198
1VA N HOE 0 O-N A
LOS 0
N
Ivanhoe Donaldson
Every generation senses some sort of crisis of its time. The
crises of these times, at least in terms of internal domestic problems, are
a) the question of racism
b) the urban crisis.
This does not mean to say that these are the only crucial problems facing
domestic America today, but that outside of the question of American
foreign policy in general and the war in Vietnam specifically, these issues
are paramount.
Technological advancement in industry has not only created a life
of luxury for some, it is eating up the blue-collar job market and creating
a situation of permanent unemployment for others.
The haphazard and sloppy fashion in which most city bureaucracies
are run leave the poverty pockets and the urban ghettos open to ruthless
exploitation by slum landlords, merchants, ambitious politicians, prison–
camp school systems - and the list goes on and on.
The black community is not only unable to find the political levers
which would provide at the minimum an atmosphere of hope in the
ghettos, but is consistently undermined by what Stokely Carmichael
often refers to as
institutional racism.
After having spent decades enslaved to the rhetoric of the liberal
and radical community, and seeing the situation growing steadily more
explosive, young militants and radicals began to holler "Black Power."
The demand for Black Power isn't new. Afro-American nationalists
have been talking about it in one sense or another throughout the
twentieth century, and before. What really polarized the term Black
Power wasn't the sensationalism of the press, but the inability of the
intellectuals of the liberal community to develop a new analysis and a
new scheme to rebuild a decaying society infiltrated by racism. The
black community was beginning to take its cues from its own established
leadership, rather than from the leadership the liberal community or
Establishment provided.
The lack of creative depth in the intellectual community becomes
painfully clear when we see how often the intellectuals are willing to
run the gauntlet to attack, under the guise of analysis, without ever
providing any new ideas of how to deal with the cleavages in the soci–
ety. In many ways, Bayard Rustin's Freedom Budget is one of the few
ideas
to evolve out of the intellectual community, and it provided noth–
ing radically different for the life style of the ghettos, aside from
the fact that it is intentionally designed to give support to the war in
