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Truth and Revolution. Michael Staudenmaier
Читать онлайн.Название Truth and Revolution
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781849350983
Автор произведения Michael Staudenmaier
Издательство Ingram
As for the other end of the arc of US history, both its publication date of 1935 and its stated topic prevented Black Reconstruction from addressing the inspiring trajectory of the black freedom movement in the period extending from the New Deal through the post-war era. The bridge between Du Bois’s psychological wage and the white skin privilege analysis of the late sixties was precisely the civil rights movement, and in particular the evolution of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. The origins of the civil rights movement lay in the cross-pollination between long-standing black demands for freedom and the strategic orientation toward direct action that had come to prominence through the CIO organizing drives of the thirties and forties. The exigencies of World War Two had made it clear that the ruling class commitment to white supremacy could at least be modified if sufficient pressure was brought to bear. For instance, A. Phillip Randolph’s March on Washington Movement used the threat of a major demonstration by African Americans and organized labor to force the US government to prohibit racial discrimination in both military and civilian spheres of the defense industry.198 Beginning in the mid-fifties, the civil rights movement attempted to replace the external pressures of war with the internal one of direct action. From the beginning, the movement was black-led, but the commitment to the goal of ending racial segregation ensured an integrated movement. Cofounder Ella Baker brought Du Bois’s influence into SNCC, which developed as a multiracial organization of young radicals so devoted to direct action that an arrest record quickly became a badge of honor.199 As the sixties progressed, however, the interaction between predominantly southern blacks and largely northern whites led to a growing awareness of the relative privileges experienced by the white students: those from the North could leave the struggle whenever they chose simply by returning home, but even those from the South received less harsh treatment from the white power structure. None of this made white activists necessarily less committed to the cause, but eventually the black leadership of SNCC came to a realization: if freedom for black people was ever to be achieved, two parallel struggles were needed, one in which blacks fought for their liberation, and another in which progressive whites struggled with other white people in order to convince them to support black liberation.200
Large numbers of white radicals, especially those centered around SDS, took this perspective seriously, and began to act on it with little, if any, conscious awareness of Du Bois’s concept of the psychological wage or Allen’s notion of white skin privilege. At the same time, the antiwar movement provided another resonant theme for radicals of the late sixties, who watched anti-imperialist movements develop throughout the third world, most famously in Vietnam and Cuba. For many, white supremacy could be viewed as the domestic manifestation of imperialist capitalism. In this context, white skin privileges were one aspect of a broader oppression of the global majority of humanity. Further, the development of youth culture (both pop- and counter-) over the course of the fifties and sixties provided another pillar for the antiracist sentiments of the white new left. As the historian Paul Buhle notes,
Subjectively, the role of Black culture in the teenage lives of the future New Left prepared the way. Only Communist or very racist parents, it is safe to say, perceived the breadth of this influence from sports to music to sexual fantasy.… To affirm solidarity with Blacks in any political sense was a minority act; but the sympathy towards Black culture reached further among millions of ordinary teenagers than any previously Left-orchestrated effort could have envisioned.201
The convergence of specifically North American experiences—both cultural and political—and a global assessment of revolutionary momentum contributed to the openness shown by many white radicals to some form of the white skin privilege analysis as the sixties progressed.
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