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STEPHAN THERNSTROM
a goal which is not too grandiose but too modest. This is the black
community's quest for self-determination of its own affairs, which
entails black control of such local institutions as school boards, the
police, poverty program area councils, etc. It is easy enough to applaud
this impulse, but we should not exaggerate the benefits which will flow
from it. Advocates of self-determination characteristically hold a simp–
listic view of what constitutes power in a complex, industrial society. To
put it baldly, the "power" attained by capturing local institutions offers
little remedy for the economic deprivation and dependency of most
Negroes today, and it is that deprivation and dependency which under–
lies the sense of powerlessness felt by so many Negro-Americans. A
ghetto run entirely by blacks - "run" in the sense in which most Black
Power theorists use the term - is a ghetto still, and the basic forces
which determine the employment opportunities, housing, consumption
patterns and education of its inhabitants are little modified by the change.
That this point has been so little heeded stems partly from the
depressing fact that, while black control of the modest prizes traditionally
up for grabs in American ethnic politics is clearly attainable in the near
future in many places, broader changes in the distribution of wealth and
power in American society are but remote possibilities, if possibilities
at all. But there is another, less defensible, reason for the rather con–
stricted vision of many Black Power advocates, namely their oddly
romantic image of immigrant politics in the American past. For all
of their cynicism about many aspects of the national mythology, prophets
of ghetto self-determination naively accept current American folklore
about how the Irish and their successors "made it" by capturing local
political machinery and exploiting it for the benefit of the group.
In fact, this model of immigrant success is somewhat misleading
historically, and even more misleading as applied to the contemporary
metropolis.
It
is misleading historically in that the immigrant group
which achieved the most dramatic political successes - the Irish - was
exceptionally slow to enter the American mainstream, while groups which
devoted less of their energies to local politics - the Japanese and
Chinese, for example - were much quicker to acquire wealth, education
and occupational status. The problem is complex, and it is important
to recognize that Japanese and Chinese enclaves in the cities soon
obtained a kind of autonomy which is still lacking in Harlem and
Roxbury today. But those who insist that Irish Power is a happy pre–
cedent for Black Power need to reflect more critically about just what
Irish Power did and didn't do for the Irish. It is currently fashionable
to look back in nostalgia on the machines of old, their cogs oiled by a
