BLACK POWER
221
and cataracts of violence, destruction, inchoate rage and promiscuous
waste to be encountered - there is well a question whether he can build
his own society at all, so perverse are the conduits of his crossed emo–
tions by now. But the irony is that the White would do well to hope
the Black can build a world, for those well-ordered epochs of capitalism
which flushed the white wastes down into the black heart are gone–
the pipes of civilization are backing up. The irony is that we may even
yet need a black vision of existence if civilization is to survive the death
chamber it has built for itself. So let us at least recognize the real ground
of Black Power - it is ambitious, beautiful, awesome, terrifying, and
has to do with nothing so much as the most important questions of us
all - what is man? why are we here? will we survive?
Jack Newfield
Last July, on the third day of the Newark riot, high on
marijuana, I watched films of the carnage on television, with the sound
off, and the stereo blasting accidentally ironic counterpoint by Bob
Dylan. As the spasms of police and National Guard brutality splashed
across the TV screen, Dylan whined...
"To live outside the law you must be honest.
"
"I'm on the pavement, thinking about the go vernment.
"When you got nothin',
j'OU
got nothin' to lose .
..."
"
When I came down, I picked up an academic study someone had
sent me that revealed three out of every ten black schoolchildren in
Roxbury, Massachusetts, had identified a drawing of a bear as a rat.
Later, I made some phone calls to find out if I could do anything to
help my SDS friends who were organizing in Newark. In that hour of
McLuhanized apocalypse, the best I could do was get stoned and
play Red Cross worker. I thought I was a radical, but I felt like Nero.
The intellectual theorists of the Black Power movement do not
make much sense to me. I don't think America is in "a revolutionary
situation." I don't think the guerrilla warfare ideas of Fanon or
Debray are particularly relevant to a 90 per cent white, technological
superstate. And I don't think the blacks inside America have a separate
destiny from the whites; the military-industrial-labor complex is de–
humanizing us 'all to an equal level of powerlessness.
