In Chapter 3 of his book, The Temper Of Our Time, a chapter titled
The Negro Revolution. Eric Hoffer offers his take about blacks, their
nature, their challenges, their prospects. This Chapter 3 runs from
Page 47 to Page 69, and I will type it out and comment on it where
needed.
Here it is: Hoffer (H after this): “ 3
The Negro Revolution
The Plight of the Negro in America is that he is a Negro first and
only secondly an individual.”
My response: This bold declaration is dead accurate: blacks have been
and still are stereotyped racistly and racially, by others and by
themselves, as black first, and an individuals only second. As an
egoist morally and a supremely unbigoted person, I suggest that no
human being can get very far, if she does not insist that she be
regarded as an individual first, and a member of whatever racial or
other group associations she belongs to, only secondarily.
Indeed, I generalize and gently refute Hoffer’s proposition, which
may have been so in the 1970s—but need not be black destiny in
2026--that blacks are only their racial identity first, and
individuals second. Hoffer is not a racist, or much of one--as I too
am not a racist, or much of one--rather he likely was right to be
alarmed that that American blacks, due to their ancient tribal
history in Africa and perhaps by genetic predisposition are some of
the most collectivist, altruistic, and group-oriented people in the
world, and that genetic liability and their ancient communal
heritage, holds them down and back, from advancing, from making
wealth and pride for their people. The good news is they are as
smart, talented and able to develop morally as any other racial or
ethnic group, but they must become rational egoism to move forward.
To be groupist, altruistic, collectivistic and nonindividuating is to
be evil, emotional, immoderate, more criminally inclined, more
undeveloped and less enterprising than one otherwise would be.
It initially matters not whether blacks or any peoples who
communitarianism and groupism is holding them down and back, are able
to come up with a program of reform and progress which is the group
doing better as a whole, or isolated individuals in that group
excelling, excelling without their group’s support, and without
even aid from others of the group obstructing one. All must be
reform-oriented for things to get better.
The message is: blacks are smart and talented, as capable as anyone
else. That being my premise, there is no excuse for blacks as a
community and as individuals not to excel as well as the Jews or
Japanese have done consistently. With a pride in themselves
collectively and individually, that they are so proud and their
standards of individual performance are so high, demanding
consistent, perpetual, self-excellence in performance from
themselves, and nothing less, these individuators of color will
discover that by their own efforts and accomplishments, the sky is
the limit.
I believe Hoffer is writing this or suggesting this, even if he is
part-racist or stubbornly uses the word Negro. Deep down he knows
blacks can cut the mustard, and because they can, he wants no one to
baby them or feel sorry for them, or offer them welfare checks. Get
the hell out of the way, and just see what these fine people can do
on their own, without interference or subsidies.
It is time for black Americans to transcend and abandon as irrelevant
and old news, the black story as very communal, very group-oriented
people, who are irretrievably crippled and stunted due to a heritage,
whose lingering suffering from discrimination and being
psychologically crippled by a having ancestors who were enslaved in
America, predestines for American blacks a bleak future, a pitfall
constructed and distorted by altruist morality.
H: “Only when the Negro community as a whole performs something
that will win for it the admiration of the world will the Negro
individual be completely himself.”
My response: I work with many blacks, native Americans as well as
African immigrants, and I have know they do not lack ability at all,
but they need the Western values, and they need to work hard, and
build something technically, in farming, and in business, which no
other people have done: that will make them admired and respected
around the world, and such achievement will make them feel proud of
their own skill and abilities, and then they will be self-esteeming
individuals. From their industry, their originality and their
inventiveness, this is how blacks will come to esteem themselves, and
thusly win and earn the approving, onlooking world’s appreciation,
and there is no cheap substitute or that.
H: “Another way of putting it that the Negro in America need
pride—in his people, their achievements and their leaders—before
he can attain self-respect. At present, individual achievement cannot
cure the Negro’s soul, No matter how manifest his superiority as an
individual, he cannot savor ‘the unbought grace of life.’”
My response: There is no doubt that blacks come from a strong tribal
background in Africa, and that to some degree flavors how they live
and perceive, even today. If they maverize, then they can began to
feel proper, healthy pride and self-esteem, and the more their
leaders and more people in their community do likewise, it will be
easier to stand out and alone to achieve, and to feel accepted in
America as one of our cherished peoples and individuals, finally
being granted and feeling ‘the unbought grace of life which other
Americans more readily are granted by society, and receive from
society, a gift of social acceptance of one of the successful groups
of Americans, a sense of acceptance which motivates people to live up
to such a fine reputation, if they esteem themselves at all, and
perform to match this high self-image.
H: “The predicament of the Negro in America then, is that what he
needs most is something he cannot give himself; something, moreover,
which neither governments, nor legislatures, nor courts, but only the
Negro community as a whole, can give him.”
My response: If of course his community, through its leaders and
members do better, that reflects well upon the individual black, but
I go a bit beyond Hoffer here, and suggest as blacks maverize, more
and more and more of them commit themselves of a life of maverizing,
they as individuals can give themselves respect that way too.
H: “Despite the vehement protestations of Negro writers and
intellectuals, the Negro is not the white man’s problem.”
My response: It is a lie and a stunting, unworthy alibi for blacks or
any human being to protest that the Negro is the white man’s
problem. Each black, and each individual black, is her own problem.
Only she can choose to be nothing and amount to nothing; only she can
hold herself down and back, by simply refusing to work hard every day
to be a better woman, a better human being.
Only she can serve God and self-realize: if she accepts that she is
her own problem and she must solve her own problem, then, guided by
egoist-individualist morality to self-actualize, she will blaze in
the night sky like a meteor, and wondrous will her life of artistic
and intellectual achievement, and wealth accrual be to behold. Hoffer
does not suggest this explicitly, but it is implied by him, the quiet
egoist moralist.
H: “On the contrary, the white man is the Negro’s chief problem.”
My response: Yes, the white man is the Negro’s chief problem
because blaming whitey for one’s personal failure to excel for many
blacks, has long served as a useful rationale, for never getting off
of one’s duff, and becoming all that one can be.
The developing individuator does not look to others to save him, nor
does he look to others attributing to them the power to keep him down
and back. He regards others in this sense as irrelevant. He wills to
self-realize and their fumbling efforts to hold him down and back
within the pack of nonindividuators will fail. He lets none interfere
with his plan of action to individuate actively, and he wastes not
his life, time, energy and power allotment from God, seeking to
control others, to gain power over them, to prevent them from
self-realizing. Nor does he allow them to get a grip on him. None of
these dead-end, pointless games appeal to him any longer.
H: “As things are now, the Negro is what the white man says he
is—he knows himself only through white hearsay.”
My response: A groupist allows others to define him; black victims
have allowed white actual or putative victimizers to define who they
are, what they can do, what they are.
Blacks, like all humans, as rational egoists and individualists,
would spurn any attempt to define who they are and what are the upper
limits of their moral, intellectual, cultural and artistic
capacities. They would snarl defiantly in the face of any mouthy,
prescriptive define: “I define me; I define what I am and what I
can do. Get the hell out of my life and my affairs, forever.”
H: “That which corrodes the soul of the Negro is his monstrous
inner agreement with the prevailing prejudice against him. To annul
the white hearsay and be what he chooses to be the Negro must become
his own playwright, stage his own play, and cast himself in a role of
his own choosing. It must be a heroic play, staged in a part of the
country where the Negro’s wrongs are glaring, and the attempt to
redress them attended with deadly risks.”
My response: Hoffer’s wisdom and kindness towards blacks and all
people and peoples is magnificently on display in this paragraph just
above. Peoples and people must write their own narrative, be their
own playwrights, stage their own play, and cast themselves in the
role of individuators, in a specialty of their own choosing. This
heroic self-staging to live as a maverizer and living angel is not a
foolproof plan for success for blacks as individuals and as a block
of Americans, but it is the next best thing to it.
I suspect that native Americans (the Cherokees, the Navajos, and
isolated individuals in many bands and tribes across America) as
individuators within a tribalist community, like blacks, need to
bootstrap their way to richer, more enriching lives. They can do
this if they adopt rational egoism as their moral system and try real
hard to be all they can be.
H: “There are counties in Alabama and Mississippi, where Negroes
are a majority. If a single, such country, preferably a small one,
could be quietly organized to elect a sheriff and defend him from
interference from the outside, there would be set in motion a course
of events which could bring salvation to the Negro in every part of
the country. It would be salvation by disciplined, controlled
violence, with opportunities for magnanimity. If a Bull Connor or a
Sheriff Clark comes to such a county, he is disarmed, given a good
lunch, and driven back to the county line. To say that the odds are
enormous against such a staged small-scale Negro Alamo ending in
success is beside the point. Defeat here would mean more in
increments of Negro self-respect than any number of victories in New
York or San Francisco. The Negro needs genuine, unequivocal heroes.”
My response: Yes, Negroes need genuine, unequivocal heroes, heroic
men and women of color for black youth to look up to and emulate as
white boy scouts had white heroes to look up to and emulate.
H: “Martyrs or slogan-slingers cannot make history.”
My response: Social justice warriors are not heroic.
H: “Surely, if in Israel a few thousand fugitives from gas chambers
stood up on their hind legs and defied forty million Arabs it should
be possible for American Negroes to stand up to a pack of cowardly
white trash.”
My response: Amen.
H: “The black counties in Alabama and Mississippi are more truly
the homeland of the Negro than Palestine is the homeland of the Jew.
Yet one has the impression that the Negro has no taste for the
patient, quiet organizational work which is the taproot of any
durable social improvement.”
My response: If millions of American blacks were individuators, they
could readily united, cooperate and work, patiently, quietly at room
temperature, to do work as individuals and as a community, which
would impress no only themselves but the entire world. If blacks
believe they can do this, then sooner or later they will do it and
then the American “unbought grace of life” will be bestowed upon
them by society too.
H: “The prevailing feeling seems to be that everything the Negro
needs must come full grown from without.”
My response: That is complete false and erroneous: anything anyone
needs or hopes to achieve must be made, assembled, or fabricated by
the self for the self, or it is not an organic and lasting possession
constructed by the creator as a gift to that creator, a
self-generated homage to the creator.
H: “When James Baldwin went to Israel several years ago there was
something in him that kept him from seeing what he should have seen;
namely, a paradigm of what the weak can do to heal their souls.”
My response: The man works magic with words: Israel can serve as a
paradigm to blacks and native Americans of what the weak can do to
heal their souls.
H: “He wrote instead an article for Harper’s magazine in which he
said that a cynical Britain and a cynical America gave Palestine to
the Jews. To Baldwin it is self-evident if you have something because
someone gave it to you.”
My response: Baldwin the intellectual, the altruist and Leftist,
assumes you have something because the system gave it to you and you
lack something because the system deprived you of it. Nonsense, most
of the time you have something of substance when you earned it, and
none can deprive you of it, unless they are confiscatory tax
collectors, robbers or swindlers.
H: “He seems unaware of the fact that no one can give us freedom or
take away our shame and all that we can expect from others is that
they wish us well.”
My response: Amen, so eloquent.
H: “One begins to wonder whether the American Negro has the
capacity to create a genuine community with organs for cooperation
and self-help.”
My response: They had this capacity in tribal villages in Africa for
tens of thousands of years, so with egoist ethics and proper
self-pride here, they will come around.
H: “You strain your ears in vain amid the present Negro clamor for
a small voice saying, ‘Leave us alone and we will show you what we
can do.’ If it be true that the only effective way to help the
Negro is to help him help himself, then the Negro’s aversion to, or
perhaps incapacity for, a self-starting, do-it-yourself way of like
makes it questionable whether he can ever attain freedom and
self-respect. One cannot think of another instance where a minority
striving for equality has been so deficient in the capacity for
mutual aid and cooperation.”
My response: If black youth were brought up to work hard, discipline
themselves, to maverize under the guidance of egoist morality, no
doubt all of Hoffer's doubts above could be assuaged.
H: “Almost invariably when a Negro makes his mark in whatever walk
of life his impulse is to escape the way of life, the mores and the
atmosphere of the Negro people. He sees the Negro masses as a
millstone hanging around his neck, pulling him down, and keeping him
from rising to the heights of fortune and felicity. The well-off or
educated Negro may use his fellow Negroes to enrich himself (in
insurance, newspaper publishing, cosmetics) or to advance his career
in the professions or in politics, but he will not lift a finger to
lighten the burden of his people. Thus, the most enterprising and
ambitious segment of the Negro population has segregated itself from
the Negro millions who are left to wallow in the cesspools of
frustration which are the Negro ghettos.
The Negro leaders seem to have little faith in the character and
potentialities of the Negro masses. Their words and acts are largely
directed toward non-Negro America. They are not aware of the Negro
masses as a reservoir of power and an an instrument of destiny. And
this lack of faith in the Negro masses is dictating the singular
pattern of the Negro revolution. Its objectives, tactics, and
finances are not predicated on massive Negro backing.”
My response: It is very disturbing that black leaders and blacks who
are prosperous and have made it into the middle class and upper
classes are not giving back to their community, but more importantly
mentoring and sponsoring the young, showing them there is hope and a
concrete way forward that works, a path built upon getting educated,
obeying the law, working hard to provide for oneself, and forging a
personal dream of improvement, and then following through upon
chasing after it.
Once blacks like all Americans learn to live in accordance with
egoist ethics and a teleology of maverizing, it will not matter so
much what the leaders of the community think or believe about black
masses, though heroic individuals in the community who have made it
are always an inspiration to the aspiring young paying attention.
H: “A cursory check among my Negro fellow longshoreman on the San
Francisco waterfront (there are some 2,000 of them earning between
$7,000 and $10,000 a year) showed not one of these questioned have
been asked to contribute to the Negro cause and not one of them has
come near a CORE picket line, whereas many white longshoreman receive
requests for money from Negro organizations, and some of them, and
their daughters, are passionately involved in CORE affairs. Whether
it be legitimate or not to expect as much from the Negro as we expect
from ourselves (Negros are our equals, so we should not coddle them,
but expect always as much from them as we expect from ourselves—Ed
Says.), it is clear that we can expect little from the Negro so long
as he does not expect much from himself.”
My response: None can save anyone but oneself. No black or any other
human can be saved unless he expects and awful lot from himself and
works hard and creatively to make it happen..
H: “Since the revolution has no roots in the Negro masses it cannot
grow.”
My response: Another brilliant Hofferian insight: the only real
revolution lasting reform only comes from the bottom up, from the
people themselves as their promoters, implementers, sustainers. And
genuine reform or revolution must be, by the audience, accepted as
voluntary. The organizers educate and persuade only, and their
pressure is gentle, not punitive, legal, tolerant and peaceful. The
masses will only do something well if they heart is in it, if they
choose to adopt a program of personal or societal reform willingness,
not at gun point from thugs working for zealous elite interests.
H: “It cannot engage in long-range programs which after a period of
maturing may yield an abundance of striking results. It goes for
immediate, showy objectives. It operates wholly in the present, and
has no thought of the future. In the past, wherever there were many
wrongs to right, the one least capable of yielding palpable results
was attacked first. In early nineteenth century England the abuses
which called for remedy were many. There was unimaginable poverty
among the masses, and a lack of protection by the law of the weak,
yet the attack which rallied all the reforming forces was directed
against parliamentary corruption. One has the feeling that the
prospect of Negro equality would have been brighter had the first
target been disfranchisement rather than segregation. But the Negro
leaders, having no faith and no roots in the Negro masses, cannot
wait for votes to yield results. They cannot heed Nkrumah’s advice:
‘Seek ye first the political kingdom and all others shall be added
unto it.’”
My response: Hoffer is making the wise point that no reform is
genuine, embedded or lasting unless it is championed by the people
from the bottom up, an organic uprising of protest. If the people
initiate it or adopt this cause, then it takes root and they are
willing to change and personally commit to work towards, expanding
the reform in their personal lives socially and communally, as well
las legislatively in the community, the state, the nation.
Reform, at bottom is always a do-it-yourself, voluntary pledge, and
no college-educated leaders, elites or limousine white-liberals can
alter that basic reality, thus much of the black revolution since
World War II forward has ben artificial, superficial and skin-deep.
In other words, it never took hold because the masses weren’t in on
it, and never will be until and unless it is their idea.
For a movement or reform to become popular within the targeted
community or audience, the leaders must work with each member of the
masses who populate the community, doing the slow, heavy, arduous
lifting of persuading and revealing to them why joining and
personalizing the reform is advantageous and morally desirable.
Hoffer wants to see the black masses, from the bottom up, with some
help from their leaders and idealists at the top, take ownership of
their personal and group reform, and implement it in their private
lives first, and then secondarily as a political process or plan.
When and if black Americans adopt a love of capitalism, the
philosophy of individuation and egoist morality, there will be no
holding them back at all.
Hoffer is saying all of this or implying it, and many dismissed him
as a racist for his tough-love approach to telling blacks that they
must solve their own problems as individuals and as a minority, and
that the failure to make progress rest squarely on their shoulders,
not with anyone outside their community. Hoffer told blacks and
liberals in his day the truth, and they weren’t having it, and I
know he was marginalized by intellectuals and liberals, labeled and
smeared as a crude, heartless white supremacist, but he was nothing
of the sort. In his frank acceptance of blacks as his equals, he
expected them to bootstrap themselves up on their own financially,
culturally and as individuating individuals solely on their own, and
that liberating approach is one of love, respect and complete
non-racism. Progressives hate blacks, assuming they are inferior and
cannot make it on their own, which is utter tripe.
H: “The questionable nature (Questionable as fake cause, run by
clueless, phony idealists, Progressives with no understanding of
human nature and black natures, doomed to utter failure from the
get-go—Ed Says,) of the Negro revolution manifests itself in its
choice of enemies. It wants an abundant supply of tame enemies—real
enemies are too dangerous—and the way to come by tame enemies is to
declare that your friends, the white liberals, are enemies because
they are white. One can almost smell the psychological twist when a
James Baldwin or a LeRoi Jones vilifies and baits white liberals who
have championed the Negro cause their whole lives. So utterly
convinced are Baldwin and Jones of the irredeemable worthlessness
(None are worthless, let irredeemably so, unless that is how that
individual or his minority group choose to low-rate themselves; such
self-rejection is not true, but how one misperceives oneself does
become true or reality for any person who low-rates, underestimates
and short-changes himself: if he says he is no good, and cannot and
will not amount to anything, well, then, his future is set: failure,
loss, suffering and decline until he dies—Ed Says.) of the Negro
people that anyone who thinks well of the Negro must seem to them
simple-minded or just dishonest.
By a similar twist the Negro revolution tries to obtain tame
substitutes for its only legitimate substitutes.* (*This chapter
originally appeared in the New York Times Magazine in 1964 published
there in slightly different form. I do not know whether the
participation of the Negro masses in the civil rights movement has
increased appreciably in the last two years. There is still no vivid
awareness that genuine emancipation is a do-it-yourself job. There is
still a shying away from quiet, patient organization, and a penchant
for showy, quick results, and for tame enemies and tame
battlegrounds. There is still the illusion that achievements are
echos of words. The present clamor for Black Power conveys the
impression that power is something that comes in cans and all you
have to do is reach out and grab it.).”
My response: This entire asterisked paragraph is one of Hoffer’s
most articulate, accurate, incisive criticisms which he ever wrote. I
agree with it completely. Real revolution is personal, and an
individuator is the most revolutionary revolutionary to ever exist,
and her effort is quiet, gentle, peaceful, intellectual and conducted
by her with endless, patience, energy, will and focus. When enough
individuators become supercitizens and band together, they will
revolutionize first their county, their state, their country and the
world, and blacks are most welcome in this vanguard of reform, and
will do it as well or better than any one else, of any other color.
H: “Until recently, the revolution has had no stomach for
Mississippi and Alabama—except for occasional forays. Hence we find
the head of CORE in 1964 announcing to the world, from the steps of
the San Francisco City Hall, that San Francisco is Mississippi. The
Reverend Galamison from New York, who on that day happened to be in
our city, amplified the statement by saying that San Francisco is
worse than Mississippi. Even Martin Luther King is reported to have
said that the Negro’s real problem is in the North and not in the
South. In short, the voice of the Negro revolution is telling us day
in, day out, without hesitation and without qualification, that it is
we outside the South who are the Negro’s real enemies; it is we who
oppress him, exploit him, and brutalize him.”
My response: Hoffer like me is conservative but non-bigots in any
significant or harmful sense: we dispute and reject these reverse
racist historical accusations against white America and lovely
Americans by white Progressives and some blacks. We deny it all, and
welcome our black brothers and sisters to self-actualize, to be
empowered to get a handle personally each over her own life, not
worrying about the chattering class who makes personal success an
impossibility by making this a collectivist issue, about racist
groups versus groups of victims of color. It was all a lie and
unworkable and still is today. Only blacks’ adopting
Mavellonialist, liberating values will give these fine people an
actual, beneficial revolution, a way out and up; nothing else
matters, nothing else will work, nothing else is the unvarnished
truth, and Hoffer consciously and instinctively wrote of this 62
years ago as dangerous, empty foolishness.
H: “How does this sound to our ears, and how does my kind of people
react toward it?
The simple fact is that the people I have lived and worked with all
my life, and who make up 60 percent of the population outside the
South, have not the least feeling of guilt toward the Negro.”
My response: Whites should feel no guilt about blacks in America, and
if anyone in this great, noble nation of remarkable opportunity and
singular lack of bigotry cannot or has not made it, guilt should be
felt, but only by every person who is a nonindividuator, who has not
cut the mustard, because she has refused to discipline herself
sufficient to will, work and think big, so she can cut the mustard.
Success and liberation is a do-it-yourself task, and one should feel
guilty if one took the easy, lazy, cowardly way of, drifting through
life, amounting to little or nothing, playing the victim, that
dastardly excuse, the lie which justifies a life of non-action,
non-self-improvement and personal mediocre track records. Each failed
person, black or white, has only herself to blame if she is a
failure, and she should feel guilty. If she made it, she has only
herself to praise for getting it done, and she has a right to feel
proud of what she determined to get done, a life of talent potential
be actuated, a gift back to God, growing cosmos, growing God’s
kingdom here on earth.
H: “The majority of us started to work for a living in our teens,
and we have been poor all our lives. Most of us have only a
rudimentary education. Our white skin bought us no privileges and no
favors. For more than twenty years I worked in the fields of
California with Negroes, and now and then for Negro contractors. On
the San Francisco waterfront, where I spent the next twenty years,
there are as many black longshoreman as white. My kind of people do
not feel the world owes us anything, or that we owe anybody—white,
black, or yellow—a damn thing.”
My response: We owe no one anything and no one owes us anything. We
should enslave no one and hurt no one, and we cannot allow anyone to
enslave us or hurt us. There is the presupposition of moderate
morality as the base of egoism, that we make it on our own, and we
live off of none, and that is love, pure love, and any other Leftist
or Fascist effort or scheme to link or clump people together as
group-identifiers is racism, cruelty and hatred, naked, pure and
operational.
H: “We believe the Negro should have every right we have: (quality
of opportunity, not quotas, hiring and promotional preferences or
guaranteed, legislated equality of outcome—Ed Says.) the right to
vote, the right to join any union open to us, the right to live,
work, study and play anywhere he pleases. But he can have no special
claims on us, and no valid grievances against us.”
My response: I agree.
H: “He certainly has not done our work for us. Our hands are more
gnarled and workbroken than his, and our faces are more lined and
worn. A hundred Baldwins could not convince me that the Negro
longshoreman that come in every morning to our hiring hall shouting,
joshing, eating, and drinking are haunted by bad dreams and memories
of miserable childhoods, that they feel deprived, disabled, degraded,
oppressed, and humiliated. The drawn faces in the hall, the brooding
backs, and the sullen, hunched figures are not those of Negroes.
Equally absurd is the contention that the American Negro is alienated
from America. Despite discrimination, the Negro actually seems more
at home in this country than any other segment of the population. It
is doubtful whether even the Negro intellectual could transplant
himself and prosper. The white men who populated this continent, most
of them peasants, were not the type that transplant well. Their
incredible homesickness not only made them perpetual wanderers but
also gave them a feeling of being strangers on this planet; it drove
them to impose their own man-made world on God’s creation to a
degree never attempted before, and undoubtedly contributed to
America’s unprecedented dynamism.
Even when it tries to be gentle, the voice of the Negro revolution
grates on us and fills us with scorn. The Negro seems to say: ‘Lift
me up in your arms. I am an abandoned and abused child. Adopt me as
your favorite son. Feed me, clothe me, educate me, love me, baby me.
You must do it right away or I shall set your house on fire or rot at
your doorsteps and poison the air that you breathe.’
To sum up: The Negro revolution is a fraud.”
My response: Hoffer is repudiating the Negro’s revolutions’s
legitimacy and his tough love, no-holds-barred criticism of the
leftist liberation motif might be just what is needed.
H: “It has no faith in the character and potentialities of the
Negro masses. It has no taste for real enemies, real battlegrounds,
and desperate situations. It wants cheap victories and the easy way.
A genuine mass movement does not shy away from desperate situations.
It wants above all to prove the validity and potency of its faith,
and this it can do only by acting against overwhelming odds, so that
whatever it achieves partakes of the miraculous. Indeed, where there
are no difficulties the true revolutionary will deliberately create
them, and it often looks as if the chief function of his faith is to
get the revolutionary out of difficulties he himself created.
I have said that the Negro outside the South can have no special
claims on us and no valid grievance against us. This does not mean
that the Negro is not in real trouble and that he has no desperate
problems which others do not have to face.
This country has always seemed good to me chiefly because, most of
the time, I can be a human being first and only secondly something
else—a workingman, an American, etc. It is not so with the Negro.
His chief plight is that in America he cannot be first of all a human
being. This is particularly galling to the Negro intellectual and to
Negros who have gotten ahead: no matter what and how much they have,
they seem to lack the one thing they want most. There is no
frustration greater than this.”
My response: I accept that Hoffer is likely correct that in his day
and perhaps even now blacks, no matter how successful, could not be
treated as a human being first, thus enjoying the unbought grace of
life that whites like Hoffer himself enjoyed and were granted by the
community and society. My suggestion to blacks and any person not
treated as a human being first, not granted the unbought grace of
life which make them feel welcome and secure in the community or
nation that they work and thrive in—if they are thriving—I say
let none define yourself: maverize and buy that respect for yourself,
by that unbought grace of life for yourself, no matter if 99% of
other American insist still upon denying you the unbought grace of
life, the human right to be treated as a human being first. If you
declare yourself special and wonderful and maverize, then eventually
the rest of society will catch up and agree with your
self-descriptive characterization of yourself as worthy of the
unbought grace of life being granted you, that you must be treated as
a human being first. Blacks cannot thrive until they grant themselves
first and foremost these self-assignations whether society confirms
that self assessment or not.
H: “Second, if every trace of discrimination was wiped out
overnight, the Negro outside the South would still be in the throes
of a soul-wrenching crisis, and we must know something of the nature
of this crisis if we are to make sense of what is happening in the
Negro ghetto. The Negro writer Ralph Ellison has pointed out that the
American Negro is now undergoing a double drastic change. By merely
crossing the Mason-Dixon Line he steps from feudalism into the
maelstroms of industrialism, and from legal subjection to legal
equality. Now, everything we have learned about the pains and
difficulties inherent in an adjustment to the new underlines the
enormous handicaps which beset the Negro in any attempt to begin a
new life and become a new man.”
My response: Hoffer is right that blacks coming from Dixie to the
North faced very stressful adjustments in finding work in the
industrialized North, and being flung into an area where legal
equality was a reality, but, that is no reason for blacks then or now
to cease adjusting and being reborn as maverizers, because it is too
hard for them. Blacks who I work with resonate no lack of
intelligence or talent which I can detect, so, they just need to
make small adjustments as each of them reinvent themselves, and just
keep at it, until they catch up, succeed and more or less match or
beat whitey at his own game. Daunting yes, Mr, Hoffer, but doable.
H: “The Negroes who emigrate from the South cannot repeat the
experience of the millions of European immigrants who came to this
country. The European immigrants not only had an almost virgin
continent at their disposal and unlimited opportunities for
individual advancement but were automatically processed on their
arrival into new men: they had to learn a new language and adopt a
new mode of dress, a new diet, and often a new name. The Negro
immigrants find only meager opportunities for self-advancement and do
not undergo the ‘exodus experience,’ which would strip them of
traditions and habits and give them a feeling of being born anew.
Above all, the fact that in America, and perhaps in any white
environment, the Negro remains a Negro first, no matter what he
becomes, puts the attainment of a new individual identity beyond his
reach.”
My response: I do not underestimate Hoffer’s pessimistic assessment
that it is harder for blacks to be born again as American
individualists with a uniquely American identity, harder by far for
them than for immigrant whites of the last century. But I refuse to
accept that there cannot be blacks transitioning from being
collectivist peoples from the poor, racist South who can never take
on the new identity as prosperous, freer American individualists. If
and as real esteem was earned and gained by each of them through
their own efforts, while being a person of color, if blacks had
training in individuating and egoist ethics, they could make the
transition and it would help if whites would welcome then to be
individualists who have the American identity as upper middle class
patriots and lovers of America with conservative and republican
values loving freedom, prosperity and civili society and a love of
western values. If white could show by example, by encouraging and
informing blacks who are successful that they can go call the way to
being accepted as they are reborn as anarchist individualistic
supercitizens, then they--blacks--could transcend all the challenges,
daunting and substantive, which have prevented blacks in America from
historically individuating as a personal victory and life story. For
each black adult, so a desirable goal will be difficult but doable if
they work hard enough, long enough and self realize.
Get going make God, yourself and your people and all whites white
proud of you, the new you that has made constructed and donned a new
personal identity as an American patriot, an America lover, an
American rational egoist and individualist first, then a black person
and a member of the black ethnic group second, that there can be
blacks adopting this new identity which they come to love and
promote, and their self-esteem and happiness would climb through the
roof..
H: “Mr. Ellison describes the fantastic forms which the groping for
a new identity often assumes in the bedlam atmosphere of the Negro
ghetto: ‘Life becomes a masquerade, exotic costumes are worn every
day. Those who cannot afford to hire a horse wear riding habits;
others who could not afford a hunting trip or who seldom attend
sporting events carry shooting sticks.’”
My response: It seems commonly recognized that black Americans have a
flare for bright colors in their clothing, exotic, flamboyant dress
and perhaps an exhibitionistic proclivity to be striking and
noticeable in demeanor, and that is surface self-expression, more to
do with being extroverted, than communicating one’s individuality
as an individuator.
It matters not one whit to me how fantastic anyone, black, white or
another hue, dresses or speaks, but what counts is their
intelligence, their love of philosophy, their original thinking,
their artistic development, their beautiful moral characters, nature
and crafted over time.
H: “It seems doubtful, therefore, whether the Negro can adjust
himself to a new existence as an individual on his own. He cannot
cross alone the desert of transition an enter an individual promised
land. Nor can he avail himself of a genuine mass movement to give him
a sense of rebirth and sustain him until he can stand on his own two
feet.”
My response: Again, blacks may need help from white or their own
black peer groups to nudge them towards becoming reborn as
individualists and individuators, and to some degree each of them can
do it on their own. My solution is that every avenue should be
presented to blacks to help them become reborn as American
individuators and America-loving patriots.
We may be able to get this done without a black mass movement in
America.
H: “Up to now, America has not been a good milieu for the rise of a
mass movement (We are too wealthy, too moderate and too egoistic,
which leads to per capita fairly high individual self-esteem, and
those who esteem themselves, are not discontented enough in quiet
times, or frustrated enough in time of turmoil to seek out a rising
mass movement in America—though cultural postmodernism is going
strong and dangerously as the first successful mass movement to take
hold in America—a sure sign that Americans lack self-esteem now,
that they are frustrated, passionate and groupist--Ed Says.).
What starts out here as a mass movement ends up as a racket, a cult
or a corporation. Unlike those anywhere else, the masses in America
have never despaired of the present and are not willing to sacrifice
it for a new life and a new world.”
My response: Note that Hoffer labels shattered, lost souls seeking to
find refuge from their hated selves by fleeing into the collective
matrix, the sociological and metaphysical phenomena which is a
current mass movement, as willing to sacrifice the present and their
own lives, and he is not normatively approving of self-sacrificing,
and in this way, again I see some convergence of thinking between him
and Ayn Rand, though she rejects any sort of self-sacrificing as
unfortunate and wicked.
H: “In this, the American Negro, despite his handicaps, does not
differ fundamentally from his fellow Americans. He has no extravagant
dreams, visions, and no wild hopes. He cannot conceive of anything
more grand and desirable than the life lived by a middle-class
American. Another way of putting it is that the American Negro
minority is more American than minority. It cannot generate the
alchemy of the soul which enables ‘the weak things of the world to
confound the things which are mighty . . . and things which are not
to bring to nought things that are.’ Like his fellow Americans, the
Negro sets his heart no on ‘things which are not’ but on things
he sees in store windows.”
My response: It comforts me to accept the reassuring truth that
American blacks are American to their core, and could not go home to
Africa again. It gives me hope that black Americans, who since World
War II, have done so well integrated into the US military
institutions, that they will be able to adopt full acceptance and
living in accordance with individuating, rational egoism and loyalty
to The American Way Culture, which will bring them fully into the
‘normal grouping of regular Americans who then enjoy the unbought
grace of life, which accompanies being part of this society, deep
down, and that comforts a people mightily.
H: “Hence, when the Negro masses act, you have looting orgies and
not a mass movement. It is questionable, therefore, whether it will
be a mass movement that would cure the ‘nowhereness’ and
‘nobodyness’ of the Negro ghetto and lead the Negro out of the
present crisis.
But what of Elijah Muhammad and the Black Muslim movement. Alone of
all the Negro leaders Elijah Muhammad has a vivid awareness of the
vital need of a new birth in any drastic human transformation, and he
alone has mastered the technique of staging a new identity. In one
sense the Black Muslim is trying to do to the Negro what America
automatically did to the millions of immigrants from Europe. By
joining the Nation Of Islam the Negro is stripped of his habits,
attitudes, opinions, beliefs, etc. He is given a new name, a new
religion, and a new way of life. He is processed into a new man. That
in order to do this Elijah Muhammad had to concoct doctrines of
breathtaking, almost insane, absurdity should not come as a total
surprise to anyone aware of the fantastic quality of man’s nature.
Often in human affairs the simplest ends can only be reached by the
most roundabout and outlandish means. And the fact is that the Black
Muslim movement can point to many solid achievements. It has
transformed idlers, criminals, junkies, and drunkards into
clean-living, purposeful human beings.”
My response: If we reach out to the black community and use
persuasion and steady pressure to invite their people to become
reborn—not by such drastic, collectivistic, cultish means as the
Black Muslim movement--to transform and create themselves each by her
own efforts, reborn as a singular individuator, over time, we can
help blacks become solid, contributing Americans, not a drag on the
system any more.
H: “Yet it is highly doubtful whether in this country the Nation of
Islam could ever become a movement of powerful sweep and drive.
America simply is not favorable for the unfolding and endurance of
genuine mass movements. The enormous digestive and assimilative
capacity of this country is nowhere demonstrated more strikingly than
in what it has done to mass movements. It has made of Puritanism a
forcing house of successful capitalists; it turned Mormonism into a
school of business tycoons; and even American Communism is becoming a
preparatory school for successful real-estate dealers.* (*On the San
Francisco waterfront the Communists are the most effective
capitalists.) And now the Black Muslim movement is being
Americanized; it is equipping its converts for success in practical
affairs. If Elijah Muhammad or his successor has vision, he will
realize that the future of his movement lies not in America but in
Africa. It is conceivable that an Islamic heresy hatched by Negroes,
preaching the primacy of the Negro race, and coupled with American
industrial knowhow might become an unequaled instrument of empire in
Africa. It confined to America, the Black Muslim movement may
eventually become a holding company of stores, banks, factories, and
farms. The most it could aspire to would be a miniature Utah with a
mosque in its new capital of New Mecca.
As to the other black nationalist groups which are springing up
across the country, they are manifestations of the Negro’s passion
for alibis and the easy way out. They are a plunge toward the
impossible to escape the arduous tasked required to attain the
possible. As a black nationalist all you have to do is shoot your
mouth off about the fire next time, and about grabbing six or seven
Southern states, founding a Negro empire and breathing down the neck
of a cornered, frightened white America. Your heart swells with
heroic negritude, and you don’t have to lift a finger to do a
thing.
Finally, I cannot see how the American Negro can escape the identity
crisis by identifying himself, in the world of Martin Luther King,
‘with his black brothers of Africa and his brown and yellow
brothers of Asia, South America and the Caribbean.’ Assuming, as I
must, that the American Negro is as American as I am, I cannot see at
present in the whole of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, a single
achievement, a single personality even, to inspire me with
wholehearted admiration, to set my heart and mind on fire, and prompt
me to identify myself with it. It is possible to see how a James
Baldwin or a Malcom X, lusting for a taste of power, can identify
himself with a pseudointellectual dictator like Nkrumah. But it is
inconceivable that a Negro longshoreman should swell with pride at
the thought of a megalomaniac pie-card who fancies himself a lord of
creation.
Surely, it should be the other way around: it is the American Negro
who should demonstrate to the world what Negro energy, initiative,
skill, and guts can do, and serve as an object of identification for
Negroes everywhere.”
My response: I agree: as individuators American blacks would be
exception thinkers, workers, inventors, poets, producers.
H: “It is the American Negro that the new Negro nations of Africa
should be able to turn when they want to build factories, dams, and
railroads, or create an army, or start an irrigation system. Again
one cannot help thinking that what a handful of Jews in Israel have
done for the self-respect of Jews everywhere, and what they are doing
to help new nations in Asia and Africa, should not be so utterly
beyond the reach of twenty million American Negroes who breathe the
air we breathe and share the work we do.
The question remains: What can the American Negro do to heal his soul
and clothe himself with a desirable identity? It has to be a
do-it-yourself job. Anything done to and for the Negro must be done
by Negroes.”
My response: Right on.
H: “There cannot be a non-Negro Moses leading Negroes to a promised
land. Non-Negro Americans can only offer money and goodwill. As we
have seen, the Negro cannot look for a genuine mass movement to lead
him out of the frustration of Negro ghettos, nor can he attain
self-respect by an identification of Negroes and negritude outside
America. What, then, is left for him to do?
The only road left for the Negro is community building. Whether he
wills it or not, the Negro in America belongs to a distinct group,
yet he is without the values and satisfactions which people usually
obtain by joining a group. When we become members of a group, we
acquire a desirable identity, and derive a sense of worth and
usefulness by sharing in the efforts and achievements of the group.
Clearly, it is the Negro’s chief task to convert this formless and
purposeless group to which he is irrevocably bound into a genuine
community capable of effort and achievement and which can inspire its
members with pride and hope.
Whereas the American mental climate is not favorable to the emergence
of mass movements, it is ideal for the building of viable
communities; and the capacity for community building is widely
diffused. When we speak of the American as a skilled person we have
in mind not only his technical but also his political and social
skills.”
My response: For any community of individualists to thrive, the
population needs technical skills but social and political skills
too—great point.
H: “Once, during the Great Depression, a construction company that
had to build a road in the San Bernardino Mountains sent down two
trucks to the Los Angeles skid row, and any who could climb onto the
truck was hired. When the trucks were full, the drivers put in the
tailgates and drove off. They dumped us on the side of a hill in the
San Bernardino Mountains, where we found bundles of supplies and
equipment. The company had only one man on the spot. We began to sort
ourselves out: there were so many carpenters, electricians,
mechanics, jackhammers, and even foreman. We put up the tents and the
cook shack, fixed latrines and a shower bath, cooked supper, and the
next morning went out to build a road. If we had to write a
constitution we probably would have had someone who knew all the
whereases and wherefores. We were a shovelful of slime scooped off
the pavement of skid row, yet we could have built America on the side
of a hill in the San Bernardino Mountains.
I have no way of telling whether two truckloads of Negroes would have
performed as well. (If they are egoists and individualists, they
could do it—Ed Says.) What I know is that the distance between the
average and the exceptional is greater in a Negro than in a white
group; and it is plausible that a Negro group might have needed an
injection of leadership from without to get organized. (If they were
egoists and individualists as white culturally are predisposed to be,
they would need only minimal supervision as was afforded the white
skid row workers building the San Bernardino Mountain Road—Ed
Says.) This suggests that the mobilization of Negro energies is
hardly conceivable without the reintegration of the Negro middle
class with the Negro masses.”
My response: It would help blacks perhaps the most, but any ghetto
population of any color or nationality would do better with middle
class people of their own color working with them to get projects
done, for middle class and upper class people are more egoistic and
individualistic than are the super-rich and the impoverished.
H: “When I speak of vigorous Negro communities, I do not mean Negro
ghettos. You can have an effectively functioning Negro community
even when its members live anywhere they please. What I have in mind
is Negro centers, societies, agencies, loan associations, athletic
clubs, and the like. You can see such communal organs functioning
among the Jewish, Japanese, Chinese, and other minorities. My feeling
is that right now the Negro in San Francisco, and probably elsewhere,
is ripe for some grand cooperative effort. It could be the building
of a model Negro suburb, or a Negro hospital, a Negro theater, a
Negro theater for music and dance, or even a model elementary or
trade school. You need dedicated men and women to mobilize and
canalize abilities and money toward a cherished goal. It is being
done in America every day by all sorts of people. Someone has to
start these things—a single individual or a small group. In San
Francisco the two thousand affluent longshoreman could be such a
group.
The healing of the Negro by community building will be a slow
process, and the end results, though a durable source of pride and
solid satisfaction, will not be heavenly. There is no heaven on earth
and no promised land waiting for the Negro around the corner. Only
the rights and the burdens and the humdrum life of the
run-of-the-mill American.”
My response: Hoffer seems racist and he may be a bit, as we all are,
but, substantively he is not. He knows only blacks can save blacks at
all, and only individual blacks can liberate themselves to work and
self-actualize as individuals who flourish because they self-realize.
It is hard work and slow going, but worth whatever the individual is
willing to expend to be all she can be. Black people are loaded with
intelligence and talent, but each of them must agree to enjoy their
tribal tradition, a holdover from tribal living in Africa hundreds of
years ago, a heritage crippling blacks as a minority and as
individuals, with all the tribal stressing of altruist morality,
collectivist economics and polity, group-living, group-identifying,
and support for lives of nonindividuating.
