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FREEDOMWAYS    THIRD QUARTER 1969

conscripted into the Armyn and ordered to kill people who it would seem, far less harmful to him than those in his own country. Black men are expected to do violence to other men...in the service and promotion of a system whose very purpose and function are to do violence to black men....

The alienation of a man in this manner succeeds not only in alienating him from the culture in which he has his birthright, but expels him from the integrity of his death.23

Continuing his examination of the existential Black man, Hernton clearly elucidates on his (LeRoi Jones') grasp on the horrendous reality of America's violence:

Unlike most Americans, the existential Negroes are not blind to, or blinded by, reality; they have been grappling with the most horrible realities all of their lives. They now America from both inside and out, they are Americans and they are not Americans, they are possessors of double visions, double lies, double truths; they are not alienated from America, they are alienated within America, they are aware, more aware, of the presence of the Bomb than most white people are, and sense that annihilation haunts the entire human race; they discern the presence of violence in a society which has lost its community, its humanity-as when they see thirty humans beings stand by as a woman is repeatedly attacked, and finally murdered, or the assassination of the President, the murder of Medgar Evers, the murder of those three young civil rights workers, and the killing of people in foreign lands....The existential Negroes know the meaning of these things; their violence alone, their violence will be America's violence.24

LeRoi Jones and the younger poets and prose writers of the sixties know too well the violence and the madness of a de-humanized America. And with their knowledge, they can only see the eventual burning down to the ground of the entire white social and political structure, which they see exclusively as the doings of all white men, and the creating of a new, more human Black society. But I believe that the one most striking fallacy in the writing of many of the new writers is in their belief that it is the white man and not the structure of the American system which must be condemned and destroyed. In 20th Century America, as a prototype of western

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