BLACK POWER
221
little honest graft, smoothly dispensing turkeys and city jobs to the
deserving. In fact, however, these material rewards were spread less
widely than legend would have it, and were probably less significant
than the dubious psychic reward of having "one of our own boys" in
high office. Classic ethnic politics thus redefined class grievances as
ethnic grievances, and deflected attention away from structural arrange–
ments which worked to the disadvantage of not only the Irish poor,
but the Italian poor, the Negro poor, etc. It is perhaps a little less painful
to be exploited by one's own kind, but the resulting diminution of pain
seems to blur the vision and foster the safe status quo politics of the
Boston Irish or the Providence Italians.
If
the politics of ethnic pride and local self-determination were of
doubtful benefit to the ordinary Irishman or Italian in the past, they
offer even less to the Negro today, since blacks are gathering their
forces to assault a citadel whose treasure will have been largely smuggled
out before the defenses crumble. When the Irish captured the cities
the central urban core was far more vital and valuable than it is today.
The strangling of the mass transit system, the flight of industry, the
suburban explosion, searing tax rates in the central city: these are all
symptoms of a shift in the center of gravity of our civilization that
promises to diminish steadily the resources triumphant big-city blacks
will
have any control over. And there is in addition the legal fact that
American cities are creatures of the states, which leave,S future state
legislatures free to pursue the tactic of Yankee Massachusetts after the
Irish takeover of Boston, namely to place such sensitive functions as
policing the city in the hands of state-appointed officials.
A final observation is that earlier immigrant groups felt that they
were making progress not only because they were indeed advancing them–
selves economically, politically and educationally, but also because they
were soon followed by more recent newcomers upon whom they could
look down. The Negro, however, is obviously not destined to be followed
by a new underclass which might serve this function. There are still
large pools of unskilled rural whites who will make the move to the
city in the future, to be sure, but current studies of occupational
mobility suggest that these whites will be making more rapid gains
than Negroes.
1
Negroes are thus the first group in American history
whose chief hope of getting off the bottom is not to stand on someone
else's shoulders but to eliminate the bottom altogether. They have a
Peter M. Blau and Otis Dudley Duncan,
The American Occupational Struc–
ture
(New York, 1967), ch. vi.
