BLACK POWER
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Vietnam. Seymour Melman and his crew have poured in a few thoughts
toward rebuilding urban America, but his ideas appear to offer no
more than the Freedom Budget in the final analysis.
Martin Duberman in his piece on "Black Power in America" said,
"It is not clear whether 'Black Power' is to be taken as a short-term
tactical device or a long-range goal- that is, a postponement or a
rejection of integration; whether it has been adapted as a lever for
intimidating whites or organizing blacks, for instilling race hate or race
pride...." Let me suggest here that Black Power is not meant to answer
any of Duberman's queries.
Black Power is a step in establishing a framework which rejects
Qnce and for all the white community defining what the black com–
munity should and should not do about its problems. Black leadership
has never argued that Black Power would be the panacea for the
urban ghetto, but rather that it might set a framework for dealing
with institutional racism and with the question of exploitation and
poverty within the black community. For this reason, a discussion of
Black Power, in and of itself, is a discussion without substance.
If
one agrees that civil-rights legislation has offered very little to
improve the life style of blacks in this country, and that both the
federal and local government lack agility and creativity to deal with the
urban crisis, then the focus of the discussion should not be the pros and
cons of Black Power but how, for example, to give political support
to blacks who are trying to develop a quality school system with a cul–
tural base which reflects the black community, or how to develop an
economic and political system which reflects a black cultural base. The
black community cannot support itself solely from within: in order for
it to get external support in a framework which isn't racist or pater–
nalistic, there will have to be a radicalizing movement in the whole
society.
Intellectuals, liberals, reformers need to raise more basic questions
as ,to whether a bipartisan hierarchical system is still adequate to meet
the day-to-day problems of people in the inner city.
The way to stop the burnings of the inner city isn't to devise plans
to stop it, .but to develop and reorganize the economic institutions which
are the fundamental causes of the major problems of domestic America.
If
the society is unable to develop economic restructuring within
the inner cities, resistance will heighten and the rhetoric of revolution
and repression might in fact become the order of the day.
