A Negro participant in a House seminar on civil rights surprised the whites at one session last spring by announcing suddenly, "The trouble with you people working in the movement is that you can't hate whites the way a Negro can." What had been a free-wheeling, anecdotal discussion of the ethics of arbitrary reprisals for lynchings lapsed into silence.
The dozen white students stopped to consider the statement. Finally one with long experience in civil rights groups looked up and said that it was not true. He had hated whites at times himself, he said. The Negro was not impressed; "at times," he echoed. "You see, it isn't automatic."
Soon others spoke, suggesting that a capacity for hatred should be no prerequisite to service in the movement. But the Negro was not convinced--and neither, to a certain extent, were the whites.
The Negro had played his trump card: he had reminded this group of white liberals that he is black, and has had experiences they can never know without changing their color. There was nothing the whites could say. For most Harvard undergraduates argue from emotion: they base their judgments about things moral and political on their own feelings--and by asserting his emotional uniqueness, the Negro had deprived the whites of any grounds for refutation.
Interviews conducted last spring indicate that many Harvard Negroes are "black nationalists." They are concerned with the development of racial pride and of a self-conscious cultural tradition among Negroes the world over--often more than with the integration of Mississippi's public schools or the success of a rent strike in Chicago. Few advocate physical separation from white society, as do the Black Muslims, but few find the idea totally ridiculous. And many will tell you that the former Muslim, Malcolm X, is "a fine, brilliant man."
To a certain extent such sentiments result from impatience with the rate of social change in America. Harvard Negroes were saying quite blunty last spring that they were "losing the battle for civil rights," or at least that the movement had "reached an impasse." And many regard the "Negro Revolution, which is another name for the spread of nationalism in its milder forms, as a necessary precursor to any real victory in the fight for equality.
But the nationalism popular at Harvard has its most significant roots in emotional needs--and often these are needs produced by the Harvard environment itself. "Many students who accept black nationalism," said Archie C. Epps, teaching fellow in Middle Eastern Studies, "do so because of their experience at Ivy League schools. They go to the same classes with you, they dress the same. But Negroes feel they cannot become part of the life at Harvard on the weekends or even at night. Some of them don't think they can have friends here. Maybe they go down to Elsie's and get a roast beef special--something a Negro has never heard of--but that's all."
"Black is Good"
Nationalism puts an end to the traditional dilemma of the Ivy League Negro, caught between a color he cannot live down and a white culture he cannot become a part of. As one junior expressel it, "A man realizes that he's black and that's good. It's good to be black; black is good. He realizes that he has been denied things because he is black."
"What you are fighting at Harvard," said another Negro student, "is liberal paternalism. You get admitted to the college because you are a Negro. You get a scholarship because you are a Negro. Everyone wants to be nice to you. Run for class marshal--no one can afford to vote against you."
Escape from this "debilitating" paternalism and from the futile struggle for total acceptance involves separation, self-assertion, sometimes arrogance. Negroes who had been good friends in prep school consequently often become aloof. Those who are particularly active in civil rights groups sometimes refuse to discuss that subject in the dining room. Perhaps the best example was the formation in 1963 of the Association of African and Afro-American Students, with its "by-invitation-only" membership clause.
None of these actions is specifically nationalistic, and most Harvard Negroes find it hard to follow through completely, to reject acceptance by whites. As one student observed "to go along with Malcolm is to give up your dreams of getting into the mainstream of American life." But though few embrace black nationalism as a doctrine, many accept it as a useful concept, an intellectual focus for their feelings.
The thinking of many Negroes who are active in civil rights reflects this interest in, or emotional response to, nationalism. According to one, Negroes must develop an ethnic identity of their own, such as the Jews, Irish, and Italians had when they arrived in this country, before they became full-fledged Americans. He wants Negroes to withdraw as much as possible from white society, and thereby develop a degree of self-confidence and self-as-secretiveness that is impossible within the present framework.
American Negroes will then have the choice, he says, of reentering American society or withdrawing from it--to one section of the country, to certain parts of each city, or to Africa. "We don't necessarily want to be part of American society; we just don't want to be systematically excluded."
Basically a Definition
