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PARTISAN REVIEW
Our politics have been influenced by our virtues as well as our tragic
exemplifications of the lower inclinations of humanity. It is quite easy,
therefore, to celebrate our most noble visions, while denying our short–
comings.
It
is also easy to emphasize our shortcomings, while denying our
most noble traditions. All of this is the result of the fact that we too often
fail to understand the complexity ofwhat we find ourselves in the middle
of, refusing to see just how hard it is to realize a democratic sense of life
and society. That is why I believe that we periodically slump into the
kind of balkanized rage that expresses itself across race, sex, and class in
our time. We are then retreating to a stance that falls short of a true
democratic sensibility.
In our time, I would say that this is a version of what Arthur Schles–
inger calls "the cycles of American history." In the terms of this
discussion, we must look closely at those who so adamantly see them–
selves as outside of American privilege that they have embraced the idea
of exclusion and have created a political vision in which the majority is
all
wrong and the minority is all right. This is something I trace in our re–
cent history to the emergence of Black Power, which spurned the
conceptions of the Civil Rights Movement in the interest of a politics not
based on the achievement of equality, but one rooted in race and highly
inaccurate colonial metaphors.
Due to the popularity and eventual canonization of Malcolm X, there
was a very strong separatist feeling in the radical air. Discussion was
dominated by assertions of the Negro's alienation from America at large
and the fact that the Negro shared a common fate with colonials the
world over, almost all of whom were in revolt against the Western world
and capitalism. I choose to investigate this aspect of our recent history be–
cause it was an essential part of what led to the ethnic and sexual
narcissism that presently hampers our ability to speak to one another
across categories.
It
is also another telling example of the difference be–
tween what Americans come to believe about themselves and what their
actual experience and history is.
What the Caribbean or African colonial often feels, as revealed by so
much of the writing on the subject, whether fictional or polemical or
both, is far removed from American experience. The most obvious differ–
ences are found in issues that pivot, from the beginning, on geographical
and historical relationships to those who dominate politically and eco–
nomically. The colonial knews that his or her people had essentially
nothing to do with the creation of what gives uniqueness of style and at–
titude to the mother country, which is far, far away. The colonial
provided no more than the subjugated labor that prepared the exported
raw materials destined to fuel some part of the engine of modern life in
