BLACK POWER
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calculated reduction which attempts to introduce comfortable propor–
tions into historic phenomena which are barbaric, heroic, monstrous,
epic and/or apocalyptic.
(New Republic
and
Nation
writers please
stand!) So we may remember there was never much of a famine in
the Ukraine, just various local dislocations of distribution; never real
Moscow trials, rather the sort of predictable changing of the guard
which accompanies virile epochs of history.
Th~
American labor unions
were never really in danger of leaving the Left, just being led down
the garden path by unscrupulous but limited leadership. Et cetera.
So forth.
Now, Black Power. We are bound to hear before we are done that
Black Power is merely a long-due corrective for premature and admin–
istratively betrayed efforts at integration - an indispensable period of
self-development which will result in future integrations at a real level.
Like all such Left perspectives, it is wishful, pretty, programmatic,
manipulable by jargon, and utterly stripped of that existential content
which is indispensable to comprehending the first thing about Black
Power.
The first thing to say, pretty or no, is that the Negro (that is the
active volatile cadres of every militant Negro movement, SNCC, Black
Muslims, etc., plus those millions of latently rebellious black masses
behind them - which is what we will refer to when we speak of the
Negro) , yes, this Negro does not want equality any longer, he wants
superiority, and wants it because he feels he is in fact superior. And
there is some justice on his side for believing it. Sufficiently fortunate
to be alienated from the benefits of American civilization, the Negro
seems to have been better able to keep his health. It would take a liberal
with a psychotic sense of moderation to claim that whites and Negroes
have equally healthy bodies; the Negroes know they have become on
the average physically superior, and this
against all the logic of Amer–
ica's medical civilization
- the Negroes get less good food ostensibly,
no vitamins, a paucity of antibiotics, less medical care, less fresh air, less
light and sanitation in living quarters. Let us quit the list - it is parallel
to another list one could make of educational opportunities vs. actual
culture (which is to say-real awareness of one's milieu). The Negro's
relatively low rate of literacy seems to be in inverse relation to his
philosophical capacity to have a comprehensive vision of his life, a large
remark whose only support is existential- let us brood, brothers, on
the superior cool of the Negro in public places. For the cool comes
from a comprehensive vision, a relaxation before the dangers of life,
a readiness to meet death, philosophy or amusement at any turn.
Commend us, while we are on iists, to the ability of the Negro to
