Hoffer On Blacks

 

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.