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WILLIAM MELVIN KELLEY
practice which the Vietnam crisis has made all the more fashionable.
Partisan Review
might someday consider a symposium analyzing the
labor movement's foreign policy positions, but the fact is that right now
the labor movement as a whole-and not simply the UAWand the
UFT- has by far the most advanced economic policies of any major
institution in American life. This has the ring of a thirties' cliche, but
it happens to be true, as anyone who takes the trouble to read the pub–
lications of the AFL-CIO or to familiarize himself with its legislative
campaigns can easily discover. There is much to be criticized in the
labor movement, but no liberal coalition with muscle and staying power
can be constructed apart from it. Had the liberal intellectuals of recent
years absorbed more of labor's concern with full employment, higher
wages, expanded housing construction and increased federal spending
for social purposes, instead of so often portraying the nation's problems
as cultural, legal and aesthetic, the gap between "white liberalism" and
the ghetto might not be so wide as it now appears. I am at a loss to
understand why Mr. Duberman excludes most of organized labor from
the coalition but embraces "unskilled, ununionized laborers," unless he
means to suggest that some political virtue resides among the unskilled
and unorganized and that this virtue is contaminated by unionization.
Here I fear Mr. Duberman may have succumbed to New Left romanti–
cism. I am also skeptical of the progressive role he assigns to "new
class technocrats," in whom I detect strong and dangerous currents of
elitism. In glorifying this class, many New Leftists (I do not include
Mr. Duberman) are disclosing more about their own class connections
and semi-conscious ambitions than about the dynamics of social change.
The proletariat having failed, history, they seem to say, has a new agent.
I doubt it.
William Melvin Kelley
Is it still necessary, in 1968, to discuss the differences between
the two peoples, African and European, who inhabit the United States?
I thought everybody accepted those differences. I thought that
everybody knew the difference between James Brown and Elvis Presley,
or Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle, or the waltz and the guaguanco,
or the Temptations and the Beatles, or Leontyne Price and Joan Suther–
land, or Duke Ellington and Aaron Copeland or even old Nat Turner
and Mr. Jefferson Davis. And so I did not think we had to leaf back
to Chapter One. But we do.
Please, sir, we are different, sir.
Our ancestors came from Africa, yount from Europe. Our ancestors
