“Well, daddy, I’m just putting you on. Didn’t you ever hear of the hereafter? That’s where it will all work out, there where us Blacks are the angels and honkies is the flunky. Now, let me take you by the tail, white cat, long enough to see that I want some more of these handouts, see, these homey horse balls and government aid.”
The splendid American has just been left in the mire of a put-on and throwaway. How is he to know if this is spring mud or the muck of the worst Negro Hades?
The native’s relaxation takes precisely the form of a muscular orgy in which the most acute aggressivity and the most impelling violence are canalised, transformed, and conjured away.… At certain times on certain days, men and women come together at a given place, and there, under the solemn eye of the tribe, fling themselves into a seemingly unorganized pantomime, which is in reality extremely systematic, in which by various means—shakes of the head, bending of the spinal column, throwing of the whole body backwards—may be deciphered as in an open book the huge effort of a community to exorcise itself, to liberate itself … in reality your purpose in coming together is to allow the accumulated libido, the hampered aggressivity to dissolve as in a volcanic eruption. Symbolical killings, fantastic rite, imaginary mass murders—all must be brought out. The evil humours are undammed, and flow away with a din as of molten lava.
—FRANTZ FANON, The Wretched of the Earth
Here is the lesson learned by the struggles of present-day colonial countries to obtain their independence: a war of liberation converts the energies of criminality, assassination, religious orgy, voodoo, and the dance into the determined artful phalanxes of bold guerrilla armies. A sense of brotherhood comes to replace the hitherto murderous clan relations of the natives. Once, that propensity to murder each other had proved effective in keeping the peace—for the settler. Now, these violent sentiments turn against the whites who constrain them. Just as the natives upon a time made good servants and workers for the whites, while reserving the worst of their characters for each other, now they looked to serve each other, to cleanse the furies of their exploited lives in open rude defiance against the authority.
This is the conventional explanation offered by any revolutionary spokesman for the Third World—that new world which may or may not emerge triumphant in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. It is a powerful argument, an uplifting argument, it stirs the blood of anyone who has ever had a revolutionary passion, for the faith of the revolutionary (if he is revolutionary enough to have faith) is that the repressed blood of mankind is ultimately good and noble blood. Its goodness may be glimpsed in the emotions of its release. If a sense of brotherhood animates the inner life of guerrilla armies, then it does not matter how violent they are to their foe. That violence safeguards the sanctity of their new family relations.
If this is the holy paradigm of the colonial revolutionary, its beauty has been confirmed in places, denied in others. While the struggles of the NLF and the North Vietnamese finally proved impressive even to the most gung ho Marine officers in Southeast Asia, the horrors of the war in Biafra go far toward proving the opposite. The suspicion remains that beneath the rhetoric of revolution, another war, quite separate from a revolutionary war, is also being waged, and the forces of revolution in the world are as divided by this concealed war as the civilized powers who would restrain them. It is as if one war goes on between the privileged and the oppressed to determine how the productive wealth of civilization will be divided; the other war, the seed contained within this first war, derives from a notion that the wealth of civilization is not wealth but a corporate productive poisoning of the wellsprings, avatars, and conduits of nature; the power of civilization is therefore equal to the destruction of life itself. It is, of course, a perspective open to the wealthy as well as to the poor—not every mill owner who kills the fish in his local rivers with the wastes from his factory is opposed to protecting our wilderness preserve, not at all, some even serve on the State Conservation Committee. And our First Lady would try to keep billboards from defacing those new highways which amputate the ecology through which they pass. Of course, her husband helped to build those highways. But then the rich, unless altogether elegant, are inevitably comic. It is in the worldwide militancy of the underprivileged, undernourished, and exploited that the potential horror of this future war (concealed beneath the present war) will make itself most evident. For the armies of the impoverished, unknown to themselves, are already divided. Once victorious over the wealthy West—if ever!—they could only have a new war. It would take place between those forces on their side who are programmatic, scientific, more or less socialist, and near maniac in their desire to bring technological culture at the fastest possible rate into every backward land, and those more traditional and/or primitive forces in the revolution of the Third World who reject not only the exploitation of the Western world but reject the West as well, in toto, as a philosophy, a culture, a technique, as a way indeed of even attempting to solve the problems of man himself.
Of these colonial forces, black, brown and yellow, which look to overthrow the economic and social tyrannies of the white man, there is no force in Africa, Asia, or Latin America which we need think of as being any more essentially colonial in stance than the American Negro. Consider these remarks in The Wretched of the Earth about the situation of colonials:
“The colonial world is a world cut in two. The dividing line, the frontiers are shown by barracks and police stations.” (Of this, it may be said that Harlem is as separate from New York as East Berlin from West Berlin.)
“… if, in fact, my life is worth as much as the settler’s, his glance no longer shrivels me up nor freezes me, and his voice no longer turns me into stone. I am no longer on tenterhooks in his presence; in fact, I don’t give a damn for him. Not only does his presence no longer trouble me, but I am already preparing such efficient ambushes for him that soon there will be no way out but that of flight.” (Now, whites flee the subways in New York.)
“… there is no colonial power today which is capable of adopting the only form of contest which has a chance of succeeding, namely, the prolonged establishment of large forces of occupation.” (How many divisions of paratroops would it take to occupy Chicago’s South Side?)
The American Negro is of course not synonymous with Black Power. For every Black militant, there are ten Negroes who live quietly beside him in the slums, resigned for the most part to the lessons, the action, and the treadmill of the slums. As many again have chosen to integrate. They live now like Negroid Whites in mixed neighborhoods, suburbs, factories, obtaining their partial peace within the white dream. But no American Negro is contemptuous of Black Power. Like the accusing finger in the dream, it is the rarest nerve in their head, the frightening pulse in their heart, equal in emotional weight to that passion which many a noble nun sought to conquer on a cold stone floor. Black Power obviously derives from a heritage of anger which makes the American Negro one man finally with the African, the Algerian, and even the Vietcong—he would become schizophrenic if he tried to suppress his fury over the mutilations of the past.
The confrontation of Black Power with American life gives us then not only an opportunity to comprehend some of the forces and some of the style of that war now smoldering between the global rich and the global poor, between the culture of the past and the intuitions of the future, but—since Black Power has more intimate, everyday knowledge of what it is like to live in an advanced technological society than any other guerrilla force on earth—the division of attitudes within Black Power has more to tell us about the shape of future wars and evolutions than any other militant force in the world. Technological man in his terminal diseases, dying of air he can no longer breathe, of packaged food he can just about digest, of plastic clothing his skin can hardly bear, and of static before which his spirit has near expired, stands at one end of revolutionary ambition—at the other is an inchoate glimpse of a world now visited only by the primitive and the drug-ridd
en, a world where technology shatters before magic and electronic communication is surpassed by the psychic telegraphy of animal mood.
Most of the literature of Black Power is interested entirely, or so it would seem, in immediate political objectives of the most concrete sort. Back in 1923, Marcus Garvey, father of the Back-to-Africa movement, might have written, “When Europe was inhabited by a race of cannibals, a race of savages, naked men, heathens and pagans, Africa was peopled with a race of cultured black men, who were masters in art, science and literature, men who were cultured and refined, men who, it was said, were like the gods,” but the present leaders of Black Power are concerned with political mandate and economic clout right here. Floyd McKissick of CORE: “The Black Power Movement seeks to win power in a half dozen ways. These are:
“1. The growth of Black political power.
“2. The building of Black economic power.
“3. The improvement of the self-image of Black people.
“4. The development of Black leadership.
“5. The attainment of Federal law enforcement.
“6. The mobilization of Black consumer power.”
These demands present nothing exceptional. On their face, they are not so different from manifestos by the NAACP or planks by the Democratic Party. A debater with the skill of William F. Buckley or Richard Nixon could stay afloat for hours on the lifesaving claim that there is nothing in these six points antithetical to conservatives. Indeed, there is not. Not on the face. For example, here is Adam Clayton Powell, a politician most respected by Black Power militants, on some of these points. Political power: “Where we are 20 percent of the jobs, judgeships, commissionerships, and all political appointments.” Economic power: “Rather than a race primarily of consumers and stock boys, we must become a race of producers and stockbrokers.” Leadership: “Black communities … must neither tolerate nor accept outside leadership—black or white.” Federal law enforcement: “The battle against segregation in America’s public school systems must become a national effort, instead of the present regional skirmish that now exists.” Even consumer protest groups to stand watch on the quality of goods sold in a slum neighborhood are hardly revolutionary, more an implementation of good conservative buying practices. Consumers Digest is not yet at the barricades.
Indeed, which American institution of power is ready to argue with these six points? They are so rational! The power of the technological society is shared by the corporations, the military, the mass media, the trade unions, and the government. It is to the interest of each to have a society which is rational, even as a machine is rational. When a machine breaks down, the cause can be discovered; in fact, the cause must be capable of being discovered or we are not dealing with a machine. So the pleasure of working with machines is that malfunctions are correctable; satisfaction is guaranteed by the application of work, knowledge and reason. Hence, any race problem is anathema to power groups in the technological society, because the subject of race is irrational. At the very least, race problems seem to have the property of repelling reason. Still, the tendency of modern society to shape men for function in society like parts of a machine grows more powerful all the time. So we have the paradox of a conservative capitalistic democracy, profoundly entrenched in racial prejudice (and hitherto profoundly attracted to racial exploitation), now transformed into the most developed technological society in the world. The old prejudices of the men who wield power have become therefore inefficient before the needs of the social machine—so inefficient, in fact, that prejudiced as many of them are, they consider it a measure of their responsibility to shed prejudice. (We must by now move outside the center of power before we can even find Gen. Curtis LeMay.)
So the question may well be posed: If the demands formally presented by Black Power advocates like McKissick and Powell are thus rational, and indeed finally fit the requirements of the technological society, why then does Black Power inspire so much fear, distrust, terror, horror, and even outright revulsion among the best liberal descendants of the beautiful old Eleanor Roosevelt bag and portmanteau? And the answer is that an intellectual shell game has been played up to here. We have not covered McKissick’s six points, only five. The sixth (point number three) was “The improvement of the self-image of Black people.” It is here that sheer Black hell busts loose. A technological society can deal comfortably with people who are mature, integrated, goal-oriented, flexible, responsive, group-responsive, etc., etc.—the word we cannot leave out is “white” or white-oriented. The technological society is not able to deal with the self-image of separate peoples and races if the development of their self-image produces personalities of an explosive individuality. We do not substitute sticks of dynamite for the teeth of a gear and assume we still have an automotive transmission.
McKissick covers his third point, of course: “Negro history, art, music and other aspects of Black culture … make Black people aware of their contributions to the American heritage and to world civilization.” Powell bastes the goose with orotundities of rhetorical gravy: “We must give our children a sense of pride in being black. The glory of our past and the dignity of our present must lead the way to the power of our future.” Amen. We have been conducted around the point.
Perhaps the clue is that political Right and political Left are meaningless terms when applied conventionally to Black Power. If we are to use them at all (and it is a matter of real convenience), then we might call the more or less rational, programmatic, and recognizably political arm of Black Power, presented by McKissick and Powell, as the Right Wing, since their program can conceivably be attached to the programs of the technological society, whether Democrat or Republican. The straight-out political demands of this kind of Black Power not only can be integrated (at least on paper) into the needs of technological society, but must be, because—we would repeat—an exploited class creates disruption and therefore irrationality in a social machine; efforts to solve exploitation and disruption become mandatory for the power groups. If this last sentence sounds vaguely Marxist in cadence, the accident is near. What characterizes technological societies is that they tend to become more and more like one another. So America and the Soviet will yet have interchangeable parts, or at least be no more different than a four-door Ford from a two-door Chevrolet. It may thus be noticed that what we are calling the Right Wing of Black Power—the technological wing—is in the conventional sense interested in moving to the left. Indeed, after the Blacks attain equality—so goes the unspoken assumption—America will be able to progress toward a rational society of racial participation, etc., etc. What then is the Left Wing of Black Power? Say, let us go back to Africa, back to Garvey.
We must understand that we are replacing a dying culture, and we must be prepared to do this, and be absolutely conscious of what we are replacing it with. We are sons and daughters of the most ancient societies on this planet.… No movement shaped or contained by Western culture will ever benefit Black People. Black power must be the actual force and beauty and wisdom of Blackness … reordering the world.
—LEROI JONES
Are you ready to enter the vision of the Black Left? It is profoundly antitechnological. Jump into it all at once. Here are a few remarks by Ron Karenga:
“The fact that we are Black is our ultimate reality. We were Black before we were born.
“The white boy is engaged in the worship of technology; we must not sell our souls for money and machines. We must free ourselves culturally before we proceed politically.
“Revolution to us is the creation of an alternative … we are not here to be taught by the world, but to teach the world.”
We have left the splendid American far behind. He is a straight-punching all-out truth-sayer; he believes in speaking his mind; but if LeRoi Jones—insults, absolute rejection, and consummate bad-mouthing—is not too much for him, then Karenga will be his finish. Karenga obviously believes that in the root is the answer to where the last growth went wrong�
�so he believes in the wisdom of the blood, and blood-wisdom went out for the splendid American after reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover in sophomore year. Life is hard enough to see straight without founding your philosophy on a metaphor.
Nonetheless the mystique of Black Power remains. Any mystique which has men ready to die for it is never without political force. The Left Wing of Black Power speaks across the void to the most powerful conservative passions—for any real conservatism is founded on regard for the animal, the oak, and the field; it has instinctive detestation of science, of the creation by machine. Conservatism is a body of traditions which once served as the philosophical home of society. If the traditions are now withered in the hum of electronics; if the traditions have become almost hopelessly inadequate to meet the computed moves of the technological society; if conservatism has become the grumbling of the epicure at bad food, bad air, bad manners; if conservatism lost the future because it enjoyed the greed of its privileged position to that point where the exploited depths stirred in righteous rage; if the conservative and their traditions failed because they violated the balance of society, exploited the poor too savagely, and searched for justice not nearly enough; if finally the balance between property rights and the rights of men gave at last too much to the land and too little to the living blood, still conservatism and tradition had one last Herculean strength: they were of the marrow, they partook of primitive wisdom. The tradition had been founded on some half-remembered sense of primitive perception, and so was close to life and the sense of life. Tradition had appropriated the graceful movements with which primitive strangers and friends might meet in the depth of a mood, all animal in their awareness: lo! the stranger bows before the intense presence of the monarch or the chief, and the movement is later engraved upon a code of ceremony. So tradition was once a key to the primitive life still breathing within us, a key too large, idiosyncratic, and unmanageable for the quick shuttles of the electronic. Standing before technology, tradition began to die, and air turned to smog. But the black man, living a life on the fringe of technological society, exploited by it, poisoned by it, half-rejected by it, gulping prison air in the fluorescent nightmare of shabby garish electric ghettos, uprooted centuries ago from his native Africa, his instincts living ergo like nerves in the limbo of an amputated limb, had thereby an experience unique to modern man—he was forced to live at one and the same time in the old primitive jungle of the slums and the hygienic surrealistic landscape of the technological society. And as he began to arise from his exploitation, he discovered that the culture which had saved him owed more to the wit and telepathy of the jungle than the value of programs of the West. His dance had taught him more than writs and torts, his music was sweeter than Shakespeare or Bach (since music had never been a luxury to him but a need), prison had given him a culture deeper than libraries in the grove, and violence had produced an economy of personal relations as negotiable as money. The American Black had survived—of all the peoples of the Western world, he was the only one in the near seven decades of the twentieth century to have undergone the cruel weeding of real survival. So it was possible his manhood had improved while the manhood of others was being leached. He had at any rate a vision. It was that he was black, beautiful, and secretly superior—he had therefore the potentiality to conceive and create a new culture (perchance a new civilization), richer, wiser, deeper, more beautiful and profound than any he had seen. (And conceivably more demanding, more torrential, more tyrannical.) But he would not know until he had power for himself. He would not know if he could provide a wiser science, subtler schooling, deeper medicine, richer victual, and deeper view of creation until he had the power. So while some (the ones the Blacks called Negroes) looked to integrate into the supersuburbs of technologyland (and find, was their hope, a little peace for the kids), so others dreamed of a future world which their primitive lore and sophisticated attainments might now bring. And because they were proud and loved their vision, they were warriors as well, and had a mystique which saw the cooking of food as good or bad for the soul. And taste gave the hint. That was the Left of Black Power, a movement as mysterious, dedicated, instinctive, and conceivably bewitched as a gathering of Templars for the next Crusade. Soon their public fury might fall upon the fact that civilization was a trap, and therefore their wrath might be double, for they had been employed to build civilization, had received none of its gains, and yet, being allowed to enter now, now, this late, could be doomed with the rest. What a thought!
Mind of an Outlaw Page 28