I had intended to prepare a written speech for the Dialectics, and had started to prepare it three weeks before the trip, but the United States government thought that as I was starving it would be better if they saw to it that I got some meals every day, so they confined me to their prison system, and I lost all the notes. So I’ve been trying to get another one together.
Now since I’ve been at the Congress I’ve been very confused, because I’m not a psychologist or a psychiatrist, I’m a political activist. I don’t deal with the individual, I think it’s a cop-out when people talk about the individual. What we’re talking about around the United States today, and I believe around the Third World, is the system of international white supremacy coupled with international capitalism. We’re out to smash that system. People who see themselves as part of that system are going to be smashed with it—or we’re going to be smashed.
Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation, London, July 18, 1967.
So I’m not going to talk about the individual. For one thing it will be seen that the black man’s alienation is not an individual question, it is a question of socio-diagnostics. The Negro problem does not resolve itself into the problem of individual Negroes living among white men, but rather of Negroes as a class that is exploited, enslaved, and despised by the colonialist, capitalist society, which is only accidentally white. But since it is accidentally white, that’s what we talk about—white Western society.
The other reason why I won’t talk about the individual is that whenever you raise questions about racial problems to white Western society, each white man says: “Well, don’t blame me, I’m only one person and I really don’t feel that way. Actually I have nothing against you, I see you as an equal. You’re just as good as I am—almost.” I want to clear that up—to point out the difference between individual racism and institutionalized racism.
The first type, individual racism, consists of overt acts by individuals, and usually the immediate result is the death of the victim, or the traumatic and violent destruction of property. This type can be recorded on T.V. cameras and can frequently be observed in the process.
The second type is less overt, far more subtle, less identifiable in terms of specific individuals committing the acts, but it is no less destructive of human life. It’s part of the overall operation of established and respected forces in the society, so it doesn’t receive the condemnation that the first type does.
Let me give you an example of the first type. When unidentified white terrorists bomb a black church and kill five black children, that is an act of individual racism, widely deplored by most segments of the world. But when in that same city, Birmingham, Alabama, not five but five hundred black babies die each year because of lack of proper food, shelter and medical facilities, and thousands more are destroyed and maimed physically, emotionally and intellectually because of conditions of poverty and discrimination in the black community, that is a function of institutionalized racism. When a black family moves into a home in a white neighborhood, and it is stoned, burned or routed out, the latter is an overt act of individual racism, and many people condemn that, at least in words. But it is institutionalized racism that keeps the black people locked in dilapidated slums, tenements, where they must live out their daily lives subject to the prey of exploitative slum landlords, merchants, loan sharks and the restrictive practices of real-estate agents. We’re talking now about the U.S., but I think you can apply a little of it to London. But the society either pretends it does not know of institutionalized racism, or is incapable of doing anything meaningful about the conditions of institutionalized racism. And the resistance to doing anything meaningful about institutionalized racism stems from the fact that Western society enjoys its luxury from institutionalized racism, and therefore, were it to end institutionalized racism, it would in fact destroy itself.
One of the major tools of racism is mystification, so I want to get into the idea of demystifying human beings, and I’m talking about the Third World, I’m not talking about the white West. I think that the Third World are the people who, at least in the United States, black people are concerned with; the white West has been able to do very well for itself. I want to talk, then, very specifically about a number of things under demystification.
The first is the importance of definitions. Second, cultural integrity versus cultural imposition. And then I want to talk about the United States, specifically the cities and the rebellions—“riots,” they’re called by the white press—that are occurring in the United States which are going to lead to guerrilla warfare. And I want to talk about violence because the West is always upset by violence when a black man uses it. Yeah.
In one of my favorite books, Alice in Wonderland, there’s a debate between Humpty Dumpty and Alice around the question of definitions:
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean. Neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “who is to be master. That is all.”
And I think Lewis Carroll is right: those who can define are the masters. White Western society has been able to define, and that’s why she has been the master. The white youth of my generation in the West today starts off with subconscious racism because he accepts the writings of the West, which have either destroyed, distorted, lied about history. He starts off with a basic assumption of superiority that he doesn’t even recognize.
The people of the Third World are going to have to stop accepting the definitions imposed upon them by the West. Frederick Douglass, the great black leader of the 1800s, said that slave seeks his liberation when, and only when, he stops obeying a master. Camus said the same thing one hundred years later on the first page of The Rebel: when a slave stops accepting definitions imposed upon him by his master, then, and only then, he begins to move and create a life.
History books tell you that nothing happens until a white man comes along. “Who discovered America?” “Christopher Columbus.” “Who discovered China?” “Marco Polo.” I used to be told in the West Indies that I was not discovered until Sir Walter Raleigh needed supplies for his ship, and then he came along and found me and said “Whup! I have discovered you!” and my history began.
But let us examine the racism in that statement—let us examine it very closely. Columbus did not discover America. Columbus may be the first recorded white man to set foot on America—that is all. There were people there before Columbus. But white Western society never recognizes the existence of non-white people, either consciously or subconsciously, so that all around the world, the peoples of the Third World never did anything until some white man came along. And that’s why China’s nonexistent, because Mao won’t let no white folk in there. Yeah. And pretty soon Hong Kong is going to be nonexistent, because they’re going to kick them out.
All through history classes we were studying “Western civilization,” and that meant that all else was uncivilized. One of the biggest lies that Western society could have done was to name itself Western civilization. White kids who read that today never recognize that they’re being told that they are superior to everybody else because they have produced civilization. At best, it’s a misnomer; at worst, and more correctly, it’s a damn lie. Western “civilization” has been, as a matter of fact, most barbaric. We are told that Western civilization begins with the Greeks, and the epitome of that civilization is Alexander the Great. The only thing I remember about Alexander the Great was that at age twenty-six he wept because there were no more people to murder and rob. That is the epitome of Western civilization. And if you’re not satisfied with that, you could always take the Roman Empire: their favorite pastimes were watching men kill each other or lions eating up men—they were a civilized people. The fact is that their civilization, as they called it, stemmed from their oppression of other peoples, which allowed them a certain luxury, at the expense of those other people. That exploitation for luxury has been interpreted as “civilization” for the West, and that exploitation for luxury is precisely what it has done. The only difference is that after the Roman Empire, when the British Empire—on which the sun never used to set, but today it sets, sometimes it don’t even rise—began to exploit other peoples, what they did was they let color be the sole criterion in choosing which peoples they would exploit.
You’ve been able to lie about terms, so you’ve been able to call people like Cecil Rhodes a philanthropist when in fact he was a murderer, a rapist, a plunderer, and a thief. But you call Cecil Rhodes a philanthropist because, after he stole our diamonds and our gold, then he gave us some crumbs so we can go to school and become just like you. And that was called philanthropy. But we are renaming it: the place is not called Rhodesia any more, it is called Zimbabwe—that’s its proper name. And Cecil Rhodes is not called a philanthropist any more, he’s known to be a thief. You can keep your Rhodes Scholars, we don’t want the money that came from the sweat of our people.
I’m always appalled when some white person tells me that “progress is being made.” I always ask him, “Progress for whom and from whom?” Progress for white people might be made, because I would say that since World War II they have learned a little how to get around, to get along with people of color. But I don’t think there’s been progress for the black people, there’s not been progress for the people of color around the Third World. And progress will not be measured for us by white people. We will have to tell you when progress is being made. You cannot tell us when progress is being made, because progress for us is getting you off our backs, and that’s the only progress that we can see.
There have been a lot of changes but no progress.
When I was a young man in the West Indies, I had to read Rudyard Kipling’s The White Man’s Burden. I thought the best thing white men could do for me was to leave me alone, but Rudyard Kipling said they should come and save me because I was half savage, half child. It was very white of him. Because the white West felt somehow that it was better than everybody else, it has used force to impose its culture on the Third World wherever it has been. If a few settlers left England to go to Zimbabwe, there was no reason for them to rename that country Rhodesia, after themselves, and then force everybody to speak their language. If they’d had respect for the cultures of other people, they would have spoken the language of those people and adopted their religions. But the West was powerful—that’s the word nobody wants to talk about, power. It was only power that made people bow their heads to the West. They didn’t bow because they liked Jesus Christ or because they liked white folks. Machiavelli said a long time ago that “people obey masters for one of two reasons. Either they love them, or they fear them.” I often ask myself whether the West believes the Third World obeys them out of love.
It’s clear that they feared them; the West with its guns and its power and its might came into Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the U.S.A., and raped them. And while they raped they used beautiful terms: they told the Indians, “We’re civilizing you, and we’re taming the West. And if you won’t be civilized, we’ll kill you.” So they committed genocide and stole the land, and put the Indians on reservations, and they said that they had civilized the country.
They weren’t satisfied with that. They came to Africa and stole Africans and brought them to the U.S.A., and we were being brought there because we were cannibals and we ate each other, and they were going to give us a better life, which was, of course, slavery.
Now I want to make just one clear distinction, before I move on, about cultural integrity. Inside the countries of the West there was democracy for the whites, at least some form of it. But that democracy was at the expense of non-white people. While Britain surely enjoyed her Parliament House nonsense about constitutionality, she was suppressing all of Africa. The same holds true for France, and the same thing, of course, is true today for the United States.
White people are very funny, you know. De Gaulle got out of Vietnam a few years ago, and now he’s got very broad-minded. But he’s still in Somaliland.
The West said, “Our culture is better, we are civilized.” And because of whites’ power, the non-white countries began to try to imitate Europe and to imitate its ways, and then some began to believe the whites, because nobody wanted to be uncivilized. Our ancestors knew what civilization was, long before Europeans even got out of their caves, and if they had stuck to their way of life, perhaps we wouldn’t be in the shape we are in today.
Thus all other people have been stripped of their culture. They have been forced to accept a culture that does not belong to them. The minds of people of color around the world are so messed up that in certain sections of Vietnam today, and in Japan certainly, women who have slanted eyes are cutting their skin so they can have round eyes and look like Westerners. There’s no need to say what black people have been doing to their hair, especially females: they have been putting hot combs in their hair, straightening it, attempting to look like white people, because the West has defined beauty as that which was theirs.
Now there’s a fight for cultural integrity in the world today. Each group of people wants to retain its own integrity, and say, “To hell with the West and its culture. Let it keep it. We want ours.” I don’t propose to speak for the Red Guards, but I would assume that’s part of the fight they’re waging. It’s a healthy fight and it needs to be waged. I know that in the United States one of the fights we’re waging is the fight for cultural integrity. We want to be able to recognize the contributions that the non-white peoples of the world have made. It’s amazing: when you do some reading, you find out that they did most of what the white people claim they did. They just bleached history. Pythagoras didn’t give you geometry, the Egyptians did.
I have something against England, I really do, because when I was young I had to read all that rot about how good England was to Trinidad, while she was raping us left and right. And all I used to read about when I was small was London, the beauty of London, and how peacefully everybody lived, and how nice life was—at my expense. And I used to say, “I sure would like to get to London and burn it down to the ground.” But that’s violence!
I’m amazed when I pick up the paper and read that “England today decided to give independence to the West Indies.” The whole West feels it has the right to give everybody their independence. That’s totally absurd. You can never give anyone his independence. All men are born free, they are enslaved by other men; so the only act that the men who enslaved them can do is, not give them their independence, but stop oppressing them. There’s a very important difference, and I don’t think people make that all the time. Who the hell is England to give me my independence? All they can do is stop oppressing me, get off my back. But when they say “We’re giving you your independence: You’re ready for it now,” it sounds so much nicer than for them to admit to themselves, “We’re going to stop oppressing you because we’re becoming a little bit more civilized, or because you’re making it uncomfortable for us and we can no longer afford to oppress you at the price that you’re asking us to pay.” That would be correct. But you wouldn’t expect self-condemnation.
You cannot grant anybody independence, they just take it; and that is what white America is going to learn. No white liberal can give me anything. The only thing a white liberal can do for me is to help civilize other whites, because they need to be civilized.
Now in the United States—and England isn’t far behind —it is estimated that in another five to ten years, two-thirds of the twenty million black people who inhabit the United States will be living in the ghettos in the heart of the cities. Joining us are going to be hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans, Mexican-Americans, and American Indians. The American city, in essence, is going to be populated by the peoples of the Third World, while the white middle classes will flee to the suburbs. Now the black people do not control, nor do we own, the resources—we do not control the land, the houses or the stores. These are all owned by whites who live outside the community. These are very real colonies, in the sense that they are capital and cheap labor exploited by those who live outside the cities. It is white power that makes the laws, and enforces those laws with guns and nightsticks in the hands of white racist policemen and their black mercenaries. It does not seem that the men who control the power and resources of the United States ever sat down and designed those black enclaves, and formally articulated the terms of their colonial and dependent status, as was done, for example, by the apartheid government of South Africa, which Britain, the United States, and France back. Yet one cannot distinguish between one ghetto and another as one moves around the United States; every ghetto seems to be the same. Note that the United States has, on its continental borders, forty-eight states, and each of these states has a ghetto in each of its major cities. As one moves from city to city, it is as though some malignant, racist planning unit had designed each ghetto from one master blueprint. Indeed, if the ghettos had been formally and deliberately planned instead of growing spontaneously and inevitably from the racist functionings of the various institutions that combine to make the society, it would be somehow less frightening—one could understand their similarity as being artificially and consciously imposed, rather than the result of identical patterns of white racism which repeat themselves in cities as far apart as Boston is from Watts—that is 3,000 miles.
A capitalist system automatically includes racism, whether by design or not. Capitalism and racism go hand in hand. The struggle for Black Power in the United States, and certainly around the world, is the struggle to free these colonies from external domination, but we do not seek merely to create communities where black rulers replace white rulers, controlling the lives of black masses, and where black money goes into a few black pockets. We want to see it go into the communal pocket—the society we seek to build among black people is not an oppressive capitalist society. Capitalism, by its very nature, cannot create structures free from exploitation.
The struggle to free these internal colonies relates to the struggles of imperialism around the world. We realistically survey our numbers, and know that it is not possible for black people to take over the whole of the United States militarily, and hold large areas of land; in a highly industrialized nation, the struggle is different. The heart of production, and the heart of commercial trade, is in the cities. We are in the cities. We can become, and are becoming, a disruptive force in the flow of services, goods, and capital. While we disrupt internally and aim for the eye of the octopus, we are hoping that our brothers are disrupting externally to sever the tentacles of the United States. Newark, New Jersey, is where Engelhart has his capital—and for the last five days he couldn’t do any work. You know Engelhart controls most of South Africa, along with Rockefeller, the liberal.
It is sometimes said that the African-American movement in the United States does not understand the true nature of the struggle in the world today, that the movement is involved in fighting only racial discrimination, and only with the weapon of nonviolence. It used to be. We moved away from that. The integration movement’s goals were middle-class—such as job opportunities for college graduates, open public accommodations. And that’s very important because the West doesn’t understand its own racism when they talk about integration. White Americans’ concept of integration is based on the assumption that there was nothing of value in the black community and that little of value would ever come from the black community. When they talk about integration, they talk about accepting black people—isn’t that ridiculous? I have to talk about whether or not I want to accept them, and they’re never willing to talk about that, because they know they’ll come up losing. Integration is absolutely absurd unless you can talk about it on a two-way street, where black people sit down and decide about integration.
As you know, the Black Power movement that SNCC initiated moved away from the integration movement. Because of the integration movement’s middle-class orientation, because of its subconscious racism, and because of its nonviolent approach, it has never been able to involve the black proletariat. It could never attract and hold the young bloods who clearly understood the savagery of white America, and who were ready to meet it with armed resistance. It is the young bloods especially who contain the hatred Che Guevera speaks of:
Hatred as an element of the struggle, relentless hatred of the enemy that impels us over and beyond the natural limitations of man, and transforms us into effective, violent, selected and cold killing machines.
The Black Power movement has been the catalyst for the bringing together of these young bloods. This is the real revolutionary proletariat, ready to fight by any means necessary, for the liberation of our people.
The Black Power movement in the United States is exposing the extent of the racism and exploitation that permeate all the institutions in the country. It has unique appeal to young black students on campuses across America. These students have been deluded by the fiction that if the black man would educate himself and behave himself, he would be acceptable enough to leave the ranks of the oppressed and have tea with the Queen. However, this year, when provoked by savage white policemen, students on many campuses fought back—before, they had accepted these incidents without rebellion. As students are a part of these rebellions, they begin to acquire a resistance-consciousness. They begin to realize that white America might let a very few of them escape, one by one, into the mainstream of a society, but as soon as blacks move in concert around their blackness she will reply with the fury that reveals her true racist nature.
It is necessary to understand that our analysis of this country and international capitalism begins in race. Color and culture were, and are, key in our oppression; therefore our analysis of history and our economic analysis are rooted in these concepts. Our historical analysis, for example, views the United States as being conceived in racism. Although the first settlers themselves were escaping from oppression, and although their armed uprising against their mother country was around the aggravation of colonialism, and their slogan was, “No taxation without representation,” the white European settlers could not extend their lofty theories of democracy to the red men, whom they exterminated systematically as they expanded into the red men’s land. Indeed, in the same town where the settlers set up their model of government based on the theory of representative democracy, that same town brought the first slaves in from Africa. The glorious Constitution’s guarantees of “Life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness,” and all that other garbage, were guarantees for white men only; the black man was counted only as three-fifths of a person. If you read the United States Constitution, you will see this clause is still in there, to this very day—a black man is three-fifths of a man.
It was because white America needed cheap or free labor that she raped our African homeland of millions of black people. Because we were black and considered inferior, our enslavement was justified and rationalized by the so-called white Christians. They explained their crimes with lies about civilizing the heathens, the savages from Africa, whom they portrayed as being “better off” in the Americas than they’d been in their homeland. These circumstances laid the base and framework for the racism that has become institutionalized in white American society.
In our economic analysis, our interpretation of Marx comes not only from his writing, but, as we see it, from the relationship of capitalistic countries to people of color around the world. The labor movement gives an example of what happens when people in a white country in the West organize themselves when they’re being oppressed. The labor movement in the United States is cited around the world as the real friend of the black man, which is going to be able to help him. When the white workers organize—and this is true for all the little white countries—here’s how they get out of the bind.
In the beginning, certainly some of the great labor-movement leaders struggled against the industrial lords’ absolute control of the economy, but the fight of white workers in the West has been essentially only for money. Those few who had visions of extending the fight, of demanding workers’ control of production, never succeeded in transmitting their entire vision to the rank and file. The labor movement found itself asking the industrial lords not to give up their control, but merely to pass out a few more of the fruits of this control. Thus did the United States anticipate the prophecy of Marx, and avoided the inevitable class struggle within the country by expanding into the Third World and exploiting the resources and slave labor of people of color. Britain and France did the same thing. United States capitalists never cut down on their domestic profits to share with the workers—instead, they expanded internationally, and threw the crumbs from their profits to the American working class, who lapped them up. The American working class enjoys the fruits of the labors of the Third World workers. The proletariat has become the Third World, and the bourgeoisie is white Western society.
I’ve watched the relationships of whites to whites who are communist, and whites to non-whites whom they call communist. When the United States wants to take somebody’s country, they get up and say: “Communists are invading them and terrorist guerrilla warfare is on the way, and we must protect democracy, so send thousands of troops to Vietnam to kill the communists.” Italy is a white country. Over one-third of its population is communist. Why doesn’t the United States invade Italy? Tito is an acknowledged communist. The United States gives him aid. Why don’t they invade Tito’s country, if they really care about stopping communism? The United States is not kidding anybody; when they want to take over some non-whites’ land, they talk about communist aggression—that’s what they did in Cuba, in Santo Domingo, and it’s what they’re doing in Vietnam. They’re always telling non-white people how they’re going to stop them from going communist. Don’t talk about dictatorship. Franco is perhaps the worst dictator in the world today, but the United States gives him aid.
It is clearly not a question of communist invasion, merely a question of taking the countries they want most, and the countries they want most are the non-white countries because that is where the resources of the world are today. That’s where they have been for the last few centuries. And that’s why white Western society has to be there.
Another mystification white society uses is the word “riot”—when rebellions break out in the large cities of America, the first thing people say is that they’re riots. And white Western society is very good, the next thing they say is: “We must have law and order.” Hitler had the most efficient system of law and order we’ve ever seen. He happened to have been a fascist. He did not have justice coupled with his law and order. The United States knows about law and order, it doesn’t know about justice. It is for white Western society to talk about law and order. It is for the Third World to talk about justice.
For God’s sake, I don’t understand how the white West can ever talk about violence—they are the most violent people on the face of the earth. They have used violence to get everything they have. And yet, they’re the first to talk about violence. The armed rebellions and the guerrilla warfare going on in the United States today are not the most violent things going on in the world—Vietnam, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Hong Kong, Aden, Somaliland, that’s where your violence really is. Violence can take the form of physical warfare, or it can take the form of a slow death. The Jews in the Warsaw ghettos were suffering from violence. It didn’t take an actual physical form until they were put in the gas chambers, but they were suffering from mental violence. Wherever you go in Africa today, the Africans are suffering from violence inflicted on them by the white West, be it that they are stripped of their culture, of their human dignity, or of the resources of their very land.
And it is crystal clear to the peoples of the Third World today that it’s time out for talk. There can be no talk about how to stop violence, that’s clear. Even Camus talks about that, though he cops out. Camus talks about executioner /victim. He says, Well, there are executioner/ victim relationships in society, and the executioner uses force to keep his victim down. But the victim gets tired of that, and what happens is that when the victim moves either to a position of equality or to try to conquer the executioner, he uses the force and the means and the methods that his oppressor used to keep him down. That happens to be violence. I never get caught up with violence. As a matter of fact, one of my favorite quotes that stops all the talk about it is from Sartre:
What then did you expect when you unbound the gag that had muted those black mouths? That they would chant your praises? Did you think that when those heads that our fathers had forcefully bowed down to the ground were raised again, you would find adoration in their eyes?
That’s Jean-Paul Sartre, not me.
We are working to increase the revolutionary consciousness of black people in America to join with the Third World. Whether or not violence is used is not decided by us, but by the white West. We are fighting a political warfare. Politics is war without violence. War is politics with violence. The white West will make the decision on how they want the political war to be fought. We are not any longer going to bow our heads to any white man. If he touches one black man in the United States, he is going to go to war with every black man in the United States.
We are going to extend our fight internationally and we are going to hook up with the Third World. It is the only salvation—we are fighting to save our humanity. We are indeed fighting to save the humanity of the world, which the West has failed miserably to preserve. And the fight must be waged from the Third World. There will be new speakers. They will be Che, they will be Mao, they will be Fanon. You can have Rousseau, you can have Marx, you can even have the great libertarian John Stuart Mill.
I want to tell you why violence is important in building a resistance-consciousness in the United States. I want to use a quote that we learned from Germany:
The triumph of the Storm Troopers required that the tortured victim allow himself to be led to the gallows without protesting, that he repudiate and abandon himself to the point where he ceased to affirm his identity.
There is nothing more terrible than these processions of human beings going to their death like zombies. I’m afraid that blacks in America cannot afford to march to the gallows the way Jews did. If white America decides to play Nazi, we’re going to let them know the black people are not Jews, we’re going to fight back to the death. And lest you think that sounds very violent, let me remind you of a poem that your “great” Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill read when you were getting ready to attack Germany, even though you were told that you were a minority. Incidentally, I don’t know if he told you, it was written by a black man named Claude McKay from Jamaica, and he wrote it for black people. It is called “If We Must Die.” It is our poem today in the United States:
If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.
If we must die, 0 let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
Our fight will be international because such a consciousness will destroy the minority complex within black communities that is so carefully calculated by the American press; and also because when the black man realizes that the counter-insurgency efforts of the United States are directed against his brothers, he will not fight in any of its wars—he will not go. Then it will become crystal clear to the world that the imperialist wars of the U.S. are nothing less than racist wars. During the past year we have initiated a black resistance movement to the draft, which is being led by our hero, the World Champion, Mr. Muhammad Ali. We’re against black men fighting their brothers in Vietnam—and we’re certain that the next Vietnam will either be in the Congo, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Bolivia, Guatemala, Brazil, Peru, or indeed in the West Indies. And we are not going to fight our brothers.
For the past four hundred years the African-American has tried to coexist peacefully inside the United States. It has been to no avail. We have never lynched a white man, we have never burned their churches, we have never bombed their houses, we have never beaten them in the streets. I wish we could say the same for white people around the world. Our history demonstrates that the reward for trying to coexist in peace has been the physical and psychological murder of our peoples. We have been lynched, our houses have been bombed and our churches burned. Now we are being shot down like dogs in the streets by white racist policemen. We can no longer accept this oppression without retribution. We understand that as we expand our resistance and internationalize the consciousness of our people, as our martyred brother Malcolm X did, we will get retaliation from the government, as he did. As the resistance struggle escalates we are well aware of Che’s words: “The struggle will not be a mere street fight, but it will be a long and harsh struggle.” And to the end, we are going to work with our common brothers and sisters in the Third World to fight this oppression.
I would like to conclude by telling you just precisely what black people in America are going to do, and when we’re going to do it, and how we’re going to do it, and why we’re going to do it. This is your only chance to hear it clear, because you’ll be hearing it from the BBC next time.
Black people in the United States have no time to play nice polite parlor games, especially when the lives of our children are at stake. Some white Americans can afford to speak softly, tread lightly, employ the soft-sell and the put-off—or is it put-down?—because they own the society. For us to adopt their methods of relieving our oppression is certainly ludicrous. We blacks must respond in our own way, on our own terms, in a manner that fits our temperaments. The definition of ourselves, the road we pursue, and the goals we seek, are our responsibility. It is clear that society is capable of, and willing to, reward those individuals who do not forcefully condemn it—to reward them with prestige, status, and material benefits—but these crumbs of corruption will be rejected. As a people we have absolutely nothing to lose by refusing to play such games. Anything less than clarity, honesty, and forcefulness perpetuates the centuries of sliding over, dressing up and soothing down the true feelings, hopes, and demands of an oppressed black people. Mild demands and hypocritical smiles mislead white America into thinking that all is fine and peaceful; they lead white America into thinking that the path and pace whites choose for dealing with racial problems are acceptable to the masses of blacks. It is far better to speak forcefully and truthfully. Only when one’s true self, black or white, is exposed, can society proceed to deal with the problems from a position of clarity, and not from one of misunderstanding.
Thus, we have no intention of engaging in the meaningless language so common to discussions of race in the world today: “Things were and are bad, but we are making progress.” “Granted, your demands are legitimate, but we cannot move hastily. Stable societies are best built slowly.” “Be careful that you do not anger or alienate your white allies. Remember, after all, you are only 10 per cent of the population.”
We reject the language and the views, whether expressed by blacks or by whites. We leave them to others to mouth, because we don’t feel that this rhetoric is either relevant or useful. Rather we suggest a more meaningful language —that of Frederick Douglass, a man who understood the nature of protest in society:
Those who profess to favor freedom, yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without ploughing up the ground. . . . Power concedes nothing without demands—it never did and it never will. . . . The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.
He was a slave.
Black Power, to us, means that black people see themselves as a part of a new force, sometimes called the Third World; that we see our struggle as closely related to liberation struggles around the world. We must hook up with these struggles. We must, for example, ask ourselves: when black people in Africa begin to storm Johannesburg, what will be the reaction of the United States? It seems inevitable that the U.S. will move to protect its financial interests in South Africa, which means protecting the white rule in South Africa, as England has already done. What will be the role of black people living inside the United States? Black people in the United States have the responsibility to oppose, and if not to oppose, certainly to neutralize white America’s efforts. This is but one example. Many such situations have already arisen around the world, and there are more to come, there is only one place for blacks in America in these struggles, and that is on the side of the Third World. Frantz Fanon, in The Wretched of the Earth, puts forth clearly the reasons for the relationship of the concept called Black Power to the concept of a new force in the world:
Let us decide not to imitate Europe. . . . Let us try to create the whole man, whom Europe has been incapable of bringing to triumphant birth. Two centuries ago a former European colony decided to catch up with Europe. It succeeded so well that the U.S.A. became a monster in which the taints, the sickness and the inhumanity of Europe has grown to appalling dimensions. . . . The Third World today faces Europe like a colossal mass, whose aim should be to try to resolve the problems to which Europe has not been able to find the answers. . . . It is a question of the Third World starting a new history of man, a history which will have regard to the sometimes prodigious thesis which Europe has put forward, but which will also not forget Europe’s crimes, of which the most horrible was committed in the heart of man and consisted of the pathological tearing apart of his functions and the crumbling away of his unity. . . .
No, there is no question of a return to nature. It is simply a very concrete question of not dragging men towards mutilation, of not imposing upon them brain rhythms which very quickly obliterate it and wreck it. The pretext of catching up must not be used for pushing men around, to tear him away from himself or from his privacy, to break and to kill him.
No, we do not want to catch up with anyone. What we want to do is go forward all the time, night and day, in the company of man, in the company of all men. . . .
Since there’s been a lot of talk about psychology at this meeting, I’ve thought up a psychological problem. White liberals are always saying, “What can we do?” I mean, they’re always coming to help black people. I thought of an analogy. If you were walking down the street and a man had a gun on another man—let’s say both of them were white—and you had to help somebody, whom would you help? It’s obvious to me that if I were walking down the street, and a man had a gun on another man, and I was going to help, I’d help the man who didn’t have the gun, if the man who had the gun was just pulling the gun on the other man for no apparent reason—if he was just going to rob him or shoot him because he didn’t like him. The only way I could help is either to get a gun and shoot the man with the gun, or take the gun away from him—join the fellow who doesn’t have a gun and both of us gang up on the man with the gun. But white liberals never do that. When the man has the gun, they walk around him and they come to the victim, and they say “Let me help you,” and what they mean is “help you adjust to the situation with the man who has the gun on you.”
If indeed white liberals are going to help, their only job is to get the gun from the man and talk to him, because he is a sick man. The black man is not the sick man, it is the white man who is sick, he’s the one who picked up the gun first.
So you can see that psychologists ought to stop investigating and examining people of color, they ought to investigate and examine their own corrupt society. That’s where they belong. And once they are able to do that, then maybe we can move on to build in the Third World.
I want to read a poem that was written by a young man who works in SNCC, the organization for which I work. His name is Worth Long. It’s called “Arson and Cold Grace, or How I Yearn to Burn, Baby Burn”:
We have found you out, false-faced Americans, we have found you out.
We have found you out, false-faced farmers, we have found you out.
The sparks of suspicion are melting your waters
And waters can’t drown them, the fires are burning
And firemen can’t calm them with falsely appeasing
And preachers can’t pray with hopes for deceiving
Nor leaders deliver a lecture on losing
Nor teachers inform whom the chosen are choosing
For now is the fire and fires won’t answer
To logical reason and hopefully seeming
Hot flames must devour the kneeling and feeling
And torture the masters whose idiot pleading
Gets lost in the echoes of dancing and bleeding.
We have found you out, false-faced farmers, we have found you out.
We have found you out, false-faced America, we have found you out.