( This is the second part of a two-part feature )

WE can only learn through experience. We only really know what we have seen and heard and felt. I am not black, and therefore I cannot explain what it is like to feel the spiked heel of racism grinding into your stomach.

Imagination is, however, a kind of ersatz experience. When you see a starving child, you share his suffering through empathetic identification, through imagination. If someone who has seen a starving child is able to relay the sensory image of his perception, he can stimulate your imagination, to a lesser degree, to understand the child's suffering. If your learning is confined to reading non-empathetic accounts of the effects of starvation on, say, a million people, you are little better off than when you started. To understand, you have to translate the "facts" into examples from your former experience.

When the matter is starvation, we can all imagine the feeling to some extent, for all of us have gone without a day's meals at one time. To go without food for a week or a month is certainly different, but we can imagine. We can also imagine the feeling of burning napalm glued to your body, because we have all burned our fingers on a stove. The more able your imagination, the more able you are to extrapolate from a modest experience to an intensive one, the more suffering you can understand.

But when you have no experience to relate to someone else's, you are unable to understand it. Again, I am not black. I have not the words, but more than that, I have not the experience to explain what it is like to walk down the street in a white city, with a black face. I have no idea what it would be like to know that my grandfather was a slave. I do not know what it is like to have learned that I am here by the grace of a white God, because I am of a race of savages.

I have a sense that it would be unpleasant, but that is all that I have. I have not lived in a ghetto, so I do not even have the sensory basis for understanding. I have not talked to enough black people who have felt the enforced burden of inferiority.

ALL THAT I can relate to is a kind of oppression that could happen to me. I can imagine what it is like for a white man to starve. Even then I am unable to comprehend the overwhelming extent to which black people are forced into the worst jobs, the extent to which they are beaten and murdered by the police, the extent to which they have the creativity stomp-out of them. I can read the Black Panther every week, but all I can grasp each week is another eviction, or another Panther office destroyed. I could multiply the number of times each of those incidents takes place in this country each week, by ten or a hundred or a thousand. But multilying does not intensify.

The Panthers explain that black people in this country are oppressed as a colonial nation-in Frantz Fanon's sense. That oppression is both economic and psychological, and the case is obvious. But white Americans cannot feel what it is like to live in a colony, either in Vietnam or Harlem, because they have never experienced it.

I would like to stop talking about racism and call out for everyone to pick up a gun and march into the New Haven jail, into the New York jail, and into every jail where a black man is held to have violated laws that he never consented to, and help to free them to organize and lead their own lives. But I cannot call out, because there are not yet enough of us.

Instead, we will march from Post Office Square today at 3 p.m. to the Berkeley Police Station. We will march because we understand that the state will not free Bobby Scale, that it will continue to bind and gag and starve black people in this country until enough people decide that they are willing to do anything to stop it. But we will also march because we understand that, in a real sense, we do not yet know about racism, and that only by fighting it can we learn what it is that we are fighting.

I sat on the grass with 5000 other people two summers ago at the Peace and Freedom Southern California convention in a Los Angeles park. I watched Eldridge walk to the small platform escorted by half a dozen uniformed Panthers. As he began to speak, I looked around and saw about twenty other Panthers spread through the crowd, facing the seated audience, and another six with walkie-talkies on the small hillside next to the grass. Malcolm X was gone and they weren't going to lose Eldridge.

I was scared. I was afraid that one uniform was as bad as another and that black people would begin to kill white people. As I listened to Eldridge, I had to wrestle with what I meant by "civil rights." At the end of that long afternoon, I marked "Cleaver" on my ballot and handed it in. I had begun to understand that black people have a much better judgement about how to organize other black people than I did. If black people thought that they needed to defend themselves with guns, then I would have to respect that. I realized that I had liked Dick Gregory because he made me feel comfortable. I had like his tactic of boycotting record and cigarette companies until the war ended. But I liked it because it was respectable, not because I thought that it would work. I knew that I would have to overcome that.

So the movement does not claim to know everything about racism and does not want simply to get enough people together to change it. We can begin to understand our own racism only by pushing ourselves until we see the effect of our own racism on our lives. Banks burned down, ROTC buildings exploded and court houses were destroyed because five white radicals were sent to jail for five years. But when Bobby Scale was sentenced to four years for contempt, no one did a thing. Why?

Because the movement is still fighting its own racism. Because we can listen to Eldridge talk about a race war and then go home and go to sleep.

We learn through experience. I am not a woman, and therefore I can only imagine what women feel in America. I can only imagine what it must be like to walk down a never-ending street lined on both sides with men who judge how well I would fulfill their sexual desires. I do not know what it is like for a working class woman who graduates from high school and is forced to sell herself to a man, sell herself into slavery in order to have any kind of existence-social or economic.