Metaphors and Models: Inequalities and Disorder at Home and Abroad

Though we expect to put this essay at the end of a sequence, it was actually written first. It is more speculative and discursive than the others in the series.

1. Americans and Westerners in general have been unsettled by domestic disorders: student riots in many universities in the United States and also in France, Italy, Germany, Spain, and Belgium, and the growth of problems connected with discrimination against racial, ethnic, or linguistic minorities in the United States, Canada, Belgium, England, France. What has been unsettling in part has been the idea that these disorders -- which North American and Europeans are used to thinking of as specific to the Third World -- are occurring in the First and Second. The resemblances are partial but uncomfortable. If we are moving towards One World, it seems to be the Third.

2. The parallels drawn by the dissident minorities or the students are most frequently phrased, not simply as internal conflicts of the kind that rack less developed countries like Nigeria today in its combat against the secession of Biafra, but as the struggle of colonies to become independent of an imperial or colonizing power. This metaphor suggests the irreconcilability of domestic antagonisms. It gives the impression that the only possible result is the separation, the freeing of the subject people. (Of course on a world scale the former colonies have almost all been given independence and the continued use of the word to describe the quite different present relations between less developed and developed countries is itself a metaphor.)

3. A third parallel depicts the relation between the poor and rich countries as analogous to internal war, and specifically like internal race conflict. It is the central metaphor of the famous speech by Lin Piao about the countryside "encircling" the city;[1] but the analogy seems to be prominently, if vaguely, in the minds of such writers as Ronald Segal, Gunnar Myrdal and Barbara Ward. The extreme version divides the world as a whole into colonies and the imperial power, and likens the division to an internal war between a peasant countryside and the cities that the peasant revolutionaries besiege.

4. Such are the increasingly common extreme versions. But moderates and many who are principal opponents of black nationalism sometimes use some of the same terms: "civil war" on the international scene, and within the United States "two nations," a "colony," and the "exploitative majority." In the latter case they may mean only to emphasize the actuality of discrimination, not the white stake in its continuance. The moderates do not hold that the interests of the two "nations" are inherently or irreconcilably opposed. Sometimes the metaphor serves merely to stress the wide difference in standing and the difficulty of communication.

5. Concern with the race crisis at home has been accompanied in the past few years by a weakening of concern for the Third World, a desire that the U.S. Government turn from concern with foreign countries in general, but especially away from the distant, less developed ones. On the other hand, paradoxically, the rebellious domestic minorities identify their rebellion with the struggles of the Third World and the blacks are especially likely to identify not merely with the nonwhite Third World but with Africa. So Floyd McKissick resents the fact that white America can see when East Indians are hungry, but does not notice the starving Biafrans.[2] Africa is probably the continent least often considered important for American interests in discussions by neo-isolationists. West Europe is frequently admitted to be "vital," in some vague sense; and perhaps Latin America too. Even Asia and the Middle East may evoke a few twinges of doubt and a little argument. But Africa is hardly mentioned by establishment isolationists.

6. International, cross-national and cross-temporal experience can illuminate the highly uncertain relations between American domestic inequalities and civil disorders. Indeed it would be hard to avoid using this body of experience; and foolish, since among other things these inequalities and disorders in other places and at other times provide the context for our own troubles at home as well as tests for hypotheses about them. Nonetheless the almost universal metaphors that identify race relations here with the political, social and economic relations between nonwhite and white nations can cast quite as much shade as light. The implicit content of the comparison varies widely with the user. On the one hand, it may suggest a relation between two sets of people very differently endowed with wealth, skills, specialties, culture and possibly language -- with partially conflicting, partially common interests who may derive a large mutual benefit from trade, capital transfers, cultural exchange, and even growing political cooperation. On the other hand, and much more frequently, it is meant to suggest a zero-sum relation where whatever one group gains, the other must lose, where the only solution is political, social and economic separation. Metaphors of anti- colonialism and guerrilla war suggest despair and tempt to violence. The political and economic remedies they suggest, moreover, are millenary in a sense that goes beyond the utopias current in the Third World. Here, as we shall stress, these local utopias would be even less viable economically, a kind of neighborhood autarky. And in the case of our domestic minorities, even the process of revolution, not just its end, is impracticable.

The following expands and illustrates these points and several others.

I. Metaphors and models: Relations between states as analogue for U.S. domestic conflict

"Colonialism," it is easy to illustrate, is a rich source of varied metaphor. The large handicaps placed on the Negro in America in acquiring and using his skills productively to earn income, in choosing a place to live, and in taking part in the political process are frequently referred to in such language, not simply by advocates of Black Power, but by civil rights moderates and some able social scientists. Nathan Glazer, Kenneth Clark and others use the analogy to emphasize difficulties in communication between whites and non-whites as well as the disparity in status, power and rewards. For Kenneth Clark: "The dark ghettos are social, political, educational and - above all - economic colonies."[3] Glazer and Moynihan write: "Just as in underdeveloped countries governments insist that the foreign investor take on a certain proportion of native employees, so have the political organizations of Harlem insisted that the Jewish storekeeper have Negro salesmen. They lack only the ultimate power of expropriation, but if they did, Jewish and other white business might fare as badly in Harlem as the American investments in Mexican oil, or in Cuba.

"We can press our colonial analogy a bit further. For, if the Jews, in an earlier parallel to colonialism, may be seen as exploiters, they are also paralleling the later development of colonialism, those who help and assist the deprived group."[4]

A metaphor is useful in good part because it is evocative. However, that of colonizer and colonized, of investor as exploiter, evokes a cloud of ideologies of economic development. These ideologies can confuse analysis of the actual problem of improving the status of the Negro in the United States. They have suggested some highly questionable remedies that emphasize economic and political autarky in the ghettos. This is not to say, of course, that men like Kenneth Clark, who use the metaphor, draw these conclusions. On the contrary, Clark regards the autarkies suggested by Black Power advocates as a romantic throwback to Booker T. Washington. But Black Power advocates are led naturally to such remedies by the colonial metaphor and by anti-colonialist rhetoric. And even government staff programs sometimes grope tentatively in the same mist. The Two-Nation metaphor of colony and colonizer suggests the importance of freeing one from the other. For militants it implies an antagonism of interest best handled by making the separation more complete and violent. But not only for militants. Such analogies in half-conscious form are much more widespread. A Hollywood movie being filmed this year in the Cleveland ghetto by Jules Dassin is based on a scenario brought up to date from Liam O'Flaherty's The Informer, a story of the Irish Republican Army and the struggle that eventually led to the establishment of Eire. The analogy of relations between a less developed and developed country need not of course imply irreconcilably conflicting interests. The metaphor is vague and evokes these associations. But if we turn from metaphor to analysis, the non-zero-sum character of the relation may dissolve.

For example, Gary Becker has an analytic model of the two "societies," white and nonwhite. In his pioneering study of the economics of discrimination he applies the theory of international trade to evaluate the effects of prejudice and nepotism on the incomes of different groups.[5] His white and nonwhite "societies" trade capital and labor, factors of production used in making commodities rather than the commodities themselves. The white society exports capital which it has in relative abundance and the nonwhites export labor. In discriminating, one group acts as if it were willing to forfeit income in order to avoid transactions with a member of another group; and the magnitude of discrimination is measured by the amount of income forfeited. In other literature on discrimination, it is widely assumed that the loss imposed on nonwhite laborers is a net gain for white employers, that is, that the loss to nonwhites equals the gain to whites, that the continuance of discrimination is in the interest of the employer.[6] If this were true there would in fact be no basis in economic self-interest for an adjustment of the differences between whites and nonwhites. What would be involved would be purely a redistribution of income. Becker's theoretical analysis of transactions among groups, however, does not presuppose that the interests of these groups are strictly incompatible. Rather, the convergence and divergence of the various interest groups are a subject for analysis.

Becker's analysis concludes that the return to white labor and nonwhite capital increases as the result of discrimination but the return to white capital and nonwhite labor decreases by an even greater amount so that the net overall aggregate return to all factors in both societies taken together declines (i.e. the aggregate net income of the white and nonwhite "societies" is reduced by discrimination); and, finally, that if the minority responds to discrimination by withdrawing into complete economic separation it worsens the discrimination, and its own absolute and relative income.

Becker's model, like any theory, simplifies; and as might be expected in a pioneering effort, it makes some drastic simplifications. (It is a static equilibrium model, assumes simple production functions, homogeneous in the first degree, constant tastes for discrimination, etc.)

The model and his discussions of it moreover have some unclarities: it is not always plain whether Becker is saying that there is a net loss due to discrimination in the aggregate product of the two societies taken together, that the white gain is smaller than the black loss; or whether he is saying that the white society taken as a separate sub-aggregate suffers a net loss. Even in the first case, however, the argument for reducing discrimination has a greater appeal to the self-interest of whites than if the relationship between whites and non-whites were truly zero-sum. Moreover, the fact that not merely re-distribution but a potential increase in the aggregate product are involved is a matter of some importance and is comparable with some empirical phenomena: discrimination against Negroes is greater in the South than it is in the North and West. The ratio of nonwhite to white incomes is lower. But such greater "exploitation" does not make the Southern whites better off than Northern whites. On the contrary, they are worse off. Again, models such as Becker's despite its simplifications might catch essential features of the realities of discrimination and separation so far as retaliation by economic minorities are concerned: increasing the separation does not help the minority, his model suggests; the American Indians are more separate than Negroes from whites -- and have even lower incomes.

Becker's model suggests that discrimination is very unstable in the long run because firms employing Negroes tend to prosper more than firms that don't, sine the former can purchase their labor at lower money cost. In fact the long term persistence of discrimination in an economy of employers maximizing profits requires explanation and complication of the model. On the other hand Becker's model suggests that white employers who hire Negroes only will make out best of all and in this way implies a tendency toward a special kind of segregation.

Finis Welch has constructed an economic model that modifies these aspects of Becker. It is concerned in particular to specify the characteristics of discrimination by other employees. Welch assumes that laborers with different amounts of education are complementary rather than substitutes, but that race differences impose psychic or real costs on laborers of different races working together and that this offsets some of the complementarity. However, there is some net complementarity and hence integration. Like Becker's, the Welch model is highly simplified. However, neither model implies a zero-sum relation between the races. In both an increased allocation of investment in education and training of the nonwhite population does more than simply redistribute income; it can add to the net social product.

Even in such models some may gain from discrimination and in a complication of such models, others may be unaware that they lose, and still others may be irrationally inert. Reducing the effects of stigmatization will in no event be easy. Nonetheless analyses, like those of Becker and Welch, are plainly more hopeful for reducing discrimination within the framework of the American economy than the belief that white society as a whole has a net interest in discrimination.

We return to this subject in discussing ghetto autarky. Our point here is that a parallel between the transactions among disparate domestic groups on the one hand and among disparate nations on the other may suggest policies of reducing or increasing the transactions, depending on the implicit theory of development and trade. The international transaction analogy may illuminate, inspire, obscure, discourage, incite or simply entertain.

All of the above looks at the nation as the world in small. The next section deals with metaphors of the world as a disordered nation writ large.

II. The reverse: Internal race war as analogue for world conflict.

The enormous gap in per-capita income between countries in the Third World and the industrialized countries suggests parallels between problems of foreign domestic economic development and those of closing the economic gap between American Negroes and American Whites. The parallel moreover is reinforced emotionally by the fact that, as Gunnar Myrdal and many others have pointed out, "all the rich countries are white or predominantly white, while almost all poor countries are colored."[7]

This coincidence of color and per capita income differences carries with it the danger that the two may be confounded. Myrdal himself has been concerned about the coupling of charges of racialism and imperialism in statements by representatives of the Third World at international conferences, and "infusion of the race issue into the international class struggle."[8] Carmichael does fuse the race problem with the problem of closing the gap between rich and poor countries. And fuses both with the problem of liberating minorities in the United States. "For a century, this nation has been like an octopus of exploitation, its tentacles stretching from Mississippi and Harlem to South America, the Middle East, southern Africa, and Vietnam; the form of exploitation varies from area to area but the essential result has been the same--a powerful few have been maintained and enriched at the expense of the poor and voiceless colored masses."[9]

Liberals today are turning quite rapidly from foreign concerns to the domestic crisis. But the minority in that crisis continues to have a kind of foreign concern and interest. It is not indifferent to the present hardships and future development of the poor nonwhite countries. It may, however, think of the poverty of these countries as due to the exploitation of Western governments and specifically the United States. While liberal members of the Establishment in the United States may in these days of the new isolationism use the metaphor of an underdeveloped nation within the United States as a reason for turning away from the troubles of more distant underdeveloped countries to deal with our own, radicals may think of a common struggle in which the colony inside and the colonies outside will liberate themselves simultaneously from the American Establishment Octopus.

III. Independence wars and the interplay between domestic and foreign conflicts.

For militants (and the New Left), sympathetic identification with the Third World seems particularly clear in the case of Africa, Cuba, and Vietnam. The involvement with Africa needs least comment. There has, of course, been a long history among American Negroes of denial as well as affirmation of the connection. Marcus Garvey's Back to Africa movement of the 1920s petered out without much evident residue and without any return to Africa. The Negro American was and is irreversibly American. Still, things have changed since the 1920's. Contemporary Africa and the contemporary Negro American are something else again. The African native is now a citizen of an independent state and is no longer ruled by whites. He is an actor on the world scene, and highly visible in New York at the UN. His right to respect is jealously guarded by protocol officers in the State Department intent on protecting him against the indignities inflicted on American Negroes by prejudiced whites. The irony of this situation is fully appreciated by American Negroes. malcolm X advised: "Just stop being a Negro. Change your name to Hoogagagooba. That'll show you how silly the white man is. You're dealing with a silly man. A friend of mine who's very dark put a turban on his head and went into a restaurant in Atlanta before they called themselves desegregated. He went into the white restaurant, sat down, they served him, and he said: 'What would happen if a Negro came in here?' And there he's sitting, black as night, but because he had his head wrapped up the waitress looked back at him and says: 'Why, there wouldn't no nigger dare come in here.'"[10]

The American Negro, descendant of whites as well as blacks, may find when he is in Africa, as Harold Isaacs tells us, that he is regarded as white and foreign. But he often feels a bond with the continent of his origin and even more, there is some similarity between his desire for equal status with whites in America and the successful emergence of the black African from under the rule of white Europeans. Therefore, Malcolm X, who juxtaposed bullets and ballots, placed a good deal of importance on the fact that each of the new African countries had one vote in the united Nations just like the United States (even though electoral politics in the UN influence world affairs substantially less than ballots in the United States affect domestic events).

In more recent times, one of the heroes of the black militants is Frantz Fanon, the Negro psychoanalyst who took part in the North African revolutionary movement. He inspires much of the doctrine of Black Power, as Carmichael and Hamilton formulate it. Born in Martinique, a Caribbean Negro, Fanon's origins in the West Indies link him to a part of the world from which a rather large proportion of political militants among Negroes in the United States have come.[11]

Cuba is the Caribbean country, of course, that provides some of the readiest symbolism: in Arévalo's phrase, a small sardine next to the American shark; or so close that it is almost like the American Negro minority inside the great white whale. For militants who keep being reminded that Negroes make up only 10 or 11% of the population of the United States[12] and so must find some accommodation, form some coalitions, it provides an example of the possibility of triumphing over numbers. Cuba's population today is 8 million compared to the 200 million in the United States, to the 240 million in the Soviet Union, to the three quarters of a billion Chinese. Castro has defied them all, but, in particular, the United States. Moreover, his history seems to have been a continual defiance of numbers: from his 178 raiders against the whole of the moncada barracks in 1953, his crew of 80 on the Granma in 1956, the handful of survivors of the Granma who outwitted Batista's pursuing army in the Sierra Maestra, his rebel army which reached 300 men at a maximum on the last official Cuban count before it descended to take power and be joined by many enthusiasts. Castro does not shrink from projecting into the future his example of what a minority can accomplish. He summed it up on July 26, 1960: "Here, facing the unconquered mountain range, facing the Sierra maestra, let us promise one another that we shall continue to make our fatherland an example that will make the Andes mountain range into the Sierra Maestra of all America."[13]

Part of the usual explanation of the seemingly magical victory against Batista was the rot and corruption inside the shell of Batista's political and military structure. Similarly, the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion is explained by the decaying power that had to depend on "mercenaries." Under the pressure of organized black guerrillas, the rotten United States establishment will fall too.

Castro moreover has made much of a new emancipation of the Negro in Cuba, drawing a dramatic contrast between Batista's Cuba and his own. In fact, Batista was a mulatto of lower class origin, as were many of his cronies, and some of his generals were Negroes. Castro's movement was largely white middle class; his first cabinet represented a shift to lily whites. As in the case of some other Caribbean countries, the society before Castro was to a considerable extent multi-racial. A main difference affected the exclusive clubs and private beaches. The Right to Swim on the Beach was one of Castro's revolutionary slogans that might have puzzled European Marxists, but it is quite intelligible to American Negroes concerned to desegregate athletic clubs, swimming pools, and beaches. The leadership of the anti-Castro Cubans includes Negroes. Olveira, one of the major figures in the Bay of Pigs invasion, is a Negro, but Castro in his series of widely publicized personal interrogations of the Bay of Pigs prisoners chose not to question Olveira on television.

So far as Malcolm X was concerned, the allegiance of Negro militants in the United States is quite clear; "you don't see any anti-Castro Cubans around here - we eat them up."[14] And long before the cultivation of Stokely Carmichael at the LASO Conference, Castro beamed his incitements to revolt at the American Negro. The American Negro, Robert Williams, a member of the extremist Revolutionary Action Committee, until recently conducted a series of broadcasts from Havana to the United States. And when Castro made his second state visit to the UN with a large party of Cuban comrades, he moved with great ostentation to the Hotel Theresa in Harlem, leaving an East Side white hotel wrecked from barbecuing chickens in the living room, in a sequence that had been planned well before he left Cuba. Castro and Guevara have been in communication not only with the Black Muslim movement here, but have been actively engaged in the training of African guerrillas and in the organization of guerrilla wars in Africa. Guevara's contribution to guerrilla war doctrine with its emphasis on the fact that the objective conditions for revolutionary success need not all be present, but can be created by the guerrilla revolutionary himself, has a special appeal to rebels facing great odds. And Guevara, dead or alive, cuts a romantic figure.

But in recent times the agonizing war in Vietnam, more than anything else and for a wider range of civil rights militants, has tended to fuse the cause of civil rights with the fate of a guerrilla movement - not only SNCC and CORE in their Black Power phase, but Martin Luther King's and Ralph Abernathy's Southern Christian Leadership conference and many other fighters for civil rights in the United States. (In some cases this has been widened in a surprising way to include supporting National Liberation struggles even in countries like Betancourt's and Leoni's Venezuela where the democratic left has won election twice in a row.) It might almost be said that Vietnam tends to displace problems of domestic civil rights among civil rights activists as much as in the American Government. And the growing extremism in American politics is visible in the unmeasured and violent language that has been observed by Nathan Glazer. Charges of genocide by the Government of the United States in Vietnam coincide with charges that genocidal preparations are being made to control the summer riots here. They fit a situation in which "public housing projects are called 'prisons,' poverty is labeled 'slavery,' disrespectful language becomes 'brutality,' the demand for better living conditions becomes the call for 'liberation' and 'freedom.' And men are willing to do things for liberation and freedom that they probably would not do for higher welfare payments."[15] In this situation black militants apply the label "genocide" to programs for family planning in the ghetto: one more parallel to some of the ideologists in less developed countries, who have charged that foreign aid programs furthering birth control have genocidal intent.[16]

Ernesto Betancourt (an economist in the Organization of American States, and an early associate of Castro who was with him until the end of 1959), has talked recently of another connection between civil disorders in the United States and national liberation fronts overseas. This feedback runs the other way, from the United States to overseas. Liberation fronts are doing poorly in Latin America, even though they face less insuperable obstacles to acquiring power than those confronting a group that by its own definition in ethnic terms cannot in the United States be universal or a majority. It appears, according to Betancourt, that the fact that Carmichael and Rap Brown can talk of revolution and guerrilla war against such impossible odds is a spur to revolutionaries in Latin America.

But in the postwar world there has been from the time of the Truman administration at least fitful recognition of an adverse influence of domestic racial discrimination and domestic disorder on the professed policies of the United States abroad. According to Secretary Dulles, for example: "The segregation of school children on a racial basis is one of the practices in the United States which has been singled out for hostile foreign comment in the United States and elsewhere. Other people cannot understand how such a practice can exist in a country which professes to be a staunch supporter of freedom, justice, and democracy."[17]

Our domestic racial inequities and the civil disorders associated with them affect the Third World and our relations with them most directly. But they also influence our European allies and their publics. Internal disorder and violence suggest an unexpected political weakness in the American giant on which West Europe depends for nuclear protection. The inequities at the root of the violence diminish the United States as an example. And it is almost beside the point that Europeans and Australians and new Zealanders are in no position to cast the first stone. Each of these advanced countries, to say nothing of the developing ones, exhibits discrimination in the marketplace in many ways and many do so more extensively than the United States, as Gary Becker suggests.[18]

The advanced countries in Europe and Oceania are, of course, a highly exclusive residential preserve for whites, and this is the result of a deliberate immigration policy even more restrictive than our own. When an Englishman or a Frenchman points out the superior position of the Europeans on racial problems, he is likely to be unconscious of this fact (except intermittently, as in the case of the recent restrictions on immigration into France from Algeria or the bitter debate over the tightening of entry into Britain by holders of British passports of Indian ancestry coming from Kenya).[19] So, for example, William Clark: "...the United States is prevented from achieving a wholly satisfactory relationship with the tiers monde because America itself is reft by the clash of color which is part of the world scene. Europe, inoculated by its colonial experience, seems likely, in spite of Algeria and Rhodesia, to be spared an internal color problem."[20]

"Inoculation" may hardly be the word. But even if the right word is "anesthetic," the fact remains that other advanced industrial countries are shocked at American racial inequities and disorders. They tarnish the image of the United States, decrease public support of these governments for moves in support of American policy, and furnish one more example of the connection between domestic and foreign policy processes.

In the next section we explore the way even the attempt to disconnect our domestic troubles at home from troubles abroad -- so that we may attend more to the former -- may exhibit a parallel between foreign policies of disconnection and decentralization on the one hand and some domestic policies of separation and independence on the other.

IV. Ghetto Independence and the New Isolation

Proposals for decentralizing power in the Negro community might be an important part of the process of integrating the Negro into American life. But they can also signal a white desire to be rid of the black problem, to let the blacks take care of themselves. A white withdrawal from responsibility, as Kenneth Clark, Bayard Rustin and others have pointed out, is perfectly matched by black separatism. There are analogies on the international scene.

Some variants of the new isolationism hope for regional balances of power in the Third World, to be achieved, if possible, exclusively among countries inside the region. Hopefully such local balances will be stable and self-sufficient sub-systems in the international system. Though some forms of regional self-help are useful and some may be imperative, this sort of regionalism in its increasingly popular, extreme form amounts to a hope that the white countries of Europe and North America may wash their hands of the sordid, turbulent mess in the colored world. Part of the process of decolonization had such motives, as an anti-colonialist like Frantz Fanon perceived. (Fanon cites the overtones of bestiality in De Gaulle's references to the "yellow multitudes" and Francois Mauriac's "black, brown and yellow masses which soon will be unleashed," and Meyer's hope to avoid prostituting the French National Assembly with Algerians.[21] DeGaulle, himself conjured up the awful vision for Soustelle, "Can you see 100 Moslem Deputies?"[22])

Though frequently inept, the developed countries' current support for economic development of the Third World and for its physical security differs greatly from colonialism. Retreat from such support has in it a very large element of callousness. One of the best young foreign affairs journalists in West Germany repeated at two conferences in Asia last year that this was "the first time in over 150 years that Europe doesn't have an Oriental problem." Now, it seems, the Orientals have the Oriental problem. Recent American writings speak of the lack of any vital interest of the United States in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, East Europe and so on. These are all "culturally inaccessible." And, viewed somewhat unkindly, recommendations for regional unions all over seem to propose our own islands -- or continents -- of invisible men on an international scale.

The new isolation has been encouraged by the disaster of Vietnam, and encompasses the emotions of right and center as well as left. In fact, as we have said, Vietnam has displaced much of the Government concern to develop programs for reducing domestic inequalities, to say nothing of other foreign concerns. It has done so in spite of President Johnson's evidently earnest desire, expressed in his first State of the Nation speech, to turn his attention mainly to the problems of American domestic society, where we suspect he feels more comfortable. For a world power, foreign political and military disorders often turn out to be hard to ignore. And, almost against governmental will, they have consumed more and more national resources and government attention. Whatever the right allocation of effort between home and overseas concerns might have been, the displacement that has taken place illustrates one fundamental tie between domestic and foreign troubles, namely that there is an allocation problem, that overseas troubles and those at home are both of concern and have to be dealt with out of the same pot, in proportions that will vary over time and by means that are arguable and even for ends which need clarification and continuing revision. But for the United States both sorts of trouble will need handling.

In the long run turning away from the world is not very plausible for the United States. Moreover it would be a great mistake to suppose that indifference to the fates of ethnically different peoples in Asia and Africa and the Middle East would mean a turning toward a concern for ethnic minorities within the United States. On the contrary, it seems more likely for isolationism to accompany domestic indifference and reaction.

We think of government programs that might have been undertaken if there were no war and if Congress spent as much money on reducing racial inequities as it spent on the war, and as a result we tend to identify this war -- or previous wars -- as the reason for lack of progress in improving the status of nonwhites relative to whites. In fact, however, there is a grim paradox, of which many Negroes have been conscious, that has made wars the occasion for some of the most decided improvements in Negro status. So Ralph Ellison has written: "...I would like to say something which is unpleasant about the Negro in Vietnam. Speaking historically, our condition has been bettered in this country during periods of national disaster. This was true of the Spanish-American War when there was the beginning of the migratory movement. It was true to a large extent during World War I...As much as I dislike warfare, and I would like to see this thing in Vietnam ended, but from a Negro point of view, from one Negro's point of view, I know that the people who are going to rule the South together under the new political situation there will be the black and white Southerners who are fighting together in Vietnam, getting to know one another without the myths of racial inferiority or superiority."[23]

And Bayard Rustin: "...World War I aroused new hope in Negroes that the rights removed at the turn of the century would be restored...World War II was a period of hope for Negroes, and the economic progress they made through wartime industry continued steadily until about 1948 and remained stable for a time...Then there is the war in Vietnam, which poses many ironies for the Negro community. On the one hand, Negroes are bitterly aware of the fact that more and more money is being spent on the war, while the anti-poverty program is being cut; on the other hand, Negro youths are enlisting in great numbers, as though to say that it is worth the risk of being killed to learn a trade, to leave a dead-end situation, and to join the only institution in this society which seems really to be integrated."[24] C. V. Woodward makes some parallel comments on the effect of the Korean war.[25]

These informal observations of Rustin, Ellison and others can be precisely documented. The tangible rewards to Negroes in the form of command over goods and services grew most rapidly in absolute and relative terms during World War II, during Korea and during the expansion of the war in Vietnam. This is shown by the comprehensive data on total money income of families and of persons 14 years and over and by data on money wages and salaries presented in Chapter IV.

To complete the irony, it should be observed that while large advances in the status of nonwhites have occurred as unintended by-products in the conduct of foreign wars, some of the programs that have been devised specifically to aid nonwhite and other poor have frequently had an opposite effect. As James Tobin has observed: "...our present programs of public assistance" seem almost to have...been consciously contrived to perpetuate the conditions they are supposed to alleviate."[26] Minimum wage laws often have resulted in Negroes not getting employed at all rather than getting employed at a higher wage. Welfare payments have been coupled with means tests which reduce incentives for employment and savings and have tended to break up the Negro family.

It is surely not inevitable that programs designed to help Negroes will be poorly designed. Better programs are imperative. On the other hand, any changes that lift the economy in general and tighten the labor market tend to reduce the effect of discrimination. If (in Becker's terms) employers' prejudices are measured by a discrimination co-efficient that in effect makes employers act as if the real costs to them of hiring a Negro exceed the money costs by some percentage, then a right labor market and a booming economy can make the employer willing to pay that extra nonmonetary price. If one thinks of the labor market in the form of a queue with Negroes at the end of the queue, then in a slack labor market, employers don't reach the end of the queue. In a tight one, they do. (This sort of queuing model is of course quite different from Becker's static equilibrium theory.) Consequently, even though this war and other wars may rate strenuous disapproval on other grounds, their effect has been to improve the employment and income status of Negroes absolutely and relatively to whites.

But the problem of increasing the growth rate of nonwhite relative to white income within the United States, as we indicated at the start, has suggested some fruitful theoretical parallels with the tasks of improving the relative growth rate of less developed countries. And parallels between policies in both fields, bad policies as well as good ones. The next section deals with some of these.

V. Economic Autarkies in the Ghettos and in the Third World

After seizing power Castro undertook a program of industrialization intended vastly to increase Cuba's self- sufficiency. He attempted to promote the manufacture of many finished products which Cuba had bought before, mainly from the United States, and which were still available from East Europe and elsewhere. but the Cubans discovered that frequently it cost them more to import the raw materials than to buy the finished products. The planning, Guevara later confessed, was "ridiculous." "In industry we made a plan of self-development based fundamentally on the idea of being self-sufficient in a series of durable consumption goods or intermediate industrial articles which, however, could be obtained with relative ease from friendly countries. In this way we committed our investment capacity without completely developing our own resources of raw materials, including some intermediate products we now make... In agriculture, we committed the fundamental error of scorning the importance of sugar cane, our fundamental product..."[27]

Milder forms of autarkic theory and ideologies of inward-looking industrialization were much more widespread in the Third World at the end of the 1940s. In 1949 Raul Prebisch, then the leading figure in the Economic Commission for Latin America, was saying that: "In Latin America reality is undermining the outdated schema of the international division of labor which, after acquiring great importance in the nineteenth century, continued to exert considerable academic influence until very recently."[28] Since that time Prebisch who is now Secretary General of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) has become a strong critic of inward-looking industrialization, of proceeding "piecemeal in a large number of water-tight compartments with little intercommunication, to the serious detriment of productivity."[29]

There is a clear parallel, sometimes self-conscious, between these Third World autarkies and black nationalism in the United States. "Our people have to be made to see," Malcolm X write, "that any time you take your dollar out of your community and spend it in a community where you don't live, the community where you live will get poorer and poorer, and the community where you spend your money will get richer and richer."[30] Like the political statements cited earlier, such economic views hark back to Marcus Garvey's Back To Africa movement and BUY BLACK slogans in the 1920s; and still earlier to Booker T. Washington. Many similar statements today by Leroi Jones, Carmichael and Hamilton also draw the parallel: "Colonies have existed for the sole purpose of enriching, in one form or another, the 'colonizer'...Rich in natural resources, Africa did not reap the benefit of these resources herself. In the Gold Coast (now Ghana), where the cocoa crop was the largest in the world, there was not one chocolate factory. This same economic status has been perpetrated on the black community in this country. Exploiters come into the ghetto from the outside, bleed it dry, and leave it economically dependent on the larger society."[31] In a just order, this suggests, neighborhoods might be independent of the larger society.

Economic autarky is only one of the many meanings of the phrase "Black Power." But in this sense "Black Power" carries to an extreme the attacks on division of labor as a form of exploitation which have been expounded by many theorists of economic development in the Third World. It carries the attack from the international level down to the neighborhood.

There is, of course, something to increasing Negro entrepreneurship and Negro self-help and the growth of a Negro middle class (just as there is something to diversifying agriculture and industry in the less developed countries and subsidizing economic activities that have a prospect for becoming competitive). Indeed such domestic policies have great importance. But the black nationalist extreme of ghetto economic independence represents the least feasible of the inward-looking industrialization proposals so familiar in the Third World.

These parallels might clarify some government and academic proposals for building black institutions in the ghetto. The upshot of these proposals is often obscure. Sometimes, as in the case of Walt Williams' paper, "Power of Various Hues," they respond to the more moderate interpretations of Black Power. But they seem not unaffected by the ambiguities of that phrase. Specifically, "black economic institutions" may refer simply to building up Negro-owned industry in the ghetto to replace white products and services -- a vast "import substitution" program. Or it can mean the development of Negro specialization, Negro-owned businesses in or out of the ghetto, that are part of the complex interchange of the larger society. These are quite different things.

One is inward-looking; the other is outward-looking. The first would mean developing economic institutions providing goods and services to Negroes at higher costs and less efficiently than if considerations of productivity rather than color were dominant. An example of this import substitution is offered by some well-intentioned projects in recent times in Watts. The Watts Labor Community Action Council which was conceived in the Industrial Union Department of the AFL/CIO and has been endorsed by such disparate figures as Sam Yorty and Sergeant Shriver, appears to have performed a number of useful community services in building vest pocket parks, neighborhood clean-ups, and the like. It has also sponsored a project for encouraging "a sizable poultry ranch located in the heart of Watts."[32] The comment of Augustus Hawkins,[33] the Congressman from the district including Watts, seems quite appropriate: It might raise the price of chickens and eggs in Watts or, more likely, go out of business because it could not come near the efficiency of large-scale poultry and egg ranches located in the countryside. Congressman Hawkins has had experience not only in Watts but as a chicken farmer. Moreover, the political costs of building Negro social institutions on top of these separate inward-looking economic activities might be very high, if integration is our ultimate purpose; and especially if it is our near- or medium-term purpose. The experience of other minorities used to justify such proposals seems to be misinterpreted. Of course, there are always secondary and tertiary industries that are determined largely by residential location and in ethnically uniform neighborhoods tend to be run by members of that ethnic group. On the other hand the sort of ethnic economic institution building frequently referred to in the case of other minorities[34] involves cases of specialization rather than autarky. The Italians and the Jews in the garment industry, the Italians in shoemaking, the Irish in the police and other civil service, the Greeks in the restaurant industry, and so on, provide goods and services to the larger society and not merely to their own ethnic groups.

To develop such specialties which are ultimately competitive is consistent with the use of subsidies, nepotism and protection in a strategy to construct a ladder for Negroes from first employment to management and ownership -- a strategy Robert Dorfman has described in his paper for the Urban Workshop. Dorfman, in fact, assumes that the specific economic sectors in which Negroes might help each other are ones in which the entire urban complex may come to depend on them for important goods and services. Such strategies may be justified by a valid form of the infant industry argument. On the other hand, they almost exactly oppose a strategy of black autarky. Current discussion of ghetto institution building does not clearly distinguish these two quite opposite programs. Since ghetto autarky is even more plainly unreasonable than national or regional autarkies, a little clarity on the distinction between these two sorts of institution building is helpful.

Stokely Carmichael's version of the building of black institutions in the ghetto has a particularly utopian character. Indeed, it is an urban version of the small pastoral utopian communities that sprang up in the 19th century. His black ghetto residents will own and improve a building or a shop "cooperatively." "The society we seek to build among black people then is not a capitalist one. It is a society in which the spirit of community and humanistic love prevail."[35] Such communities embedded in the central cities of the United States make the Icarian communities of the last century seem practical in retrospect. And, another foreign parallel: they reduce to absurdity the inward looking "socialisms' sometimes conceived for small countries in the Third World.

The above has dealt with economic policy and political- economic goals, including economic utopias. The next section deals not with economic ends, but with means, including revolutionary violence. It treats some means that are utopian.

VI. Ghetto Riots and Guerrilla War

It is increasingly common to compare our own urban disorders with guerrilla war and the insurrectionary violence of national liberation fronts in the Third World. Journalists make the analogy, of course, for its vividness. And law enforcement officers, like Maryland's Adjutant General Gelston, go along with it. "This is guerrilla warfare," he said of the Detroit riots. "These people have learned the lesson of Vietnam"[36] The analogy stirs some of the deep fears and fantasies of whites. For black nationalists, it is nothing new and it is not simply metaphor. Malcolm X gave his audiences little briefings on guerrilla war, and presented it as the ground on which the black man, like the brown man, the yellow man, and the red man, can defeat the white man.[37] Prensa Latina quoted Stokely Carmichael when he attended the LASO (Latin American Solidarity Organization) meeting in Havana in the summer of 1967 as saying: "American Negroes are organizing urban guerrillas for a fight to the death."[38] Charles Hamilton, his collaborator, has referred in lectures to many parallels between guerrilla warfare in the underdeveloped countries and the efforts that Negro colonies, in cities and the rural districts, are making to secure their liberties. Carmichael and Hamilton subtitle their book, Black Power, "The Politics of Liberation in America" and feel a close bond of sympathy and mutual support in liberation struggles elsewhere. "Black Power," they write, "means that black people see themselves as part of a new force, sometimes called 'The Third World';...we see our struggle as closely related to liberation struggles around the world."[39] Guerrilla war appears sometimes as a means to their program, and sometimes as the only alternative left if their program is not accepted.

"Black Power," it appears, has a wide variety of interpretations that vary from the bloody revolutionary to the mildly pluralist. Moreover, the ambiguities are present in statements of its leading advocates. The analogies with guerrilla war that occur in Black Power statements are in the revolutionary rather than the pluralist vein. Popular though they are with panicked reporters as well as Black Power militants, they neglect some essential differences between ghetto riots and guerrilla war. Just because any of us may be tempted to use such words simply to stress the intensity of Negro disaffection expressed in the riots, they deserve sober comment. Even more because the ambiguities of "Black Power" on the subject of guerrilla war and insurrection betray a feeling of ambivalence on the part of advocates. "Black Power' cannot mean in practice "taking over the country;" and this is frequently explicit.[40] It cannot mean forceful takeover and withdrawal of even a part of the country -- though this may sometimes be less clear to its advocates. Why then apply the words "rebellion" and "guerrilla war" to the riots? Guerrilla war, as understood by its theoreticians and practitioners, is quite a different matter from our own urban disorders.

Take Guevara, a contemporary hero of the Black Power militants. His program for guerrilla war is neither a manual for using terror to influence the government to make reforms, nor is it a collection of recipes for violent expressions of protest and defiance of authority. It is a program for replacing that authority by force. The guerrilla band, on his view, starts by hiding in inaccessible parts of the countryside, moving rapidly from place to place, and makes its harassing first strike only against government outposts that it out-mans. Then after a sequence of successful harassing actions, it takes and occupies remote territory that can serve as a sanctuary, and with time occupies more and more of the country, primarily with rural support, until finally it is able to contest the government armed forces along defined fronts and annihilate them and seize power. The suburban and urban supporters play a subordinate role throughout. The peasants are crucial. Even if there is no revolutionary situation of the sort presupposed by other theorists as a necessary condition for revolution, a highly disciplined small leadership can create by means of the insurrection itself some of these conditions.

That is Guevara's theory. In fact, the realities of the successful guerrilla war in Cuba and of his unsuccessful actions in Bolivia and elsewhere were quite different. (In Cuba, for example, the peasant population with few exceptions was indifferent or hostile, and support was largely middle class. And the war of fixed fronts was invented after the fact to fit the theory.) However, the Negro riots here contrast both with the realities of Guevara's experience as well as with his theory of guerrilla war; they contrast equally with the theory and practice of Mao and Giap. The irrelevance of the countryside in the American case is among the least of the differences, More essential is the fact that the Cuban revolutionaries seriously aimed at taking power, and though small in number they made their appeal not on the basis of injustice to a small ethnic minority, but on the basis of restoring constitutional and other rights to the vast majority of Cubans who had been deprived of them. Other revolutionaries have announced more ambitious social change, but with equal universal appeal. The Negro minority, as the Black Militants keep being reminded, makes up only 11 percent of our country, and the reminder, though distasteful, is precisely in point.

A second and related difference has to do with territory. The subordinated ethnic groups that can realistically hope to seize power in other countries either make up the overwhelming majority of the population, as in South Africa or Rhodesia, or make up the majority of the population in one or two large contiguous territories within the country. In the latter case, secession is a realistic possibility. But ethnic minorities in the United States are not concentrated in one or two large contiguous areas. They are dispersed over the country in a multiplicity of rural areas and metropolitan centers. Their concentrations are small and local rather than large and national. The existence of ghettos means, of course, that there are many enclaves or neighborhoods where Negroes are majorities or nearly so. But none of these individually -- nor any set of them in combination -- could form a viable unit that is politically and economically independent of the white majority, or a separatist state of the kind currently advocated by Robert Browne. The geographical distribution of Negroes lends itself to disrupting the normal operations of government at many points in the United States, but not to replacing them.

Bayard Rustin has commented acutely on the implications of these demographic and territorial facts for the electoral politics of Black power:

...in Stokely Carmichael's extravagant rhetoric about "taking over" in districts of the South where Negroes are in the majority, it is important to recognize that Southern Negroes are only in a position to win a maximum of two congressional seats and control of eighty local counties. "Carmichael incidentally is in the paradoxical position of screaming at liberals -- wanting only to "get whitey off my back" -- and simultaneously needing their support; after all, he can talk about Negroes taking over Lowndes Country only because there is a fairly liberal federal government to protect him should Governor Wallace decide to eliminate this pocket of black power.) Now there might be a certain value in having two Negro congressmen from the South, but obviously they could do nothing by themselves to reconstruct the face of America.[41]

These considerations support one variety or another of coalition electoral politics. Perhaps those proposed by Bayard Rustin; more likely, we suspect, the loose ad hoc and shifting alliances suggested by James Q. Wilson. Wilson doubts the likelihood of a stable, organized, liberal coalition to say nothing of a radical one. In the South with the changes in Negro voting, he sees the upper middle class urban white as allies for the Negro against the lower and lower middle class rural whites. His political analysis seems broadly consistent with Becker's sort of economic model.

...the natural ally of the Southern Negro, for the foreseeable future, is the cosmopolitan white bourgeoisie. In part, this reflects self-interest: Negroes have a moral right to vote, to be free from arbitrary arrest, and to be protected from official abuse, even if century-old prejudices require that the Negro not live next door to whites. The issues now being pressed by the Negro in the South make the most fundamental claims of elementary justice; when the claims of simple justice are reinforced by self-interest, the potential for effective action is great. But his white ally has little interest in a massive redistribution of income, the nationalization of political authority, or the reordering of society.[42]