THE RABBI WRITES
If Vietnam seems far away, it needn’t. After all, Detroit can serve as an adequate local Substitute. Why travel to distant lands for the “excitement” and devastation of war when Twelfth Street is so easily accessible? An inner city tour will rival all the grim horrors of either the London Blitz or Haiphong harbor. While America is expending billions of dollars to cure the “disease of communism” a more debilitating sickness has struck the vitals of our urban culture.
The Negro riots in Detroit and Newark have struck terror in the hearts of white America. They assault the vested economic interests of the bourgeoisie and the newly won prosperity of the industrial working class. They also arouse a nameless feat which whites cannot articulate without embarrassment, and which derives from the unconscious image of the black man in an Anglosaxon world.
No solution to the problem of this violent civil disobedience can be devised until an adequate and honest analysis of its causes is undertaken. The following observations, whether, pedestrian or otherwise, are intended to promote this understanding.
(1) It is asserted by many that the riots in Detroit were not race riots. The open fighting between white and black which characterized the 1943 tragedy was absent; while the looting of stores and the sniping at policemen were happily indulged in by scores of whites. It seemed as though the mob directed its anger to symbols of privilege, property and the police, and not to race difference. Economic helplessness, not ethnic hatred, appeared the major cause.
Yet this assertion misses the point. Being privileged and being white go together in our society. While a small percentage of whites are divorced from a vested interest in our social structure, an overwhelming percentage of blacks are totally without effective status. If serious clashes between Negro and white have been avoided, it is simply because the lower-class is. So effectively sealed off by distance from the white heartland. The ghetto is so vast that only the police and the Store owners are easily accessible targets. And these hostile authority figures are, with few exceptions; white.
To believe that the Negro easily makes the distinction between being an oppressor and being white is to believe that the average suburban housewife takes time out to distinguish between being a looter and being black: Only the professional sociologist is emotionally disposed to such logic.
(2) A careful distinction must be made between the working classes and the lower classes. The working class, in prosperous America, enjoys employment, security, and group solidarity. Whether Irish, Polish, or Italian, their participation in effective unions gives them a sense of real power; and they can pleasurably help to shape their own destiny. The lower class, like the lumpenproletariat of Marx, are quite distinct. Deprived of regular employment, job security, and any form of esprit de corps, they languish in urban ghettos. Both passive helplessness and despair dominate their lives. Having no vested interest in the preservation of law and order, they are hostile to all authority; and, possessing no hope for the future, they live entirely in the present, resisting permanent human relations and indulging momentary explosive fantasies of power of rioting and violence.
The urban poor live without hope. They are atomized individuals, panic stricken by their dependency on hostile authority, hungry for any “cure” which will appease the terror of their loneliness. If drugs, promiscuous sex, and ecstatic violence thrive in the black ghetto, they are convenient ways to “lose” oneself in the present. Only people with hope worry about the “consequences” of their actions. The self-righteous bourgeois denunciation of the “looters” is boorish and without empathy. Why should Negro teenagers obey the rules of middle-class morality when middle-class rewards are beyond their reach?
(3) A wide chasm runs through the middle of the Negro community. On one side is a small minority of securely employed, adequately housed, and suitably educated Negroes who display all the features of the law-abiding bourgeoisie. They have tasted the social pleasures of a semi-integrated society and desire to increase them. Untold opportunities in private industry, the universities, and civil service have opened to their selection (in fact there is a shortage of sophisticated blacks to fill the demand of large corporations for the voguish integrated look). If the non-violent civil rights movement has benefited anyone, it has benefited them. Like the social-climbing German Jews who feared the stigma of identification with Russian immigrants, their greatest social enemy is not the establishment but the hordes of lower-class Negroes who comprise their security by sharing their color. No one fears the ghetto destitute more than his middle-class brother. The latter has neither money, nor understanding, nor compassion for the former. His fear yields only contempt.
On the other side of the chasm stand the masses of rural poor and urban outcasts who have no share in the middle-class triumph. Open housing and open employment mean nothing if they possess neither the money nor education to enjoy them. While the bourgeois Negro comes into contact with the more liberal and “respectable” elements of the white community, the ghetto Negro encounters only well-armed policemen and small-time merchant intruders who view the local population apprehensively as hostile natives on a vast African reservation. Reading about “successful” Negroes in Ebony is no consolation for misery. It only points out how few have really made it.
(4) The problem of Negro social assimilation is different from any other. While the Irish, the Poles, the Italians, and even the Greeks can adopt the protective camouflage of Anglosaxon culture, the black man cannot. While the behavior and appearance of the acculturated American Jew is indistinguishable from the image of the Mayflower descendant (with the exception of having to announce one’s last name), the socially ambitious Negro encounters only frustration. For the black man carries his difference on his face; and neither his language nor his manners can compensate for that variation. Regardless of his achievement, his social inferiority is defined by his color.
The only solution to the Negro’s dilemma is extensive interracial marriage. But miscegenation is less likely in bourgeois America of the twentieth century than in the slave culture of Virginia in the seventeenth. White masters in the South never had to confuse sexual relations with middle-class marriage. If public interracial unions in an Anglosaxon milieu may achieve tolerance, they will never, in the conceivable future, secure wide acceptance. The Negro community in America is simply too large to be “absorbed” by even the most enlightened of white majorities. Black assimilation is a social impossibility.
(5) Black nationalism is a “dirty” phrase among conventional liberals. As a seemingly racist doctrine it assaults the sacred doctrines of integration and universalism we theoretically subscribe to. It appears to be a kind of white supremacy in reverse with its chauvinism and hate propaganda. While it provides the alienated ghetto Negro with a doctrine of group solidarity, it does so by cultivating the “vices” of segregation, violence, and tribalism. It even regards the white liberal as no different from the white bigot and, with gallish “ingratitude” classifies him with the enemy.
Unfortunately, the self-righteous suburban liberal lacks insight into the phenomenon. In his obsession with Negro economic disadvantage, he fails to perceive the massive psychic problems that economic reform cannot cure. Money without self-esteem will not dispel the sickness. In fact, it may only aggravate it. Jewish self-hate was not ameliorated by individual financial success; Jewish frustration was made all the more intense by the knowledge that personal achievement was irrelevant to social acceptance. Only “Jewish power” as expressed in Zionist fantasy and Israeli reality, provided the necessary ego tonic.
Negro self-esteem is essential to Negro well-being. Before the black man can find his self respect as an individual, he has to find his selfrespect as a black man. In a culture where the word “black” has such hideously negative overtones, the sting of rejection proceeds from the very social air the Negro breathes. If he escapes massive self-hate, he has to be either dull or abnormal. While the Black Muslims are a lower class response, the leadership of the new nationalists comes from Negro students and intellectuals, whose origins are middle-class and whose personal grievances have more to do with social rejection than with economic deprivation. After all, the Bolshevik Jewish intellectual wasn’t hungry; he was bitter.
Like the Jews the Negroes may have to play the game for a while that “we are the best of all possible peoples.” Before they can love whites, they will have to learn to love themselves. They will have to abandon the pose of an obsequious and helpless petitioner and practice the rude “hutspa” of addressing whites as social equals. Although, in their desires and ambitions, they want nothing more than middle-class respectability, they will have to act out their rejection of white culture and repeatedly announce their difference and superiority. If they are going to ultimately drain themselves of the tears of self-pity, they will have to be childishly boastful and dangerously boorish. Certainly, they are entitled to the same ego “kicks” that every other persecuted ethnic group requires for maturity. Only after they have exhausted the “virtues” of chauvinism will they be ready for the cult of individualism.
(6) The new patterns of Negro violence (whether organized or unorganized) subvert the goals of genuine black power and self-improvement. While rebellions in countries where the black population is in a majority have long-run feasibility, they are suicidal in America. They only justify “respectable” whites in verbalizing the hatred they are normally embarrasse to express and divert public funds from Negro improvement to the purchase o bigger and better police. The defeat of American policy in Vietnam, couple with massive riots at home, will not persuade the white majority to be generous to blacks. Given the need to find an easy scapegoat, it will only encourage military repression and the fascist glorification of “law and order”. Sniping and looting do not arouse the conscience of the white American; they terrify him.
Negro leaders will have to confine their aggression therapy to verbal assaults. They will have to learn to enjoy vicarious violence. Whether they identify with the success of African independence or thrill to the white fear of African power, they will have to find fantasy substitutes. Short of emigration, there is no other solution. Non-violent protest may not achieve the publicity of riots; but in the long-run it has better results.
(7) Segregation is here to stay for the vast majority of the Negroes. An integrated America is a liberal illusion that inhibits constructive action. If Negroes will continue to live in their own ghettos for a long time to come, then Negro self-esteem demands that the authority figures in that ghetto be as black as possible. If a “practical apartheid” is what we confront, then steps should be taken to encourage Negro merchants and Negro professionals to work in the ghetto and provide the image of bourgeoisie success the slum dweller can identify with.
The middle-class Negro will have to learn that the white world does not distinguish between “white Negroes” and “black Negroes;” the majority simply lumps them all together. He will have to understand that he cannot run away from the ghetto and escape its problems. Wherever he goes, his color brands his difference and makes his social destiny the same as any black man. His self-respect will demand that he spend less time in the futile task of total integration and more time in giving leadership to the real society of black segregation. It would be nice to live in a world where color was unimportant; but then we don’t. If we wait for integration to work on Negro self-respect, we will get neither.