SUMMER 1999 - ISSUE NUMBER 48

Going Beyond Black andWhite

Episcopal Diocese of Michigan
Detroit, September 21, 1998

Some years ago I attended a series of workshops led by Jim Perkinson in a small attic room at the Church of the Messiah in which he shared what his Biblical studies had taught him about Jesus' role as the leader of a social movement of the poor and oppressed against an exploiting elite. I have always been grateful to Jim for enriching my understanding of Christianity through these workshops and I was therefore glad to accept John Hooper's invitation to join in this celebration of his receipt of a Ph.D. in Theology from the University of Chicago by responding to his presentation on "Getting to the Core of Racism: Privilege, Power and Possibility at the Millennium."

I don't know how John expected me to respond. But because my own experience has taught me that real education in social struggle only begins after you get your Ph.D., I have decided that I owe it to Jim to explain how my approach to racism, based on many years of life and struggle in the African American community, differs significantly from his.

This difference comes through most clearly in our contrasting views of James Forman's 1969 Black Manifesto which demanded a half billion dollars in reparations from white churches for black projects. According to Jim, Forman's striding down the aisle and interrupting the May 4, 1969 Sunday Service at Riverside Church with his Manifesto was "the seminal moment of the Civil Rights struggle," because it brought "the question home to its point of origin" and framed it "in the terms in which it has always mattered … the issue of economic indebtedness and return on investment."

By contrast, I was appalled by Forman's Black Manifesto. To me it signalled the beginning of the end of the black movement precisely because it framed the struggle against racism in these economic terms. I was present when Forman presented his demands to a caucus at the National Black Economic Development Conference at Wayne State University and have described the scene in my autobiography, Living for Change.

When the demand for a half billion dollars was projected to the fifty or more people gathered in a relatively small room, the audience gasped, eyes popped, and someone said, '$15 a Nigger.' I was horrified &emdash; into my mind popped the lines from 'The White Man's Heaven is the Black Man's Hell,' that called putting a price on a man's body 'the world's most grievous sin.'

The main reason why Blacks in this country have been pivotal to the struggle to humanize our society is because they never forgot that their oppression had been rooted in a system which was fundamentally corrupt because it elevated economic values over human values. It was precisely because the struggle for civil rights in the 1960s framed the struggle against racism in human and not economic terms, that it burgeoned into a wide-ranging movement with the potential to transform American society. Thus, even though the civil rights movement was against segregation, it was not for integration into the values and institutions of this society. In the early days of the movement, black people used to say, "Who would want to be integrated into a burning house!" It was only as the struggle gained momentum that the economic and opportunistic values of the system began to penetrate and corrupt the movement. Instead of struggling to transform the society, blacks began to covet a piece of the economic and political action.

This contradiction came to a head in the rebellions which began to erupt in northern cities in the middle 1960s. On the one hand, the young people who rose up in rebellion in Watts, Newark, Detroit and 100 cities across the nation were challenging the values of a racist society which was using Hi-Tech to destroy a small nation in Southeast Asia and to make them expendable at home. On the other, they were looting and carting away cartons of TVs, guns and liquor as if freedom could be measured in consumer goods.

This contradiction and this street force, now called the underclass, have been growing since the 1960s. It achieved organized form in the Black Panther Party which struggled valiantly to develop a revolutionary solution. It exploded again in southcentral Los Angeles in the spring of 1992 over the Rodney King verdict.

Like most of us who lived through the rebellions, Martin Luther King was deeply troubled by this contradiction and in the last two years of his life struggled to develop a vision of a new kind of movement to resolve it. As a result, he realized that it was no longer sufficient to struggle only against racism. What we now need, he said, was a non-violent revolution which would combine a revolution in values, against what he called the "giant triplets" of racism, materialism and militarism, with a revolution against the structures that doom millions to poverty and powerlessness. Recognizing the need to go beyond technological progress ("we have guided missiles and misguided men" ), he struggled to envision a system that would go beyond both capitalism (which he said was too "I-centered, too individualistic, too thing-oriented") and communism (which was "too collective, too statist"). Recognizing also that young blacks only made a historic social contribution when they "threw off their middle class values and put careers and wealth in a secondary role," he explored strategies that would involve young people in "direct self-transforming and structure-transforming" actions in "our dying cities."

Towards the end of his life King was not talking about integration &emdash; let alone reparations. No longer willing to separate out the struggle against racism from the struggle against materialism and militarism, he was talking about transformation, the transformation both in structures and in values that all of us in this society, including African Americans, increasingly need to undergo. King was killed before he could develop and implement his vision, but today, thirty years later, we should be building on his projections rather than on Forman's Black Manifesto.

I also have serious questions about Jim's conclusion. In the last paragraph of the draft which he sent me, he recommends that "at this millennial moment in North American history," we should "learn to follow a Jesus who, as surely as he was Jewish in first century Palestine, is black in contemporary North America." Implicit in that recommendation is a black-white dynamic that has outlived its usefulness but that persists in many concerned individuals of Jim's generation, black and white, whose identities have been shaped by the struggles of the 1960s. That dynamic, I am convinced, is now intrinsically unhealthy because it:

• involves an uncritical acceptance of black male leadership by whites, especially white males, on the one hand, and on the other, an uncritical assumption by blacks, especially black males, that they are the vanguard of the American revolution.

• glosses over the many conflicting tendencies in black leadership which are multiplying along with the growing gulf between the black middle class and the black underclass.

• reinforces some of the major weaknesses of most black leaders, especially the resistance to criticism and self-criticism and the continuing use of disabling myths on the grounds that they are needed by masses who have been cruelly oppressed by white racism.1

• blinds us to the tremendous changes that have taken place since the 1960s, changes that have created new contradictions and new complexities, challenging us to make a tremendous leap in our concepts of struggle and possibilities and in the words of Angela Davis, to "rethink and reshape the contours of our political activism."2

A lot of water has flowed under the bridge in the last thirty years.

In the first place, even though the movement of the 1960s did not end racism, it integrated blacks into the values of the system as they had never been before.

Second, since the 1960s there has been a tremendous influx of Latinos, Asians and people from the Middle East so that it is widely estimated that by the middle of the next century, Euro-Americans and African Americans will be among the many minorities that make up the American majority.

Third, the devastation of our cities and our communities by global capitalism has increased the hopelessness and desperation of young people in our inner cities but it is also giving rise to a new multi-cultural grassroots movement to rebuild our communities and our cities from the ground up. As a result, the time has come for us to make a paradigm shift, i.e., to go beyond thinking and talking in terms of the black/white struggle and to explore how we can empower young people in our cities by engaging them in this new movement.

The best example of what I mean is this document which presents the 17 Principles of Environmental Justice adopted at the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit in October 1991 by a gathering of African Americans, Native Americans, Latinos and Asian Americans. It is a multicultural, multinational Manifesto which establishes the foundation for a new movement, based on a new more holistic concept of citizenship, to take us into the 21st century.

For example, Principle No. 3 mandates the right to ethical, balanced and responsible uses of land and renewable resources in the interest of a sustainable planet for humans and other living beings."

Principle No. 7 "demands the right to participate as equal partners at every level of decision-making including needs assessment, planning, implementation, enforcement and evaluation."

Principle No: 14 "opposes the destructive operations of multinational corporations."

Principle No. 17 "requires that we, as individuals, make personal and consumer choices to consume as little of Mother Earth's resources and to produce as little waste as possible, and make the conscious decision to challenge and reprioritize our life-styles to insure the health of the natural world for present and future generations.

I would like to conclude with a story from the Black Radical Congress told me by General Baker, one of the founders of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. As some of you may have heard, the highlight of this Congress, which convened in Chicago in June, was the intergenerational dialogue pairing activists from the 1960s, including General, Kathleen Cleaver, Barbara Smith, Ahmad Rahmann and Angela Davis, with student activists of today. At the end of his dialogue, General asked the young woman he was interviewing what message she could give him to take back to his five children and eight grandchildren. Her reply was that "Anger will get you only so far; beyond that you have to depend on Love."

I haven't been able to get out of my mind these words from a young woman who has grown up surrounded by the just anger of her peers, the anger which exploded in the rebellions of the 1960s and has continued to fester and manifest itself in the violence of young people against themselves and others. This anger is not going to be assuaged by reparations. Or, as Audre Lorde put it, you cannot dismantle the house of the master with the tools of the master. Our challenge is to build a movement based on "self-transforming and structure-transforming" activities that foster their love for themselves, for their communities and for Mother Earth by giving them opportunities to make a difference.

For example, we can organize and support programs like Detroit Summer, "a multicultural intergenerational youth program/movement to rebuild, redefine and respirit Detroit from the ground up," which recently completed its seventh season. Or, as the Michigan Citizen advocates in this week's editorial, we can begin to address the crisis in our schools and in our cities by making community-building activities a natural and normal part of the school curriculum. Thus, "classrooms from K-12 could take responsibility for planting community gardens, maintaining neighborhood streets, rehabbing houses, recycling waste, creating healthier school lunches, etc. Including these activities in the curriculum would give every child a stake in our communities and our cities. It would give children an incentive to study and an opportunity to learn the basics in a context that matters. At the same time, by making use of youthful energies, it would go a long way towards reversing the physical deterioration of our neighborhoods and establishing positive relations between young people and adults."

These are the kinds of activities we need to be initiating and supporting now to bring to our communities the Hope and Love needed to replace the sense of hopelessness, helplessness and desperation that has been mounting for the last thirty years. Through engaging our children in activities of this kind we can begin to transform ourselves and our cities and to create the new, more holistic concept of citizenship that we urgently need as we move towards the 21st century.

1. For a critical look at these weaknesses I recommend Joe Wood's Malcolm X: in Our Own Image (St. Martins Press, 1992), especially the essays criticizing Malcolm's sexism by Angela Davis and Patricia Hill Collins and an insightful analysis by Marion Riggs of why young blacks identify with Malcolm &emdash; because he is the quintessential icon of black rage" and of "death as the inevitable price one gives to be free."

2 "Meditations on the Legacy of Malcolm X" in Malcolm X: in Our Own Image, ed. Joe Wood, p. 46.

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