NEW RADICALISM
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The main worry seems to be that Negroes don't have much of a
"stake" in the American system.
If
they can't be fit into American
"standard procedures," the argument says, the "pathology" must lie
with the Negroes. What they underestimate
is
the pathology of the
society itself: what kind of place
is
it where most people look at the
"Vietcong" (a dirty word in Vietnam vocabulary) the same way that
Southern sheriffs look at the movement of "niggers" (a dirty word
in the American vocabulary)? What kind of national intelligence
is it that contemplates thermonuclear war? It would be a domestic
"pacification" program in the "interest" of the American "natives."
It would
kill
the traditional strengths of Negro life from which protest
has originated: the ability to take oppression, cooperation to promote
survival, a radical understanding of American hypocrisy. Anyway,
the most paradoxical thing about this "assimilation" concept, to me,
is
that the most radical Negro movements have come precisely from
those areas of the Black Belt where Negro family life and work are
most stable and rooted.
We talked about how some people, like Irving Howe and Bayard
Rustin, raise the question of whether Negroes don't have a "right"
to become "middle class" instead of being manipulated by radicals.
Probably I shouldn't, but I always take this as a defense of middle–
class culture masked in the language of civil liberties. The new student
organizers can't hide the fact that they are opposed to middle-class
life as they have inherited it. Now I certainly would help community
people become "middle class," if that meant getting individuals I
know jobs or welfare or education. But the system itself usually does
that well enough. Primarily, I
think
we should be overturning the
class structure from below, not elevating people into it; changing
the quality of work, politics, organizational life, relationships between
people. I work with a lot of maids: they are disgusted by the family
structure of the people they serve. Maybe a new coalition, of those
who have slaved for the middle class and those who were born into it,
can figure out a way of creating a freer social structure for everyone.
Stavis and I talked about two different extremes toward which
American society might tend in the next few years.
As
an observer
with experience in both the CIO movement of the thirties and the
civil rights movement of the sixties, he wants to take a view of gradual
progress, racial assimilation, fairer economic distribution. When I
hear this I picture an expanded "welfare state" in which plenty of
