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DR. NATHAN WRIGHT, JR .
The picture here should be evident. There are some things that
white people themselves must do. They can and must take the initiative
in removing the roadblocks which they, their ancestors, their relatives
and their friends have placed - however unknowingly - in the paths of
black people.
It is all too true that black men must help white people in gaining
the new insights and acquiring the new and more effective motivation
needed for the tasks which are primarily those for the white people
of America to do. Practically every city and every major business enter–
prise in America has been arbitrarily white-purposed and white-con–
trolled. This circumstance has been a precondition of the growing re–
bellions which may strike critically at the nation's heart. White people
must take the leadership in changing white institutions, white attitudes
and white traditions. This must be their primary field of missionary
activity. And those white people who most would will that change
might come, must recognize first and foremost that no man can be
a change agent unless he has undergone change himself.
We cannot keep a hold on all the privileges of being white, and
at the same time truly relate to the needs of black men. As the Rev.
Richard Schoolmaster, Rector of Grace Church, Orange, New Jersey,
has put it: no white person, however well-intentioned, can escape from
the condition of riding the backs of black people; for every opportunity
which every white man in America enjoys has been widened in some
degree by the arbitrary exclusion in some degree of black people.
Thus it is that, in the nature of things, different roles and different
responsibilities are placed upon different ones among us. This is true
in a unique or critical way with respect to what black people have
far too long overlooked in -terms of what they alone can and must do
for themselves.
One hundred years ago, again, Frederick Douglass said that the
limits of oppression are never set by those who have power which is
unchecked. Only and always the limits of oppression are set by those
whom others, intentionally or unintentionally, would oppress.
We as black men must set for ourselves alone the limits of those
opportunities which would be denied to us. We alone as black men must
address ourselves to the issue of self-respect. It is clear that no one can
fully respect another who does not first respect himself. The racism
built historically into the nation's life has resulted in a cultural disdain
for blackness. Black men, who have sought more than any others to
be American, have all too often tended to outdo their fellow Americans
in the cultural disdain for blackness.
