Thus in the first instance, ending the ethnic dead-end that plagues blacks at white colleges should entail as many different choices and modes and styles there are black students:
Walking around the Physics lab table to a non-black peer to strike up discourse about an experimental method or to give advice or seek advice about a troublesome theorem;
Leaning across the listening booth in the language lab to compare a French pronounciation;
Testing one's concept of a film's symbolism on the student in the neighboring seat in a Visual Arts course.
In short, there is simply a plethora of contexts and circumstances in which each black student at Harvard can end the black isolation that chokes off the full range of benefits that are available at white colleges. There is no sense in waiting for all black students to move to embrace these variegated success-patterns as a precondition for any particular black doing so. There is, after all, a massive weight of habit surrounding the past decade of black solidariy behavior, and nowhere has it been overcome tout de suite.
Each black student must, therefore, act on his or her own. Each must, in the words of Booker T. Washington, "drop you bucket where you are," which means that each student must act within his or her immediate context, and wait not upon the weight of the herd to propel change.
Finally, it must be recognized that, given the massive economic and mobility needs of half of the Negro population (the marginal working class and lower class), it makes no sense whatever for black students to enter the nationl job market without first having maximized widespread peer linkages--both friendship and strategic in nature--with as many white and non-black students as possible. In time, these transcultural peer ties can be more than merely individual benefits; as some of one's white peer becom governors, financiers, managers, legislators, etc., the peer linkages forged at Harvard become potential agencies of actions that might have great benefit to, for example, skill-training policies for unskilled and semiskilled black ghetto youths. Both public policy and private deavors related to such issues concerning average black can be influenced be personal ties--its that begin right here at Harvard College.
Yet there are still today too many black students at white colleges who cling to black separatist fantasy of black self-sufficiency in regard to overcoming such massive problems as the viable employment of black youths--or so they pretend. This pretense of anti-white radicalism has been carried much too far. Issue-connected radicalism is one thing--I support some of it--but the back separatist fantasy of self sufficiency has outlived even its cathartic utility. The sooner black students at white colleges end this game of "putt'n on the man"--with the twisted result of also putting on themselves--the sooner blacks as a whole can move toward fuller mobility in American life.
Martin L. kilson Jr. is professor of Government. Data provided by Caldwell Titcomb '47, professor of music at Brandeis Universiy, who is preparing the first major history of blacks at Harvard.