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The gap in dollar income between whites and blacks has continued since 1959, even when the south was excluded from the data. Again excluding the south, the relative median income position of blacks as compared to whites has remained unchanged since 1953. In fact, the only improvement in relative income position has been in the south.
As a woman in Atlanta once said, "The food Ralph Bunche eats doesn't fill my stomach."
Racism has indeed in simple terms set man against man, nation against nation, insisting that one group subordinate their wishes and desires to that of another, on gathering material wealth at the expense of his fellows and his environment.
W. E. B DuBois in 1953 reflecting upon half a century of experience and thought, correctly summed up the crisis that currently occupies our struggle at home and abroad. He said, "I still think today as yesterday that the color line is a great problem of this
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century. But today I see more clearly than yesterday that back of the problem of race and color lies a greater problem which both obscures and implements it: and that is the fact that so many civilized persons are willing to live in comfort even if the price of this is poverty, ignorance and disease of the majority of their fellowman; that to maintain this privilege, men have waged war until today war tends to become universal and continuous, and the excuse for this war continues largely to be color and race."
Support for the war in Indochina is a good example of Dr. DuBois thoughts. In view of the United States' essentialyl non-violent response to white communism, including communist "aggression" in Hungary, Czechoslavakia and Berlin, it is at least plausible to argue that htere might not even be a war if the citizens of Vietnam (and/or China) were white. Apparently, it is better to be "dead than red" only if you are yellow, red, black or brown instead of white. At least the United States has not seen fit to destroy any white
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countries in order to save them from the "evils of communism".
It is essential to note how the minds of racist America function. That simultaneously with the destruction of "Indians" was the institutionalization in the nation of "civilization" as the triumph of man over "nature". The fact that native culture defined civilization as the ability to "co-exist with the forces of nature undoubtedly contributed to the definition of 'Indians' as barbaric and hence to their demise." It is not an accident that trees and buffalo along with "Indians" were the casualties of the "winning of the west".
The oppressed people of this nation have several options available to them. They quite properly ought to exercise them all.
That is to suggest that an oppressed people cannot choose a single means of freeing themselves from oppression, but that any and every method ought to be explored and attempted.
The Black people of the South, however, are attempting to try
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an old American method that has proed successful for other groups. That method is politics, which for this group of newly enfranchised people, is neither the art of compromise nor the art of the possible, but the art of seeing who gets how mauch of what from whom.
It is interesting to note that while we face the end of a war fought, so we are told, to secure free elections for the South Vietnamese, we find those same free elections so unsatisying at home.
But the newly enfranchised voters of the southeast cannot afford to ignore any of the rhetoric about democracy and freedom; they realize if they are to have any of it, it will be by their own devices, and not through promises made in Washington or high sounding speeches on the campus, or through slavish devotion to any political party, or by abandoning one party in favor of another that doesn't exist.
They enter into politics without believing that the vote alone can free a people but believing sincerely that the process of
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transferring power from those who have to those who do not will make a difference.
In essence the political activity now under way in the black belt of the south is aggressive independent politics speaking to and serving the needs of the people.
We must begin to seize power wherever we can. Our creativity must be channelled into people oriented situations. Our talents must be directed to continuing the struggle. We know the oppressor: a corproate system which strangles those that won't become its captives.
They can have only one real hope for the future, and that is not the knights on white horses will ride to save them, but that they themselves will fashion a new society, as independent as one can be in this world in this country, and that they will have something to say about what is being done to them.
What is most to be desired is the kind of analysis put forth