronting Jackson and other African-American leaders is the limitations of their own political ideology, which is liberal integrationism. Jackson never believed that the American political system could be transformed from without, via the challenge of a third party or even a quasi-independent movement like the Rainbow Coalition. He retains a deep faith that the Democratic Party can be transformed from within into an effective vehicle for the aspirations of the poor, the working class, women, racial minorities, and others experiencing discrimination and social injustices. But what is strikingly clear after the crushing of Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, and Michael Dukakis in successive presidential elections, and the ideological capitulation of mainstream Democratic Party politics to many of the central tenets of Reaganism, is that American liberalism is bankrupt. The belief in an internal, progressive realignment of the Democrats is belief in a hopeless illusion never to be achieved or realized so long as the party has some utility to corporate capitalism. It is the activists themselves who become transformed.

The crisis within black political culture is also intensified by the fraying of the bonds among virtually all African-Americans. Once, segregation led to a sense of shared suffering and group identity. An artificial yet powerful wall of race had been built around our community, giving us simultaneously a sense of oppression and a collective will to resist. On Sunday mornings in the churches of my childhood, I can distinctly recall the people who came together for the ritual of spirit and unbowed faith - the school teacher and his family in the pew ahead, the automobile mechanics and sanitation workers beside me, the doctors and dentists in the pews behind. A wide range of vocations was represented, because segregation forced every class to cooperate with each other. A black lawyer looked to the black community for his or her clients. A black entrepreneur, anxiously opening a new business, had to depend on the faithful patronage of black consumers from her or his neighborhood, civic club, fraternity, and school.

Now, in the post-civil-rights era of the 1980s and 1990s, even the definition of the term "black community" is up for debate. The net result of affirmative action and civil-rights initiatives was to expand the potential base of the African-American middle class, which was located primarily outside the neighborhood confines of the old ghetto. By 1989, one out of seven African-American families had incomes exceeding $50,000 annually, compared to less than $22,000 for the average black household. Black college-educated married couples currently earn 93 per cent of the family income of comparable white couples.

But the general experience of the black working-class, low-income people, and families on welfare - the overwhelming majority of African-Americans - is one of steady deterioration. According to African Americans in the 1990s, a recent report by the Population Reference Bureau, the average annual income of African-Americans is only 56 per cent that of white income, significantly less than the 63 per cent ratio in 1975. Black female-headed households average less than $9,600 annually. Stark differences in patterns of home ownership, income, and education indicate that there are "two separate worlds inhabited by poor and middle-class black children," the report says. This strongly implies that "the African-American population will become more polarized as these children mature."

Many white liberals take such statistics to mean that the source of the material and social inequities which separate the races institutional racism - no longer exists, or at least, in the words of influential black sociologist William Julius Wilson, has "declined in significance." A shift in liberal government policy from race-based remedies to economic, class-based programs is therefore required. From the vantage point of liberal Democrats, this would solve the perception problem among millions of white males that the party's social agenda is being held hostage to the interests of blacks. Class-based programs would eliminate the argument of "reverse discrimination" because all benefits would, theoretically, be distributed in a color-blind manner.

Stuart Eizenstat, domestic policy adviser in the Carter administration, defends this thesis. So does Richard Cohen, liberal columnist for the Washington Post. "If economic need, not race," Cohen writes, "became the basis for what we now call affirmative action, most Americans would not object. Whites, too, could be helped. . . . After all, poor is poor, although a disproportionate number of them are black." When minority community leaders read such statements, most cannot help but feel a sense of outrage and repudiation. The overwhelming majority of federal programs were based on income, not race. Poor whites shared substantial benefits from the initiatives of the Great Society. Currently, more than one-third of all students enrolled in the Upward Bound program, designed to prepare low-income students for college, are white. One-third of the children who attend the pre-school Head Start program are white. The majority of people living in public housing or who receive public assistance, are white.

The basis of affirmative action is the recognition that, within this society, there is systemic discrimination grounded in race and gender. Despite the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, outlawing discrimination in public accommodations, race is a powerful factor in determining the actual conditions of life for any person of color, regardless of income and education. My children stand a much greater likelihood of being harassed or arrested by the police, for example, than the children of my white colleagues at the university, solely because they are black. Through practical experience, African-Americans of every social class recognize this reality. To argue that a shift in affirmative action policies from race to class will benefit them seems, at best, a gross distortion. At worst, it is taken as yet one more piece of evidence that liberal integrationism has failed as a political strategy. Black intellectuals and politicians are increasingly convinced that white liberals have turned their backs against us; both parties have repudiated our very presence at any serious debate on public policy.

Many millions of African-Americans believe that most whites live a racial double life, that whites follow a hypocritical racial etiquette in the presence of blacks which disappears whenever they are among themselves. This is the basic premiss of the recent film True Identity which features a black man who dons white make-up. He discovers that whites interact very differently with each other than they do with minorities. Abundant evidence supports this thesis. Earlier this year, a study of the American Bar Association published in Harvard Law Review indicated that car dealers charge African-Americans and women higher prices than white males. Male and female researchers, black and white, presented themselves as middle-class car shoppers at ninety car dealerships in the Chicago metropolitan area. They used identical negotiation styles and bartered for identical automobiles. The car dealers' offers to the consumers followed a pattern of gender and racial inequity. The final offer to white men averaged $11,352, and to white women, $11,504; to black men, $11,783, and to black women, $12,237.

Affirmative action is a particular sticking point in the 1990s. In the workplace, most white males behave publicly in a race-neutral manner. Virtually no one openly calls African-American employees or supervisors "niggers." But millions of whites harbor deep resentment against black and Latino co-workers, whom they believe have been unfairly advanced and receive excessively high wages because of affirmative action and equal-opportunity programs. In one recent survey of several thousand white male corporate employees, only 10 per cent expressed the opinion that "women were getting too much help" through affirmative action. But 50 per cent stated that blacks and Hispanics unfairly gained "too much" of an advantage by affirmative action. Conversely, 55 per cent of all Latino and black employees polled stated that "too little was being done for them" through corporate affirmative action efforts. Many whites perceive the presence of people of color in their workplace as a "zero-sum game"; the additional appointment of any single black person means that the potential job pool for whites has decreased. Instead of fighting to increase the size of the economic pie, many whites now want to take away the small slice served up to Latinos and blacks through affirmative action initiatives.

Such programs forced police departments to hire and promote thousands of minorities and women, partially in an attempt to respond to the changing urban demographics of race. But many whites have never reconciled themselves to these policy changes, which they perceive as an erosion of "standards" and professionalism." This anger and alienation is projected onto black and Latino citizens, who are generally assumed to be guilty in any confrontation. For example, a public commission reviewing the Los Angeles Police Department reported several months ago that it found more than seven hundred racist, homophobic, and sexist remarks made by officers on the department's car-communications system over the previous eighteen months. Typical of the statements were: "Sounds like monkey-slapping time" and "I would love to drive down Slauson [a street in a black neighborhood] with a flame thrower. We would have a barbecue."

But the last evidence of the pervasiveness of white privilege is found in daily life. When inner-city blacks and Latinos return from work in the downtown district, they watch the striking changes in the allocation of commuter buses and trains, which shuttle upper-class whites in comfort to their suburban enclaves. They feel their worthlessness in white eyes as they wait for graffiti-scarred, filthy trains in stations pervaded with the stench of urine. They feel the anger held in check, seeing crack-cocaine merchants operate on their street corners as police cars casually drive by, doing nothing. Everything in daily life tells them that, to those with power and wealth within the system, African-American life, property, beliefs, and aspirations mean nothing.

In the ruins of ideology, bereft of messianic leadership, the African-American community reaches a moment of painful introspection. When hope of the New Jerusalem and the possibility of political liberation dies, part of the spirit dies as well. Locked in an urban abyss of poverty, drugs, and black-against-black violence, the working class and dispossessed increasingly retreat into themselves, psychologically and culturally. If the creed of liberal integrationism no longer makes sense, and if our leaders have failed to deliver us from the wilderness, then we must turn within our own group, reviving the images and symbols for survival. The temptation is to seek refuge in the narrow alleys of racial chauvinism and political parochialism.

Black America still sees itself as the litmus test of the viability and reality of American democracy. Indeed, the African-American striving for freedom and human rights embodies the country's best examples of sacrifice and struggle for the realization of democracy's highest ideals.

A century ago, black scholar W.E.B. Du Bois suggested that the "concrete test of the underlying principles of the great republic is the Negro Problem." Yet this historic burden of race cannot be comprehended solely in legislative initiative or in the struggles for voting rights. This sojourn through the wilderness is a quest for full self-consciousness, a "spiritual striving of the freedmen's sons" which represents a "travail of souls whose burden is almost beyond the measure of their strength, but who bear it in the name of a historic race, in the name of this land of their fathers' fathers, and in the name of human opportunity."

It is precisely here, at the juncture of faith and political ambition, of spirit and struggle, that the black freedom movement must revive itself, casting aside the parochial chains of chauvinism and isolation. We can find value in our culture and heritage without fostering negative stereotypes and myths about other ethnic groups. We can express ourselves ethnically without resorting to the false discourse and rationales of race. In the process, we will discover that the proverbial promised land of full equality and economic equity can be achieved, but only in concert with other groups of the oppressed - especially Latinos, Native Americans, Arab Americans, Asian/Pacific Americans, and the unemployed and economically and socially disadvantaged of all ethnic backgrounds.

Ethnic pride and group awareness constitute a beginning stage, not an end in itself, for a richer understanding of the essential diversity and pluralism that constitute our America. That awareness of diversity must point toward the restructuring of the elaborate systems of ownership and power that perpetuate the unequal status of these ethnic groups and oppressed social classes. This leap of awareness depends on our willingness to define our political, educational, and social goals in a way that is truly majoritarian, that speaks for the commonwealth of the whole society, that realizes a new level of struggle for the black freedom movement.

Copyright © 1995 Manning Marable. All rights reserved.