Black harbinger of hope

You know all the songs of the world

Since those of the immemorial shipyards of the Nile.

The obverse of this revolutionary perspective is a conservative world-view which underlies black nationalist ideology. Slavery, repression, and defeat have driven the black nationalist into a kind of "apartheid," which dangerously tends toward counter-revolutionary racial exclusiveness. As Tom Nairn, following E.P. Thomson, so judiciously observed of the British working class: "Such 'apartheid' was the necessary pre-condition of the conservative class-hierarchy. It was only the systematic fostering of this sense of irremediable and inherited difference, of social exclusion felt (even if not intellectually assented to) as a fact of nature. This was one of the most powerful weapons any conservative regime has ever had in its hands, worth any number of policemen. A conservative totality, and the broad distribution of property and power it represents, is bound to be safe as long as the various subordinate sectors of it have a consciousness of themselves as different and separate, as mere 'sectors' in the social space allotted to them. Such a sectional or corporate self-consciousness is the essence of social conservatism. It matters relatively little that it should be accompanied, by a sense of grievance or injustice, by demands that wrongs be righted, or demands for a 'square deal.' What counts is that the wrongs and rights are apprehended as those of the class, as opposed to the moments in history where a class desires to escape altogether from its 'apartheid and identifies its rights with those of society as a whole . . . The reflex of class hierarchy was the aggressive consciousness of themselves as an 'estate' almost a separate 'nation' on its own. The very success of the conservative formula made it necessary to turn one's back on all that did not concern one." Should "black nationalists" succeed in imposing such a conservative formula, black liberation would have been further postponed to the Greek Kalends.

Finally, it would be a pity if this incident would provide an occasion for self-righteousness on either side. It is not insignificant to recall that Harvard refused to offer an academic appointment to DuBois. not because of his intellectual distinction-which to the credit of the University, was recognized in important respects-but because it was not conceivable at the turn of the century to appoint any black to the Harvard faculty. In the final analysis, are Harvard and the society at large any less to blame that developments have come to such a pass? I wonder.