White Ethics and Black Power

The Emergence of the West Side Organization

William W. Ellis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351299183
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The disparity between the ideal, a democratic America, and the reality, racial oppression and poverty, is so great that serious voices among blacks, students, and others challenged the ethical foundations of the nation in the 1960s. Local political organizations emerging out of black ghettos led a black revolt, asserting a revolutionary black nationalism rather than social reform and integration. For those blacks, white America could no longer dictate right and wrong, and certainly could no longer tell blacks how best to pursue their goals. This feeling was so strong among the adherents of the new militant movements formed under the political symbolism of "black power" that they questioned all white ethical institutions. These new movements bargained and contended with whites, even worked closely with them for many purposes, but always with suspicion and caution.

White Ethics and Black Power describes racial relations during this period. It examines the careers and philosophies of the leadership of a community organization, illuminating the complex relationship between white America and the new black power movements, between America and its interpretation of itself on the one hand, and the experience of black and oppressed peoples in America on the other. Redefining social science as a means--through education and research--of improving the quality of American life, William Ellis derides non-participatory social science as a hoax and asks the social scientist to make clear his moral commitment: to the people he studies or to the establishment that funds him.

Controversial in its ideology, its passion, and its scorn of racist America, this volume remains the only openly partisan social scientific analysis into the nature of this American crisis. Readers may not agree with the views expressed by the author, but they cannot ignore this book's relevance to any understanding of black-white relationships. Unique in the literature, White Ethics and Black Power not only explains black power, but offers hope for meaningful change.

PART

I

INTRODUCTION

1

UNDERSTANDING WSO

What follows is an exploratory study, which is another way of saying that it was initially undertaken without a clearly defined research design, but with the notion that its chief result would be some knowledge about what questions should be asked of social configurations like the West Side Organization in future researches. This is not to say that I began with no ideas, with no notions of what to look for and of what to ignore.

My initial interests in WSO were very simple. At a suburban meeting of some middle class friends of the organization, I learned a number of things in a conversation with Eugene Harris, an official of the organization, that compelled my attention. First, it was clear that the West Side Organization was controlled by black people in a black community in which the material conditions of life are as bad as in any urban slum in America. Second, it seemed that the men from the West Side Organization present at the meeting were intelligent, articulate, and aggressive, though only one had been educated past high school. Third, Harris told me a bit about the spirit of the organization: he said many of its staff members had given up their jobs to work for a meager salary in the organization. He said the organization was “their religion.” He described the headquarters as run-down, but open and congenial to people on the West Side. He told me a bit about the dispatch and efficiency with which the organization handles its business. But perhaps the fact that I was most taken by was that these were men, not the usual young students and middle-aged social reformers who have carried many such organizations in the past, but strong, confident, intelligent black men who had begun to speak and to act politically on their own behalf.

I found all of this very interesting and sought first to work for the West Side Organization and, ultimately, to explain it to others.

The Inadequacy of the Usual Methods and Techniques

To explain adequately the West Side Organization, it is important to indicate how I know about it so that the reader will not be entirely at the mercy of the assertions in this report. This knowledge is especially important and difficult in this study because the ways of knowing—methods and techniques of research—usually employed by political scientists are not adequate to learn about the West Side Organization and similar social configurations.

The usual methods (overall research strategies) utilized in the approach of modern political science to the social world may be characterized by the preoccupation with objective social realities. The scientist is primarily concerned with describing a given situation in terms of how he sees it; and even when he is concerned with how participants in a situation view their lives, his efforts are to describe their world in his (the scientist’s) terms.

The techniques of data collection usually employed by political scientists are really quite restricted. Though most of the major data collection techniques that have been employed by the greater community of social scientists—including sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, and others, as well as political scientists—have at one time or other been utilized in political research, only a few of them have been widely used in the studies reported in the literature of contemporary political science.

Foremost among these are the techniques making up the research operation known as the sample survey. Usually in a sample survey researchers select respondents from a group of people on a chance basis, with the notion that by studying a “sample” of a group, they can economically make generalizations about what the entire group thinks, feels, or does with regard to the subjects around which a given inquiry is centered. They design questions aimed at eliciting responses from the selected individuals that will become “data” representing the behavior of interest. The questions are tried out on a few individuals in a “pre-test” to provide some notion of how the questions can be improved—that is, how they can be sharpened to elicit the desired kinds of responses, and to allow interviews to go smoothly. Then interviewers are trained to administer the questions, and finally, the questions are asked. In a sample survey national in scope the administrative task is enormous; the communications necessary to insure that the questions are being asked in a uniform fashion of all subjects are extensive. The data—responses to the questions—are ultimately compiled in a central place, analyzed, and brought to bear on the research questions central to the project.

The sample survey has been utilized to provide answers to many different kinds of research questions—from how best to market a new brand of cigarettes to how best to market a new presidential candidate. Though the techniques are remarkably flexible, providing many possibilities for researchers with divergent interests, with the dramatic increase in their use since World War II and their consequent reporting in newspapers and slick magazines, they have become familiar to the public mind and, unhappily, stereotyped in it as well. Recently, I was quite alarmed to discover that the students in one of my undergraduate courses, who knew next to nothing about social science, had some very clear ideas about what constituted an adequate sample survey, and indeed about what constituted an adequate social science. Clearly the source of their beliefs about social science and about sample surveys was not their previous training, but their experiences as participants in the mainstream of American culture, which apparently carries these notions and imprints them on the young. The sample survey, narrowly construed, is thought by many Americans to constitute the only adequate basis for a technology of social science. Most other techniques are considered, at best, shoddy.

The basis of the sample survey is the interviewing of a fraction of a group of individuals selected on a chance basis. Many inquiries utilize interviews of groups of individuals who are not selected on a chance basis. These may either provide for the interviewing of entire populations (for example, an entire state legislature), or for the selection of interviewees on the basis of some outstanding characteristics (for example, madmen of different kinds, to explore the extreme cases in abnormality to elucidate the normal).

All these techniques of data collection are based on the interview—that is, on asking individuals what they think and do, and how they feel.

Another set of techniques of data collection is organized around the observation of individuals—that is, watching what people do. Important works have been based on participant observation, where the reporter was a party to the scene he describes. These include works by presidential assistants about their days with their great man, and by those Presidents themselves about their days with their great assistants. There are also accounts, usually more illuminating, by participant observers who are merely visitors to the social goings-on they report. Among these are the reports of political anthropologists who study political life in societies vastly different from our own in parts of the world that have simpler technologies than our own, like African or Asian tribal or peasant societies, and those of some students of social movements, like religious revivals or revolutions, who are never quite captured by the movements they study. These reports may in part be based on informal unstructured interviews, if the workers who conduct them are given to asking questions that are relevant to the inquiry without being relevant to the social interaction in which they are involved. For example, a presidential assistant whose assignment is to keep the President informed of foreign developments may, in the course of his daily work, ask the President—and others who work in the White House—questions about how they reached certain decisions or how they view foreigners. But the extent to which one is involved in the social situation he is observing, and whether he asks questions irrelevant to the social processes being observed—these factors are not central to the basic differentiation of questioning and observation as techniques of data collection. No matter what the nature of a given observation study, it still rests on the notion that the researcher is watching what people actually do, rather than eliciting reports on what they do, as is the style of the interviewer.

But it should be clear that the distinction between these two techniques is blurred when they are not opposed as stereotypes. The stereotyped interview involves the researcher in asking highly structured questions of interviewees. But as the interview becomes longer and less highly structured, the researcher becomes substantially involved with his subjects. The stereotyped observational research strategy involves the researcher in simply watching what his subjects do. But as he watches less and engages himself more in the social situation being studied, he too may become more involved with his subjects. In this gray area between engagement and disengagement the ambiguity in the distinction between interviewing and observation asserts itself.

Other techniques of social research are variants and combinations of these two fundamental strategies, but the penchant of modern political scientists has been to dwell on techniques near the stereotypes of the two major strategies in their work. The usual sample survey interview is close to the ideal interview, while the utilization of reports of social events appearing in newspapers (and extant social science literature) is close to the ideal observation.

WHY THE INADEQUACIES?

If a political scientist undertakes to study individuals significantly different from himself in the way they look at the world, his questions and observations, if close to the stereotyped usage of these strategies, may be greatly misleading.

If there is a gap in social status between the scientist and his subjects, responses to his questions and the behavior presented to him for observation by his subjects are likely to be distorted. All but two of the individuals who are my concern in this study are of lower social status than myself. Because of this difference, if I questioned and watched them without engaging them, they would answer and act more in accordance with the way they think they should answer and act in the presence of a person of higher social status than they would in the exclusive company of their fellows. This gulf between the middle class social scientist and the poor black man makes understanding the condition of the poor (and of the poor and black) extremely difficult. An appropriate analogue to this difficult relation is the suspicion with which the natives regard the social scientist who is viewed as the emissary of the colonial authorities. The natives tell the colonists and their emissaries what both colonist and native expect in the expression of deference of the native to the higher social status of the colonist. What the native thinks of the colonist may be obscured to the colonist and even to himself because of the status differential.

Second, the native who knows his own mind may “put the colonist on.” If the native is oppressed by the colonist—that is, if the colonist steals much of the native’s material wealth and attempts to steal his pride as well—he confronts the native as a figure of vast power. If the native is unwilling to believe that he is inferior, he will not permit the colonist to divest him of his pride. And if he is unwilling to murder the colonist or drive him away by force, then to insure his mental survival, to shield his own personality from a basic threat, he must involve the colonist in a series of games. These games are designed by the native, consciously or unconsciously, to lead the colonist to believe that he is being deferred to, but in the native’s mind and those of his fellows, they render the colonist foolish and without humanity.

Such games are known in American slang as a “put-on.” Through its use the natives survive. In America many black people are crushed by the oppression to which they are subjected. Many, however, manage to survive—to maintain some self-respect, some semblance of ego strength. And like the natives who survive, they do it (in part) by putting white people on. For this reason, I believe that a lot of the empirical work by American social scientists on the attitudes and activities of black people may have been misleading. If some white social scientist, or his Negro emissary qua interviewer, asks a black person a question, however carefully designed, the response is likely to be either (optimistically) what the black person believes is appropriate to say to the white man (or his emissary) in the interview situation, or (at worst) a clear put-on.

Finally, given these two formidable barriers to understanding, as a social scientist I opt for the strategy of the involved (even partisan) observer. I am a member of the West Side Organization and have done a modest amount of work for it—not a leader, but a kind of technical adviser.

In the initial stages of my study I faced the quandary of all partisan observers—the intense conflict between my role as a partisan of WSO and my role as a social scientist. After a certain time spent in a social situation, a partisan observer becomes confused. He is uncertain of what is being revealed to him as a reporter and what is being revealed to him as a friend. He may find that one resolution of this conflict requires him to consider himself a subject of his own study, perhaps the most important subject. And in the ensuing mental contortions he may find that he is going mad.

The hesitation to become fully involved with, to become fully committed to, those who are initially thought of as subjects for study may damage both the research report and the researcher.

The usual ways of knowing applied to the social world by political scientists are inadequate in studying WSO, and even the strategy of partisanship presents problems.

My Posture toward the West Side organization

The resolution of these problems is critically important to this study. Only in their resolution was there to be found a way of knowing—a method of research—about the West Side Organization that provides adequate description and explanation.

IMMANUEL KANT AND THE PUT-ON

In his two major works Immanuel Kant laid the philosophical cornerstones of two trends in modern social science. The first of those trends, exemplified by the work of Émile Durkheim, applied Kant’s scientific outlook in the examination of man as an object. The other major trend, seen in the work of Florian Znaniecki and others, applied Kant’s moral perspective in the examination of man “as a personal being, seeking to study man’s values.”¹ As I said before, the first of these two perspectives is deeply imbedded in the substance of modern political research, directing our view to the objective realities of human existence through the use of research tools that maintain our distance from the men we study. If, however, we keep our distance from those who are significantly different from us, in no way can we come to understand them except as they allow themselves to be understood in terms of our view of them. For this reason black men in America have been regarded by social scientists as inferior white men, as men sharing all the values of the mainstream of American society, but who, because of “unequal opportunities,” are almost universally of low socioeconomic status. Baldly stated, this is the perspective of the imperialist, who in his preoccupation with himself is unable to judge others, even in his most charitable moments, except by his own standards.

In no way can modern social science come to understand the American black man (or his antagonists, for that matter) from the posture of disengagement—that is, from the posture which requires that its practitioners study and judge American black men in accordance with their own values. For these values, the value configuration of Americans, one remembers with both anguish and enlightenment, have permitted, and even sponsored, more than ten generations of the oppression of black men in this land.

All of us, black and white, are creatures of these values in that we are all socially trained to speak of freedom and equality and at the same time to explain away the ugliness of oppression. If the system is believed to be an open one, it is easy to accept the assertion that all deserve what they get. In this way, both black and white have come to believe that whites are superior—for they have earned their status in a free society, while blacks are inferior—for they too have earned their status without restraint. In American life the black man is confronted with a monstrous view of himself, and in many circumstances can respond only by the put-on or by violence if he is to have any hope of maintaining his sanity.

In trying to understand blacks in contemporary America, the scientific Kant—not the humanistic one—would be put on or slapped in the mouth or both.

SIGNIFICANCE FOR THIS WORK

This study would provide little illumination if it merely used the most popular approaches of contemporary political science. I would then simply present myself as a social scientist interested in learning about the West Side Organization. And undoubtedly I would be put on, much in the same way I would put on a social scientis...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• PROLOGUE About a Very Few Men
• PART ONE INTRODUCTION
• PART TWO THE LEADERS
• PART THREE THE WEST SIDE ORGANIZATION
• PART FOUR DEFINITION AND REDEFINITION
• EPILOGUE
• Selected Bibliography