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FREEDOMWAYS     FOURTH QUARTER 1968

all of the white values of success without question and hardly a revision. Since the private Negro colleges have been, during the last thirty or forty years, so closely aligned with the black middle class, it is not surprising that the colleges began to imitate and aspire to white values. What also appears is an acceptance of a mainstream theory of American history which was popular in the thirties. This is, America is a great melting pot of races and cultures and languages; somehow, someday in the beautiful millennium ahead all these ingredients will melt into one. And we blacks will melt too-provided we are permitted to reach the mainstream (always white) of American life. With one catch: always we will melt by sacrificing our identity as a people. America is a nation of many races and cultures. But a truer theory of the state of things should emphasize its cultural diversity. After all, we should remember that the authors of the mainstream theory are usually WASPs, (white Anglo Saxon Protestants) and the mainstream as far as they have states it allows no place for black reality. When whites think they are "integrating" they do things like implore the black football players on the University of Washington team to exemplify "the Husky way." The whole thing is sort of absurd, blind arrogance.

The failure to reevaluate historical missionary-oriented values and the growing acceptance of white mainstream values by a new group of black college administrators during the thirties and forties made possible an unquestioning acceptance of white America's view of black culture and experience. To white America, our culture and experience were worthless. It was something to lift ourselves out of. It is not so much that we must escape the white oppressor, but black life itself. If a black man was successful in white eyes, he came from "nothing." Hell, no one comes from nothing! That very culture and experience, no matter how economically deprived, which the person comes from surely provide the very quality which gives him sustenance to carry on But our middle-class heroes in America have too often been tied to what whites think. In the thirties and forties each success who became a Negro first-a Joe Louis, a Roland Hayes, a Marion Anderson, a Ralph Bunche-became precious because they were acclaimed by whites (who called them credits to your race). And it was whites who decided how long they would remain in the limelight. The acclaimed ones were pressed into service as racial spokesmen, even Lena Horne, and became exemplars for all of us to aspire to. But one false step, one something or other white America was no ready to accept, and that was it. Another Negro first was quickly brought

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