AMERICA
29
perceive, correctly, as the refusal of the white world to allow integration
in
housing and schools. During the very worst days of the Los Angeles
uprising, for example, the schools in the ghetto areas remained untouched.
Indeed, less damage was done to the school buildings than happens in a
normal weekend. But today the schools of California have become battle–
fields with students fighting students and teachers demanding that the
police be stationed in the hallways.
Domestically, the country is out of control on the racial question,
embarked upon a collision course, a heading for disaster. The Mexican
youth are getting restless in their barrios inside the cities and out in the
country the Indians on the reservations have started thrashing about,
making demands for equity from the white society which has suppressed
them for so many years.
Can it be that we are becoming an American version of South
Africa as the notion of integration seems to disappear from the national
discussion? Perhaps, Harlem and Watts, the South Side of Chicago and
Hunters Point in San Francisco are to be the American version of the
townships from which the poor, unskilled Negroes travel out to work
in the white sections of the cities. And standing between the American
townships and the whites wiII be the police, more frightened than they
have ever been, quicker to shoot. (Only a few months ago, in Los Angeles,
two police officers had to be rescued from an angry crowd in a housing
project by the project police. The crowd had torn the microphone out
of the police car so the officers couldn't radio for help and were getting
ready to beat up the officers for allegedly shooting a boy.
If
they hadn't
been rescued, they might have been killed by the crowd and if they had
been killed, isn't it possible that a massacre, an American Sharpsville,
might have taken place afterwards with the police and the Negroes intent
on wiping each other out?)
For the poor in America, the gap between them and the rest of
society grows greater. Anyone who is still unemployed today during the
Vietnam War has very little possibility of ever being employed in
any job which is not at or below the poverty level. And gradually, the
phony "war" against poverty is dying out as the real war in Vienam
escalates. Now, the minority poor of America must remain in their en–
claves, with the old tradition of upward mobility at an end, for there are
no unskilled jobs to provide the first exit out, as the stockyards once did
for the Poles, the railroads for the Chinese, the garment trades for the
Jews and the docks for the Irish. In fact, the Negroes and Mexicans are
worse off in 1965 than they were in 1960.
But in the meantime
l
the
TV
commercials for detergents still urge
