220
NORMAN MAILER
police himself, as opposed to the ability of the White to police others.
At the Civil Rights March on Washington in 1963 with over a hundred
thousand Negroes in town, no episodes of violence were reported - in
the riots in the years which followed, fascinating patterns of cooperation
among the rioters emerge. One may look, as Government commissions
do, for patterns of a plot ; or one may do better to entertain the real
possibility that the Negroes have psychic powers of mass impromptu col–
laboration which are mysterious, and by that measure, superior to the
White.
What the Negro may have decided at this point, as Black Power
emerges, is that he has gotten the worst and the least of civilization, and
yet has been able to engage life more intensely. It is as if the cells of his
body now know more than the white man - so his future potentiality
is greater. Whether this is true, half-true, or a species of madness is
beyond anyone's capacity to know in this year, but the psychological
reality is that breaking through his feelings of vast inferiority, a feeling–
of vast superiority is beginning to arise in the black man, and the
antennae of this superiority lead not to developing the Negro to a poin t
where he can live effectively as an equal in white society, but rather
toward developing a viable modern culture of his own, a new kind of
civilization. This is the real and natural intent of Black Power; not to
get better schools, but to find a way to educate their own out of text–
books not yet written; not to get fair treatment from the police, but
grapple instead with the incommensurable problem of policing one's
own society - what will black justice be? Ergo, not to get a fair sha rc
of hospitals, but an opportunity to explore Black medicine, herbs
ill
place of antibiotics, witchcraft for cancer cures, surgical grace with the
knife in preference to heart transfers. In parallel: not to get into unions ,
but to discover - it is far off in the distance - black notions of labor,
cooperation, and the viability of hip in production methods; not
housin~
projects, but a new way to build houses; not shuttle planes, but gliders;
not computers - rather psychic inductions.
Black Power moves then, obviously, against the technological society.
Since the Negro has never been able to absorb a technological culture
with success, even reacting against it with instinctive pain and distrust.
he is now in this oncoming epoch of automation, going to be removed
from the technological society anyway. His only salvation, short of be–
coming a city brigand or a government beggar, is to build his own society
out of his own culture, own means, own horror, own genius.
Or
own
heroic, tragic, or evil possibilities. For there is no need to assume that
the black man wiII prove morally superior to the white man. Schooled
in treachery, steeped in centuries of white bile, there are avalanches
