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Black Power—Black Racialism?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 July 2024
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The recent report on ‘Colour and Citizenship’ was greeted by the press with mild bewilderment and a sigh of relief. Britain apparently is not, after all the fuss, on the edge of racial violence. Three-quarters of the population are demonstrated to be ‘tolerant’ or ‘tolerant-inclined’, and it is precisely in those areas where coloured immigrants actually live that there is most tolerance.
In this respect Colour and Citizenship, like the laborious P.E.P. report on discrimination, is useful. But more than volumes of sheer fact are needed if we are to come to grips with the race problem. We would be mistaken to point out too enthusiastically that the majority of people in this country have been shewn to be tolerant. ‘Tolerance’ is a pretty word and one that is heavily overvalued by the prevailing ideology. In effect it means ‘indifference’. It makes little difference to the established economic system whether people have purple or green wallpaper, whether they worship in Anglican churches or synagogues, whether they sleep with members of the same sex or not. These are matters of indifference to capital organization and only a paranoid will be really intolerant of the options that people make. In other circumstances those choices could become significant. Only a minority of the population (10 per cent) are prejudiced in the strictly defined sense of Colour and Citizenship and for many of those it is apparently a symbolic issue (like the members of the Conservative Party in Surbiton—where there are some hundred black people out of a population of over 60,000—who wish to replace their liberally minded M.P. with a supporter of Enoch Powell).
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- Copyright © 1970 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
page 132 note 1 Colour and Citizenship, by E.J.B.Rose, Nicholas Deakin et al., O.U.P., for the Institute of Race Relations.cf. ‘Colour and Citizenship:The Rose Report’, by Michael Dummett, New Blackfriars, January 1970.
page 132 note 2 Racial Discrimination in England, Daniel;shortened version published by Penguins, 1968.
page 133 note 1 This figure can be arrived at from statistics given in the 1968 White Paper,Old Houses Into New Homes, Cmnd.3602.See ‘Housing:Policies and Prospects’, Greve,Political Quarterly, Jan.‐Mar.1969.
page 133 note 2 Or for that matter pushed them out of the ghetto.It is not often realized that one of the major problems in race relations is that immigrants, especially Asians, may have extensive kinship obligations or may make special arrangements which mean that three or four households are dependent on one owner‐occupier.If an immigrant area is re‐ developed a council may in good faith rehouse the owner‐occupiers and their families (as the official residents of the housing) but may have no obligations at all to the other households made homeless.Thus an authority acting in all good faith may create an explosive situation when trying to provide decent housing for immigrants.This is one of the examples of situations where we have to make serious efforts to come to terms with cultural differences. To say that the immigrants will have to accept our way of doing things is to commit against themonce again the type of cultural aggression that characterized many well‐meant efforts in education, etc., in the colonies.
page 133 note 3 This is the course exemplified, for example, in To Sir With Love (Braithwaite), where a black teacher wins acceptance by being exceptionally courageous, intelligent, friendly, clean, etc.Whatever we may think of this approach, one thing is clear and that is that we whites cannot urge it on black people.Of course, black people should be saints, but one can only urge people to sanctity when making a serious, which among other things meansdangerous, effort at it oneself.You can tell a man to turn the other cheek if you are prepared to be crucified, but not if you are doing the slapping, even when pointing out that you are trying hard to reduce the frequency of the slaps.
page 134 note 1 The best book on the Black Muslims is Black Nationalism, by Essien‐Udom.A more journalistic account is given in Lomax When The Word Is Given (U.S.A.). See also the account of his interview with Mr Mohammed in Baldwin's essay, The Fire Next Time.
page 135 note 1 This is a thesis that many Black Power leaders will not accept, but it is clear that the developed world is coming to depend less in sheer economic terms on the Third World than it has in the past.Improved techniques cut down the quantity of raw materials needed and often these can be replaced altogether by artificial products.The amount of trade betweenthe developed countries is increasing in relation to the amount of their trade with the underdeveloped world.The expansionist dynamic of capitalism which once found its outlet incolonies, can now find an outlet in gigantic, technologically developed, military projects, such as MIRV and the moon landing.For all these reasons the straightforward exploitation of the third world countries may slow down, though the damage will have been done and the political and military domination will remain.
page 136 note 1 Every schoolboy knows by now that the immigrants take less per capita out of the welfare state than they put in it.This is because of the age structure of the immigrant population, i.e. they are mainly young and healthy married couples, with few old people.Reliance on this argument by liberals is extremely dangerous, quite simply because in a few years time it will no longer be true.The immigrants will become elderly. When their age structure approximates more cloeely to that of the population as a whole they may in factbegin to take more out of the welfare state because of their past exposure to certain diseases, or because of their lack of western education. While lies about immigrants coming to scrounge off the welfare state must be exposed, we must be quite honest in recognizing the cost of accepting the immigrants as human beings. When all is said and done it is likely to be less than the cost to the black countries of such white immigrants as the staff of the British East India Company or the traders who came to live off the slave states of Africa.
page 137 note 1 It may shock many people to see how far Martin Luther King accepted this thesis in his book,Chaos or Community?, written in 1967 when Stokeley Carmichael's movement was at its height.He differs from Carmichael only in dealing with the role of violent resistance, and with the usefulness of the slogan ‘Black Power’: cf.‘There is nothing essentially wrong with power. The problem is that in America power is unequally distributed. … In his struggle for racial justice, the Negro must seek to transform his condition of powerlessness into creative and positive power. … This self‐affirmation is the black man's need made compelling by the white man's crimes against him. This is positive and necessarypower for black people' (pp. 42, 43 and 48, Penguin edition).
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