Written for the Reader’s Forum of Freedomways, a quarterly review.
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WE ARE IN THE HIDEOUS CENTER of a mortal storm, which many of us saw coming. Many of us will perish and certainly no one of my generation can hope, honorably, to survive. And, whether or not one agrees with me, I think it is useful to assume that America will not survive this storm, either. Nor should she; she is responsible for this holocaust in which the living writhe; it is American power which makes death an enviable state for so many millions of people. We are a criminal nation, built on a lie, and as the world cannot use us, it will presently find some way of disposing of us. I take this for granted; and the future of this nation, even though it may also be my own, cannot concern me any longer. I am concerned with the living, I am concerned with a new morality, and a new creation. I hope I do not sound literary; in any case, I mean what I say. I really believe that it is possible for human beings to make the world a place in which we all can live.
I think I understand, in spite of my limits—for I know more about my limits than anyone else can know, and no tribunal frightens me; I am my own tribunal—a great deal about the crisis which we, black, in America, are now enduring. The crisis has been produced by the history of Europe and the brutality of the Christian church; and I think it is very important to bear in mind that, whereas we, black, are enduring a crisis, the descendants of Europe and the defenders of the faith are witnessing their doom. Indeed, they are graceless—but they are human. This is hard, hard, hard to remember: I know how hard it is. But if one does not remember it, the battle is for nothing.
I think I know how white America operates to destroy the black integrity—and not by accident, but deliberately. You will observe, I hope, that in doing this, it has also destroyed its own integrity. I hope you will understand me and I hope you will believe me when I say that I would rather die than see the black American become as hideously empty as the majority of white men have become. I would like us to do something unprecedented: to create ourselves without finding it necessary to create an enemy. But since we are surrounded by enemies, I think I should spell that out.
A black high-school dropout in Watts, for example, has every reason to hate the police, the lawyers, the judges, the priests, the teachers, the bosses, the landlords, the mayor, the governor, and Ronald Reagan. I do not shrink from asserting that the human value of these people can only exist in the sight of God, and, happily, I’m not God (who is also, in any case, and not a moment too soon, about to go out of business). But he has no right to hate the governor’s child, and no one has a right to teach him to hate. I think that we, human beings, must try to change each other. I am perfectly aware that nothing will ever change Governor Wallace or Senator Eastland. But it is the system which created these people and gave them their power which must be isolated, anatomized, attacked, and destroyed. And I think we must be very clear-headed about this, for no people have ever been in a revolutionary situation so bizarre. It is a revolution which has all the aspects of a civil war; but at the same time, it is happening all over the globe, and America is fighting it all over the globe—using, by no means incidentally, vast numbers of its surplus and despised population. Hopefully, for example, if enough Vietnamese and black Americans are blown into eternity, the world will be made safe—for business. There is a very good reason, after all, why the government which could so severely compromise the Cuban economy can do nothing whatever to intimidate the South African economy. A revolution in South Africa would have a terrible effect on Wall Street and on the Bank of the Holy Ghost—which latter institution stands, as you know, in Rome: a monument to what is probably the most extensive, successful, murderous, and blasphemous enterprise in the history of mankind. If the Bank of the Holy Ghost should fail, the heathen could no longer be saved. And you remember, I hope, how desperately we heathens longed for salvation.
Well, then: the nature of the enemy is history; the nature of the enemy is power; and what every black man, boy, woman, girl, is struggling to achieve is some sense of himself or herself which this history and this power have done everything conceivable to destroy. But let us try to be clear. Black power is not a mystical or a poetic concept, for example; it is simply a political necessity. It has nothing to do with bad guys or good guys, and it really has nothing to do with color. Black arts has nothing to do with color, either. It is an attempt to create a black self-image which the white Republic could never allow. It is an attempt to tell the truth about black people to black people because the American Republic has told us nothing but lies.
But the Republic has told itself nothing but lies. If one accepts my basic assumption, which is that all men are brothers—simply because all men share the same condition, however different the details of their lives may be—then it is perfectly possible, it seems to me, that in re-creating ourselves, in saving ourselves, we can re-create and save many others: whosoever will. I certainly think that this possibility ought to be kept very vividly in the forefront of our consciousness. The value of a human being is never indicated by the color of his skin; the value of a human being is all that I hold sacred; and I know that I do not become better by making another worse. One need not read the New Testament to discover that. One need only read history and look at the world—one need only, in fact, look into one’s mirror.
The specific reason for this rather long letter is the series of articles concerning the Jew in Harlem (in Liberator magazine). I think it is most distinctly unhelpful, and I think it is immoral, to blame Harlem on the Jew. For a man of Editor Dan Watts’s experience, it is incredibly naive. Why, when we should be storming capitols, do they suggest to the people they hope to serve that we take refuge in the most ancient and barbaric of the European myths? Do they want us to become better? Or do they want us, after all, carefully manipulating the color black, merely to become white?
(1967)