people, is made to appear "inherent" in the white masses, who are victims of the
same ruling class. Of course, the poison of chauvinism infiltrates the ranks of the masses
of the oppressor nation; and to the extent that they fail to join in fighting alliance
with the subject nation, they bear an onus for the national oppression and for the
pernicious chauvinist ideology. But the chauvinism which these white masses manifest is
alien to their interests and to their class morality, and has to be purged from their
midst. Indeed, the very idea that chauvinism is inherent is itself chauvinist. Such films
serve their purpose as brakes on joint mass action of Negroes and whites. They have the
effect of disorienting the white masses from the clear view of their
responsibilities–inseparable from their own interests–to the oppressed Negro people. To
that extent, they retard the development of the broad people’s unity so vitally necessary
in today’s grim struggle against war and fascism, so vitally necessary for the national
liberation of the Negro people and for the achievement of Socialism.
These "Negro interest" films appear at the very time when the Negro people
are being subjected to increasing discrimination and oppression. The falsity of these
films in artistic terms is in measure to their political service to reaction. They distort
the reality of the Negro people’s struggle, which is concerned with jobs, housing,
education, equal rights, and peace.
American imperialism aims with its Truman "New Look" demagogy to convince the
Negro people in upsurge that their fate is safely in the hands of the "best"
white folk, that their social condition is every day in every way getting better and
better, and that therefore they should tolerate "occasional" Georgia lynchings
or Harlem police shootings, and pay no heed to the "trouble-making" Paul
Robesons and Ben Davises. This propaganda tries to conceal the persistent
failure–chargeable to both parties of capitalism–to establish a Fair Employment
Practices Commission, to enact anti-poll tax and anti-lynching legislation, to outlaw Jim
Crow in the armed forces, and to pass a Federal civil rights measure. It puts a veil over
the systematic exclusion of Negro workers from positions in basic industries limitedly
acquired in war time, through wholesale firings, down-grading on the jobs, and restriction
of job openings to the hardest and most menial work. This general condition is reflected
in the sharp rise of Negro unemployment: In New York, as of 1949, Negroes constituted
about 20 per cent of all unemployed, whereas their population percentage (according to
data from the preliminary census of 1950) is 9.5 per cent; in Chicago and Toledo, nearly
half of the registered unemployed were Negroes. (The Economic Crisis and the Cold War, edited
by James C. Allen and Doxey Wilkerson, New Century Publishers, New York, 1949, p. 70). In
city after city, the majority of the unemployed Negro workers have already consumed their
unemployment insurance and are at the mercy of inadequate and precarious relief
dispensations.
Truman’s showy "civil rights" bunting would cover up the shocking living
conditions in Negro ghetto communities–such appalling facts as that rentals in Harlem’s
dilapidated, rat-infested, stifling tenements consume 45 percent of the family income, as
against 20 percent in the rest of Manhattan; that Harlem’s maternal death rate is double
that of the rest of New York City’s and its tuberculosis rate quadruple (See Look magazine’s
article "Harlem … New York’s Tinder Box," December 6, 1949, by its staff
writer, Lewis W. Gillenson).
And in the field of education the President’s "civil rights" demagoguery
would drown out the growing protests against the quota system for Negro students in
colleges, and against the appalling segregation in public schools legally authorized in
twenty-one states and the District of Columbia, and permitted in eleven others. (See the
article, "Civil Rights and Minorities" by Paul Hartman and Morton Puner, New
Republic, January 30, 1950.) In the sphere of the arts and professions the same
demagoguery would silence indignation against the notorious discriminatory practices, as
shockingly exposed in March, 1947, at the conference of the Cultural Division of the
former National Negro Congress. (For some of the facts relating to discrimination against
Negro artists and workers in the cultural media, see Culture in a Changing World,
by V. J. Jerome, New Century Publishers, 1947, pp. 31-33). In the sphere alone of our
present survey, the film industry, we must take sharp note of the fact that Hollywood does
not employ a single Negro writer, director, sound man, cameraman, or other technician.
And, as we have seen in regard to the very films that are offered as an earnest of a
"new approach" to the Negro people, in two of the four pictures in the cycle the
major Negro characters were denied to Negro actors. In the face of these glaring facts,
Mrs. Roosevelt writes:
Things have been improving in the economic field and in education for the colored
people. I would also say in the field of arts that there is an increasing opportunity for
them to gain recognition on an equal basis. But if Mr. Robeson succeeds in labelling his
race as a group as Communists, many of these gains will be lost, I am afraid, in the
future (New York World Telegram, November 3, 1949).
In plain words, the Negro people must be made to under, stand: either you line up on
the political side the "best" white people choose for you, or else–. This is
the same Mrs. Roosevelt, chairman of the U.N. Human Rights Commission which was castigated
in a group petition prepared by the eminent Negro scholar Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois: "We
charge that the Human Rights Commission under Eleanor Roosevelt, its chairman . . . have
consistently and deliberately ignored scientific procedure and just treatment to the hurt
and hounded of the world" (National Guardian, December 5, 1949).
Imperialism draws willing aides for its chauvinist propganda from the reactionary
Social-Democrats and reformist labor leaders, as well as from Negro bourgeois nationalist
leaders. Their role in the mass organizations of the Negro people and among Negro trade
unionists is to undermine the self-confidence and arrest the militant advance of the Negro
people’s movement, and, above all, to thwart the historical alliance of that movement
with the American working class. In the concrete terms of today, their assistance to
imperialism is aimed at "selling" Wall Street’s war program to the Negro masses.
In this light, we can perhaps more readily understand the policy of
"elevating" certain upper-stratum Negro leaders which serves to give the
impression of full integration of the Negro people in American life. American imperialism
cultivates in this period a tissue-thin top layer of Negro aristocracy, while it
intensifies white ruling-class violence and terror, both legal and extra-legal. This new
tactic is designed to reinforce its ideological transmission belt among the Negro people
and to bring false comfort to the angry Negro masses in order to blind them with illusions
and blunt their capacity for struggle, in order to break their resistance to the
despoilers and warmongers.
The sundry misleaders of the Negro people constitute a grave threat to the present
status and future development of its liberation movement. For it should be clear that the
movement of the Negro people cannot go forward today unless it marches shoulder to
shoulder with the world anti-imperialist front of struggle for peace and national freedom.
By the same logic of historical necessity, the peace front in the United States today
cannot advance unless it makes the fight for Negro rights an organic part of its struggle.
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