The Cross of Redemption Read Online Free PDF Page B

the West, there is such confusion. This panic is the real key, as Mr. Make pointed out, to what we call, in this country, anticommunism. The people who are running around throwing people in jail and ruining reputations and screaming about Communists wouldn’t know one if he fell from the ceiling. And wouldn’t care! What they are concerned about is propping up somehow the doctrine of white supremacy, so that they can seem to have given it up, but really still hold the power. Now this is not only obvious in American relations with South Africa in terms of economics. Nor is it only obvious in such things as the invasion of Cuba. It is obvious on a much more subtle level, and that is what attacks us here. It is something I call the new paternalism, which in a very curious way is foreshadowed by Mr. [Bobby] Kennedy’s statement. The key to that statement, as I understand it, is that when Negroes have achieved the Americanism of the Irish, they will be allowed to get to Washington. Now, to tell the truth, I personally do not feel that what I would like to see come out of the last three hundred years is another Kennedy. I think the price was too high, and I insist that I believe we are better than that.
    The confusion in this country that we call the Negro problem has nothing to do with the Negroes. And this is a fact. It has to do with the actual level of American life. And when I say this, I don’t mean the life that we have in the headlines, and that is celebrated in rhetoric, which fools only us. I mean the lives, the actual private lives, being led here on this continent as we sit here, from coast to coast. It is astonishing that in a country so devoted to the individual, so many people should be afraid to speak. It is astonishing that in a country so wealthy, and with nothing to fear in principle, everyone should be so joyless, so that you scarcely meet anyone who hasn’t just come from a psychiatrist, or isn’t just running off to one.
    I’m afraid we’ll have to face such facts as these. And it’s difficult in this country now. For example, it is difficult for me to take seriously the selling of Coca-Cola. You know I don’t blame you for making money, but the selling of soap is not really an endeavor worthy of man. Especially when it is accompanied by TV jingles. What I am trying to point out is that people who think that this is important are unable to realize that something else is. The only hope this country has is to turn overnight into a revolutionary country, and I say “revolutionary” in the most serious sense of that word: to undermine the standards by which the middle-class American lives. And, by the way, there is nothing but a middle class in this country, because no worker thinks of himself as a worker. He is going to graduate UP whenhe has two Fords instead of one. Now, the only hope we have is to undermine these peculiar standards, and I will be pleased to know that the American middle class does not live by the standards it uses to victimize me. The social habits of, let us say, Scarsdale, are not more reprehensible than the social habits of Harlem. Or vice versa. But in Harlem you are a target, and in Scarsdale you are covered.
    What are you covered by? This is another question we have to face sooner or later. We are covered by an outmoded Puritan God. Now you know, the Pilgrim fathers who came here with their God had never heard of Cubans; in fact, they had never heard of me. And this concept is not large enough, is not large enough, to embrace this peculiar country. It does not embrace me. If one only considers the difficulty I had to become a Christian when I thought I was, the impossibility for the African to become a Christian by imitating Europeans! And the impossibility of anyone in the world today, who wants to be free, becoming free by imitating us. And the world I’m talking about is most of the world.
    What can we do? Well, I am tired. I personally am tired of the double-talk about