Right On Toward a New Black Pluralism

By Karsten Prage

So tranquil, so quiescent seems Black America in the Nixon Era that a presidential partisan could well argue that "benign neglect" has worked. The ghettos have, by and large, endured quiet summers. The rhetoric of black militants seems to have cooled. In a variety of ways, in increasing numbers, blacks are cracking the system --slowly, no doubt, but making it nevertheless.

It is difficult for traditional civil rights liberals to admit that the Administration's policy--or non-policy--toward black Americans possesses any saving virtues at all. Yet the Nixon stance by its very neglect, its lowering of expectations, may have contributed to forcing the black movement both in on itself and outward along new paths. Following the legal civil rights victories of the past two decades, blacks would have struck out in those directions anyway; the deaf ear in Washington simply accelerated their push into the political and economic arena, where they are rapidly learning how to use the system for--and occasionally against--itself. Indeed, the movement today may well be more confident, more pragmatic, more tough-minded and more sophisticated than ever before. "There is a much more fundamental appreciation of the meaning and uses of power," says Dr. James Cheek, president of Howard University.

At a conference in Atlanta last fall, the Urban League's Whitney Young and Newark Poet Imamu Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones), once far apart in their approach to the black push for equality, found themselves in agreement that the key to quick progress lay in the election of as many blacks as possible to political office--that is, access to political power. The results of that thrust have already begun to show. The House of Representatives now has twelve black members v. nine in the 91st Congress, still a tiny number, but not negligible; the twelve boycotted the President's State of the Union message to dramatize their unhappiness at Richard Nixon's refusal to meet with them. For the first time in this century, black representatives sit under the Confederate flags of the Alabama and South Carolina statehouses; in Delaware's House, a black delegate sometimes answers roll call with a clenched fist. Blacks run Greene County, Ala. (TIME, Feb. 1), as well as 64 of the nation's cities.

There were but a few hundred black elected officials throughout the country in 1965; there are 1,771 now --and the black electorate has only begun to assert its strength. Local leadership is growing everywhere in conflict over local issues; in the virtually all-black central area of Brooklyn, black citizen security patrols roam at night because residents feel the police are doing a poor job. "We will have order in this community, one way or another," says a local leader.

But despite the political gains, despite the black push into white-collar jobs, despite more black visibility on television, despite those blacks who have moved onto the boards of major corporations, not enough has been achieved. Beneath the surface seethe continued frustration, withdrawal, anger and alienation, even disgust with the very system blacks are trying to use to their advantage ("It takes your soul and it gives you a color TV set in return"). Educated black men and women may indeed never have had a better opportunity to get a piece of the action, but poverty, despair, hopelessness still haunt the nation's ghettos; all too many black Americans remain preoccupied with sheer survival. In fact, the gap between white and black family income overall continues to widen, despite remarkable gains by educated urban black families in the North and West. "How can people be uptight about the war and things like that when they have to worry about heat and hot water?" asks New York Congressman Charles Rangel.

The recession has not helped. The unemployment rate for blacks (9.5%) is almost twice as large as for whites (5.6%). For young blacks between the ages of 16 and 22 it approaches 40%, nearly three times as high as for their white peers, and that does not count those who, in total despair, have dropped out of the search for work altogether. Job programs have been cut, housing remains dismal, education still fails to motivate.

Blacks look to Washington and see nothing to encourage them. "This Administration is more insensitive than any Administration in recent times," laments Historian John Hope Franklin. "One would have thought that --aside from their particular private racial views--a group of political leaders as cold and hard-boiled as they are would have been more responsive." Indeed, many blacks believe that last year's police raids against the Black Panthers mirror the Administration's real feelings. "If it can happen to them, it can happen to me."

The Nixonian play on Middle America's fears, perhaps best expressed in the November campaign, helped fuse black solidarity. The campaign ignored blacks, but in its stress on law-and-order, many blacks read a code for white fear of black crime, thus an anti-black slur. It encouraged a general turning inward that was already under way, creating a greater tolerance among blacks for other blacks' views and strategies. Integration--in the sense of accepting white values to the point where all black identity fades--is clearly no longer the immediate goal, not even for middle-class blacks who might once have aspired to it.

The operative word today is "liberation"--a push for an open, pluralistic society in which blacks can take their rightful place alongside other ethnic groups, a society in which, as New York State Senator Waldaba Stewart puts it, "you get yours and I get mine." What seems black separatism, such as the kind of self-imposed apartheid prevalent on many college campuses, is a temporary stage, a step in the march toward pluralism. Black college students are probably still in the van of the turning-inward movement, of going back to black roots, of finding comfort and security in blackness. Says one Columbia student: "The notion is not to get killed and not to be exploited."

Separatist trends are possibly much harsher among even younger blacks. Racial tensions infest all too many high schools (as well as the armed forces); a segment of young blacks has become totally alienated from America, even from other blacks. Many of the kids, says Dan Watts, editor and publisher of Liberator magazine, "are a lot more married to the Third World." Moreover, they "are not talking about what happens tomorrow. They couldn't care less." Their anger is cold; they cynically, knowingly, discuss "the system" and its inequities.

There is a potential for violent explosion among these young, although no one will even take a guess at how profoundly embedded their rage is or how it might show in a sudden crisis. Conventional wisdom today has it that Watts and Newark and Detroit are not likely to happen again because they were pyrrhic, whatever their short-term value in bringing home to white America the depths of black despair. True, the riots were never part of a black revolutionary strategy as such; they grew out of combustible situations in which frustration finally vented itself, almost incoherently. Because that frustration is still a major facet of black life, similar emotional eruptions cannot be ruled out in the future. Still, the major thrust remains the effort to carve out a healthy black share in a pluralistic society.

Out of it all, somehow, black-white relations seem to have emerged somewhat more honest--if also more abrasive. "I don't think that we will ever wake up one morning and find black folks and white folks loving each other," says Isaac Williams, N.A.A.C.P. field secretary for South Carolina. "But then you don't have to love the man to get along with him." Or, as Editor Watts puts it more sarcastically, speaking of this stage in the struggle for full equality in the U.S.: "Perhaps blacks and whites deserve each other."

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