BLACK POWER
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a guarantee that what we have done is right. We must be always open
to truth.
Social goals therefore are always tentative. They are--at their best
- open to new dimensions of truth.
In a day of continuing change, such as we are facing in our nation
from here on in, it is the romantic and the dogmatic and the doctrinnaire
who have almost a written guarantee of being lost. We cannot afford to
follow those who romanticize the condition of black people or who are
dogmatic or doctrinnaire and who will hold on to old beliefs, come hell
or high water; and we must save these kinds of people even from
themselves.
In our immediate day, as we look at our racial tensions and at our
urban distress, we must know that we cannot simply prescribe more of
the same old things and still hope to be safe. Yet this is what we all
too often do.
If
what we have adopted as a course of action fails, we
often simply blame our failure on a lack of adequate resources. Far
too often, we have overlooked the possibility that our strategy might
be
in need of change or even that our definition of our problem might
be wrong.
We have, for instance, gone through what is clearly an aberration
in the human experience by the adoption of a well-intentioned but
unhistorical notion that whatever men do in reference to the needs of
black men in America must be done interracially. We are now coming
to realize- as our course of action has been accompanied by mounting
doom-that there are
some
tasks which must be done interracially; and
doubtless there needs to be far, far greater ir:tterracial cooperation. But
not all things pertaining to the interests of black men can or need to
be done in common by black and white. As with our families, some
things we do together; others we do alone.
Some things white people must do as white people.
If
a man
comes to his neighbor's house and offers a helping hand to get his
neighbor's car out of the garage, this may seem at a glance to be a
wholly worthwhile thing. But if the man has offered the help, together
with the other residents of the neighborhood, has put roadblocks in the
street so that the neighbor's car could get no farther than the driveway,
then the situation is radically altered. What the friendly and well-inten–
tioned neighbor must do, if he would be genuinely of help, is to get
together with his other neighbors and remove the roadblocks which they
shared in putting in the street. Some have reckoned that just the re–
moval of the roadblocks by white people working together as white
people to remedy what they as white people have done will take from
five to ten years or more. I happen to be far more optimistic than that.
