On Sunday, October 5, 1980 The New York Times Magazine devoted two articles to the topic: "The Black Plight: Race or Class?" which took the form of a debate between Kenneth Clark, a prominent Black psychologist and Carl Gershman, a former civil-rights activist.

Mr. Gershman argued that because the black leadership were preoccupied with a racial approach to the question of Black dispossession, it tended to ignore "the growing class divisions within the black community." He also argued that the Black bourgeoisie was inclined to use "racial myths" in an ideological manner to achieve racial entitlements from the society at the expense of the Black underclass.

This racial approach, Mr. Gershman concluded, "has benefited those (blacks) least in need and has perpetuated the dependency of the (black) underclass." Because of this failure, the Black leadership has lost "credibility in the eyes of many Americans."

Mr. Clark, argued that the condition of the black underclass springs primarily from continued racial oppression of white America. While he is cognizant of the fact that "broad urban economic forces...do affect the status of blacks," Mr. Clark believes that a new form of sophisticated racism which is practiced by Northern whites, has impeded the progress of Blacks.

Mr. Clark concludes his piece by accusing the Black intellectuals of "diversionary thinking," and the Black petti-bourgeoisie of deserting their brothers in the ghetto.

Both Mr. Clark and Mr. Gershman attack the "black middle-class leadership" for their inability to define the issue of Black dispossession in a clear and satisfactory manner and agree on the fact that the presence of a Black underclass bears ominous potentials for American democracy.

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The debate between Kenneth Clark and Carl Gershman demonstrated once more the manner in which the bourgeoisie and one of its state ideological apparatuses (i.e. the Press) seek to distort the objective nature of social processes and through its empty kind of polemics seek to make the natives fight among themselves. It is not only that they seek to obfuscate the nature of the Afro-American condition but, through a series of self-reflecting mirrors, they attempt to project themselves as the saviors of Black people, if only we can give them the solution to a problem which they created in the first place.

For the question must be asked: How can any honest dialogue about race and class be conducted in the most advanced capitalist country without so much as a single reference to the commodity-structure of production which generates these insane class conflicts and racial antagonisms? Therefore, to posit race and class as binary opposites defeats the whole purpose of trying to understand the present oppression of Afro-American people and fall into the ideological trick-bag of the dominant white society.

Mr. Clark in his discussion, however, seems to have captured the essence of the ideological game when he observed that "we would have made a major step towards racial justice in America when a Black social scientist would be invited by The New York Times to write his analysis of the aspirations, conflicts of one group or another group of white America." Edward Said, in his book, Orientalism, also picked up the tendency on the part of The New York Times to play this kind of ideological game when he documented the manner in which they presented the "objective" views of both sides of the Arab-Israeli conflict of 1973. As he observed, "The Israeli side was presented by an Israeli lawyer; the Arab side, by an American ambassador to an Arab country who had no formal training in Oriental Studies."

The substantive question which arise from this debate was this: For whom does Mr. Gershman speak? Was he supposed to be more sympathetic of the Black underclass than the Black bourgeoisie? Or was he supposed to be the scholarly propagandist of the bourgeoisie class who clothed himself in the liberal veneer of bourgeoisie objectivity?

I will argue that Mr. Gershman's attack (like the Robert Klitgaard report now in preparation by Harvard University) is nothing more than another ideological onslaught which white America is now making against Black America, the activities of the Ku Klux Klan being the more vulgar manifestation of the same phenomenon. Such attacks, seek to pit Black people against other Black people (as the Klitgaard Report attempts to pit progressive Black people against progressive Jewish people) for the sake of the dominant white oppressor class.

For make no mistake about it, Mr. Gershman has gone to great lengths to depict the Black bourgeoisie as a parasitic and exploitative class and to argue that their racial approach to the analysis of the Black condition "has benefitted those least in need and has perpetuated the dependency of the underclass." Moreover, we are now to believe that to struggle against racism and class exploitation is to use the Black underclass as a political base from which to "threaten--and extract concessions from the society." Such analysis leads one to assume, that if we did not struggle for better jobs and more equality that the Black underclass would be in a much better condition today.

As a people we must reject such obvious ideological attacks for the fallacies which they are. Such attacks are meant to put in place a series of discourses and practices by which and through which the dominant white American bourgeois class can legitimize its own power over the powerless. We must insist that we are not the CAUSE OF nor do we accept the RESPONSIBILITY FOR the poverty of the black underclass. The black underclass is the creation of WHITE CAPITALIST AMERICA. End of dialogue.

Just as importantly, we must insist that we are not members of the bourgeois class because we do not control any of the means of production in this country. After all, as Mary Ann Berry, the former U.S. Commissioner of Health, Welfare, and Education, pointed out in her address at Harvard University on Martin Luther King's birthday, all those so-called Black bourgeoisie are only two pay-checks away from the now exalted Black underclass.