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READERS' FORUM                                    SINNETTE

American society. This kind of thinking is fraught with dangerous implications for the Afro-American. It is he who is the most visible and the most vulnerable. If the nation is persuaded that it is his black presence that menaces the society's stability, then there is every reason to expect that he will be exposed to the unbridled fury of repression. Those who still refuse to believe that white America would resort to such action are either childishly naive or are totally ignorant of the history of man. On this matter Afro-America must make it crystal clear that it will not assume this additional and perilous task of either volunteering for or being maneuvered into the front ranks of the forces that wish to transform the society. This always was, and must remain the responsibility of the nation's majority - white America.
  
This is however only a peripheral issue. The cardinal problem, the terrible dilemma, revolves on the question of black liberation and black survival. The mere expenditure of large sums of money on the various ill-conceived, and usually ill-managed "anti-poverty programs" will not contain the freedom movement. From all indications, the prospects are that these programs, with all their limitations, will be curtailed because of increasing hostility by the legislatures and because of the mounting costs of the barbaric Vietnam conflict. It is very debatable whether these programs have achieved any significant measure of success in what should be their real function - to salvage the individual who has despaired of faith in himself or the future. Even if it were possible to create the incentive for training and educating this large group of black citizens, it is seriously questioned whether they could be absorbed into an increasingly automated and computerized industrial society. In a recent statement, James Baldwin aptly described the situation when he said, "The fact is that the black man is surplus population and nobody knows what to do with him . . . the Great Society has no room for him."
  
Faced with this intolerable predicament, we are compelled to examine alternative approaches to the present racial impasse. The moralist, even at this late hour, might still be constrained to try moral persuasion in the hope of arousing the nation's conscience. To cling to this belief is to indulge in the fantasy of relying on the powerful to surrender to the powerless. It is equally unthinkable to expect the black militant forces to surrender until or unless they are decisively defeated. Separatism within the geographical
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