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In 1960 one person in ten in the United States was non-white. Today it is one in nine. By the end of the decade it will be one in eight. Of persons under fourteen today it is one in seven. Of persons under the age of one it is one in six.
The American race problem is too large to be swept under the carpet. In fact it is of such a size as to influence the whole course of world politics: for if one thing is clear in this turbulent world it is that the major source of conflict of the latter half of this century will be the race/poverty problem and that America will, in one way or another, be at the hub of it.
Already in America the situation is being polarized to the extent where it is becoming more and more rare for white and black people to do anything together. This was my conclusion after two years in the U.S.: first in the liberal, nearly all white, peaceful university town of Madison, Wisconsin, and secondly in the West Side ghetto of Chicago where no other white people lived and where the crime rate was one of the highest in the country. And since leaving America twelve months ago I have seen the process of polarization accelerate at an astonishing rate. All my white and Negro friends agree that they see no alternative in sight to an escalating number of major explosions that will make Newark and Detroit look like tea-parties.
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- Copyright © 1967 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 See the classic study Caste and Class in a Southern Town, by the eminent social psychologist John Dollard (A Doubleday Anchor Book).
2 The novelist Pauli Murray describes her childhood as a never-ending obsession with colour :
The world resolved into colour and variation in colour. It pervaded the air I breathed. I learned it in hundreds of ways. I picked it up from the grown folks around me. I heard it in the house, on the playground, in the streets, everywhere.
Always the same tune, played like a broken record, robbing one of personal identity…. It was colour, colour, all the timc: … two shades lighter! Two shades darker! Dead white! Coal black! High yaller! Mariny! Good hair! Bad hair! Stringy hair! Nappy hair! Thin lips! Thick lips! Red lips! …’
3 The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee is the most militant of the Civil Rights organizations. It is essentially a movement of young people. Stokely Carmichael was its previous chairman.
4 From 1952 to 1963 (the latest date for statistical evidence) the median income of Negro families compared to white dropped from 57 per cent to 53 per cent. Since 1947 the number of white families living in poverty has decrrascd 27 per cent while the number of poor non-white families decreased only 3 per cent. The infant mortality rate in 1940 was 70 per cent greater for Negroes than whites. Twenty-two years later it was 90 per cent greater. The number of segregated schools in New York (i.e. over 85 per cent coloured) has doubled in the last five years. There is more residential segregation of the races now than in 1940. Slum housing, the central problem of the vast city ghettos, remains untouched by all the civil rights legislation and poverty programmes.
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