Martin Duberman
BLACK POWER IN AMERICA
The slogan of "Black Power" has caused widespread con–
fusion and alann. This is partly due to a problem inherent
in
lan–
guage: words necessarily reduce complex attitudes or phenomena to
symbols which, in their abbreviation, allow for a variety of inter–
pretations. Stuart Chase has reported that
in
the thirties, when the
word "fascism" was on every tongue, he asked 100 people from
various walks of life what the word meant and got 100 widely differ–
ing definitions. And in 1953 when
The Capital Times
of Madison,
Wisconsin, asked 200 people "What is a Communist?" not only
was there no agreement, but five out of every eight admitted
they couldn't define the term at all. So it is with "Black Power." Its
definition depends on whom you ask, when you ask, where you ask,
and not least, who does the asking.
Yet the phrase's ambiguity derives not only from the usual con–
fusions of language, but from a failure of clarity (or is it frank–
ness?) on the part of its advocates, and a failure of attention (or is
it generosity?) from their critics. The leaders of SNCC and CORE
who invented the slogan, including Stokely Carmichael and Floyd
McKissick, have given Black Power different definitions on different
occasions, in part because their own understanding of the term con–
tinues to develop, but in part, too, because their explanations have
been tailored to their audiences?
1. Jeremy Lamer has recently pointed out ("Initiation for Whitey: Notes
on Poverty and Riot,"
Dissent,
November-December, 1967) that the young
Negro in the ghetto mainly seeks the kind of knowledge which can serve
as a "ready-made line, a set of hard-nosed aphorisms," and that both
Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael have understood this need. In this
