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insensitivity, guilt, and feear of their masters. What I am concerned to emphaize here is that these colonies are controlled politically from the outside. Ultimate policy-making power lies in the hands of aliens who have their own representatives, many of them black, on the spot with power to see that the will of the white center is obeyed in the black circumference. We must note also that the inhabitants of the center and the inhabitants of the circumference do not deal with each other directly. Black people and white people, as Gunnar Myrdal noted, deal with each other, like two foreign countries, "through the medium of plenipotentiaries."

I say this with bluntness to emphasize the fact that when we talk about black politics we are not talking about ordinary politics. And we are not talking about ordinary politics because the American political system has not created a single social community in which the reciprocal rules of politics could apply.

Conventional politics cannot solve this problem, because conventional political politics is a part of the problem.

It is a part of the problem in the sense that the political system is the major bulwark of racism in America.

It is a part of the problem in the sense that the political system is structured to repel fundamental social and economic change.

We hear a great deal about the deficiencies, real or imagined, of certain black leaders, but not enoug attention, it seems to me, is paid to the framewwork within which they operate. The framework prevents radical growth and innovation -- and it was designed to prevent radical growth and innovation.

What we have to deal with here is what Arthur Schlesigner, Jr., called the parades of power, the fact that power within the system is