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Julian Bond
As we pass by the 1970 elections, black Americans feel intense confusion about the future of democracy and our future in America.
Existing institutions are failing to respond to the realities of our lives. The social vlaues implicit in governmental decisions are not in accord with the needs strongly felt by black people.
We are becoming conditioned to realize that neither talk nor deeds are responsive to our communities. Increasingly it appears we are first in war, last in peace, and seldom in the hearts of our countrymen.
Once cannot discuss what life will be like in the seventies without discussing what appears to be the most prevalent factors in American life: racism and war.
These factors are very much evident at the present time in the realities of Nixon and Agnew; twins of confusion and chaos, who have set up shop in Washington. One week leaves the shop to go abroad
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crusing in the Mediterranean espousing peace, while observing the seventh fleet's gun displays. At the same time the other roams the countryside enflaming an already extremely polarized homeland with the most pernicious kind of racist, neofascist rhetoric.
While one soft talk and barely recognizes the public existence of the other, the hydra_headed twins operate from the same nest.
Their presence is a reflection of a conscience either no longer caring or disappeared, a conscience that jumped into action after Selma and Birmingham, but quivered, frightened into inaction, when Watts and Newark and Detroit occurred. It began vanishing when Northern black people decided that the right to freedom and liberty meant them too, and it began when blacks in South Chicago and the Hough District in Cleveland and Watts in Los Angeles decided that the right to vote or sit at lunch counters or to peacefully petition the government for a redress of grievances meant nothing to a people who
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were living in a twentieth century version of a colony, a social, educational and economic colony that was as effectively administered and controlled from outside as was the American colony in 1776, or the Vietnamese colony before the Vietnamese people decided they could rule themselves better than could any Frenchman or Japanese or Americans, for that matter.
This colony has all the hallmarks of the classic colony: powerlessness, dependence upon the mother coutnry for goods and services, subconstitutional status. It is a colony reflecting the centuries-old existence of the twin societies, separate but unequal, that we are warned may occur if present day American society doesn't shape up.
Ours is a euphemistic, hypocritical society, and consequently little or nothing is done in its own name. Schools are segregated, not to keep blacks separate but to "preserve the neighborhood school." Police are given and exercise excessive power in the ghetto not because
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Blacks must be controlled at all costs but to stop "crime in the streets". For every conceivable act to justify this 1984 thinking, there exists a euphemism to disguise it.
Racism was officially discovered by the former governor of Illinois, Otto Kerner, and the commission he headed in 1968. The startling "discovery" of racism was in keeping with a long tradition in American history begun in 1492 when Christopher Columbus "discovered America, comparable to thinking of Sitting Bull as having discovered Washington. In view of the fact that the nation had successfully ignored, discredited and condemned those blacks (and the very few whites) who had previously labeled the United States racist, the seriousness with which the essentially white, ruling class Kerner Commission's charges were taken was itself an interesting relfection of racism. Social problems are not taken seriously in the United States until sanctified by that segment of the system which creates.
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them in the first place.
Unfortuntely, the unwillingness and inability to define or analyze the problem it correctly identifies makes such commissions mystifying and inherently unable to froce implementation.
For the record it is necessary to deal briefly here with the myth of "negro progress". Despite the highly visible advancement of some black people in recent years, it must be understood that the objective situation of most blacks, relative to whites, has remained unchanged or deteriorated. Infant and maternal death rates for black infants and mothers have deteriorated in urban areas not only relative to white death rates but also relative to the black rates of 1940's, 50's, and early '60's.
Blac unemployment as a percentage of all unemployment is rising, particularly for black youth. Although poverty is being reduced overall, black poverty as an incidence of all poverty has risen steadily since 1959.