Cliches About Negroes Destroyed

Press, Volume CVII, Issue 31539, 29 November 1967, Page 11

Cliches About Negroes Destroyed

W Z Press Assn.—CopyrightJ WASHINGTON, Nov. 27. The Civil Rights Commission, in a new report based on the testimony of numerous residents of big city ghettos, has destroyed three cliches about Negroes that have gained much currency and done considerable damage, according to Tom Wicker of the “New York Times” News Service. Wicker writes: The first of those cliches is that Negroes are only another in the long series of minority groups—the Irish, the Italians, the Jews, numerous Eastern Europeans that have migrated to the United States and ultimately fought their way out of slums and into an | accepted place in American life. The second is that if 1 Negroes would only try as hard as those other minority, groups did. they too could move out to the suburbs and up to the middle-income brackets. And the third is that, while conditions in the ghetto may be bad. it would be wrong and unwise to “reward violence" by doing something about these conditions in the wake of last summer’s riots, and those of the summer before and of the summer before that

J The first of these cliches is the hardest to deal with. Not only is it standard liberal doctrine that Negroes are like other human beings, only with black skins—but to assert that Negroes are different, from Poles and Italians is to invite the charge of racism. Nevertheless, the Civil Rights Commission says, the analogy to other minority groups is “misleading and dangerous.” Negroes, for one thing, are not invading migrants, but have been Americans, if in name only, for hundreds of years.

I Unlike the Europeans who I once flocked to the United i States, Negroes are not fleeing the repression of tyranni- ; cal foreign governments or bad economic conditions—their problem is the attitude toward them of the society to which they rightfully belong, and the economy in which they seek a living. | Within that society, and in virtually every segment of it, “the legacy of slavery continues in the form of racial segregation (de facto, if no longer legal), discrimination and prejudice.” Moreover, in the technological complexity of the late 20th i century, unskilled employment and small businesses— I the social and economic stepping stones of other minority groups—are no longer very helpful in breaking out of the ghetto or out of poverty. Thus technological demands, and the prejudice ind discrimination that the Negro’s skin colour generates in white society, erect “formidable barriers," in the Civil Rights Commission's phrase, that other minorities did not have to face. Even so, Negroes might climb over these invisible walls if the traditional means —education and work—were as available to them as they once were even to disadvantaged Irish and Italian immigrants. But they are not. Their schools and teachers are generally inferior, and in the city ghetto de fircto segregation is virtually the rule, ■ whatever the State and Federal law.

Stigmatised and out of con-1 tact with affluent American! life, these schools rarely provide the students either the incentives or the means to improve their lives. And even in the rare instances when the unusual ghetto school or the exceptional ghetto pupil results in a human being capable of playing a useful role in a technological society, he may find the job market closed to Negroes. Or he may find advantageous employment available only in non-ghetto communities where discriminatory housing practices prevent his migration. This practical imprisonment; of the Negro in the ghetto, j this lingering and subtle raIcial segregation, is at the I I root of the riots. That is the conclusion of the Civil Rights Commission, just as it is the plain meaning of the evidence so far collected by President Johnson’s Commission on Civil Disorders. A San Francisco Negro is] quoted in the report of the Civil Rights Commission as i saying: i “Now, what black nationalist groups are telling them ,is that look, baby, nobody is i going to help you hut yourI self, and what you had better do, you had better realise that with all the liberals in the world that you still have these conditions that you had when you met these liberals, and until you can do something about it for yourself they wiU be here.” That is why the most damaging and shortsighted cliche of all is an insistence that violence must not be rewarded. “When things blow in the city,” one Negro told the Civil Rights Commission. , 'people sit back and want to know why. and all the time we’re telling you why.” These destructive, fruitless, hopeless uprisings themselves are telling us that the Negro is determined to tear down ■i the conditions that surround r ,hiin, the walls that contain i him, and as one black militan

testified, if the democratic processes fail, “then we will have to do whatever is necessary to make these changes." To attack these conditions from the outside, to make that attack the nation’s “first priority”, as the Civil Rights Commission recommends, is not rewarding violence. It is preventing violence, and nothing else will do it.