SEALE: What you have to do to end white racism is to civilize white America. You have to educate the masses of white America to the trick bag that the power structure's putting them into. There was a time in history when there was a Populist and a Socialist movement, when blacks and whites were both functioning together. The only thing that divided the blacks and the whites were the oligarchy rulers because the blacks and the whites were beginning to work together.

TERRY: Considering the growing polarization of racial attitudes, what lines of communication can exist between blacks and whites? What can or should they say to each other?

BOND: People are not going to attempt to set things right until they know what's wrong. Information about black people and the condition of minorities is public knowledge in this country. But there are millions of people who do not know it. And it's frightening they don't. The government, which is supposed to be the problem-solving agency, never solves a problem unless it's pushed. And it's not going to be pushed by small groups.

I think it's a mistake for blacks to exclude whites from working with them. I don't think for a moment that white people ought to resume their former roles in the black movement, that of being the leader, if not the strategist or the planner.

An alliance should be made with low-and-low-middle-income whites. But it will never be made as long as they are hostile, and as long as they don't see their economic interest tied up with the interest of oppressed black people.

JACKSON: Economically and politically, we suffer from a man-boy relationship because we're dependent upon whites. We're saying that the relationships for the future have to be man-man relationships, based upon our mutual need for each other. We must have independence, then interdependence. Blacks must first realize that we are needed. Many blacks who feel impotent don't feel that they can deal with whites, not because they are so corrupt, but because some of us deep down feel so inferior we will not compete. Aeronautics, politics, physics, and history may be dominated by whites, but these are not white subjects. These are universal sciences first started by black men.

YOUNG: I think this is a very healthy period. For a long while, black and white people were making noises to each other, but they weren't communicating. They were smiling and talking. This is not communication. I think, for the first time, there's candidness and honesty, and I think that's healthy. I think the other thing that's healthy is no white person today can be unaware of the existence of black people. I think we've been more, as a people, victims of being ignored than even being oppressed, that for the most part we were anonymous and invisible. Faceless. We were things, and object. People didn't even care enough to hate us. We just didn't count.

The only thing that bothers me about polarization is when it becomes based purely on race. I think you're always going to have polarization. My hope is that we polarize in terms of the decent versus the indecent Americans, the selfish versus the generous, the bad versus the good, the caring people versus the greedy people.

But I think this view of the great struggle between the poor and the rich, the bourgeois and the proletariat, is today totally inaccurate. I think as we seek allies and friends, we have to look up and down the whole economic ladder, the whole spectrum, as we look for enemies and friends, we will be able to identify people who are in the upper strata, in business, in the academic world, in some cases, the religious community, who are even more committed than some people in the lower strata.

SEALE: I don't think you can draw the line in terms of black-white. It's not a race struggle. It is a class struggle, and the problem is that when we talk about the lower-class masses of the people, black people are at the bottom of the lower class, and what black people have to do is be a guiding force, to point out the economic conditions that are caused by the small minority ruling class which happens to be predominantly white.

There's a lot to be said between a white revolutionary and a black revolutionary. There's a lot to be said between a white, a black, a brown, a blue, a red, a green, or a polka-dot revolutionary, because the revolutionary is opposed to the ruling class who's the one who really maintains the warmongering, the one who really maintains the brutality and murder.

TERRY: What value is there in the notions of black nationalism or black separatism?

BOND: The physical separatists who speak of a separate state or country will have difficulty with the black community because there is only vaguely spelled out a program going from where they are now to where they want to be. They have not struck an alliance with the other separatist groups in the country. The Chicanos who want a separate state for themselves in the Southwest. The American Indians who want a separate state for themselves in the West. Until the separatists recognize that there are other separatists who really have a prior claim on this land, their programs aren't going to advance.

There are other separatists who say it is possible for us to control a black community. We should control the school system, the police system, hopefully the economic system so that money both flows in and stays in the community. That kind of separatism is going to increase.

Community control of the schools is a Northern phenomenon. It is healthy, but has a point of diminishing returns. The black community in Small Town, U.S.A., is going to have much more difficulty exercising the kind of control they want than the black community in Manhattan.