SOURCE: "Cleaver's Vision of America and the New White Radical: A Legacy of Malcolm X," in Negro American Literature Forum, Vol. 4, No. 1, March, 1970, pp. 12-21.

[In the following essay, Nower discusses literary and historical antecedents of key themes of Soul on Ice, emphasizing the national hypocrisy of white Americans in reference to freedom, justice, and personal and political self-determination among black Americans.]

Soul on Ice, by Eldridge Cleaver, Minister of Information of the Black Panther Party, is a collection of essays that conveys a world perspective on oppression and its sources, and sets forth the major tool of liberation: self-determination. The essays, ranging from a description of the author's spiritual rebirth to the political views that are reflected in the 10 Point Platform of the Black Panther Party, to a discussion of black-white sex, are written in one of the liveliest of contemporary prose styles.

Cleaver addresses himself above all to black and white youth who, he writes, are "free in a way that Americans have never been before." He observes that the gap between the generations, which is "deeper than the struggle between the races," is becoming more and more political; that "white youth are taking the initiative, using techniques learned in the Negro struggle to attack problems in the general society." ("The White Race and Its Heroes")

But the freedom of spirit experienced by white youth today has been gained by a painful recognition of the disparity between America's professed ideals and the "bitter reality of what America practiced":

For all these years whites have been taught to believe in the myth they preached, while Negroes have had to face the bitter reality of what America practiced … The core of the Black world's vision remains intact, and in fact begins to expand and spread into the psychological territory vacated by the non-viable white lies, i.e., into the minds of young whites and this is why those whites who abandon the white image of America and adopt the black are greeted with such unmitigated hostility by their elders. ("The White Race and Its Heroes")

The black vision of American society, which will be discussed in greater detail in the next section of this paper, is that America is a static society in which only those who belong to a special group or those who manage to melt into that group—the white middle class—are able to be "socially mobile"; that, furthermore, those who cannot conform are hemmed in by a system of controls that range from an oppressive educational system to an oppressive police presence; that this oppression is not sporadic and individual, but rather is built into the system.

In our century, certain events and ideas have converged which have prepared the way for the emergence of the black vision in the minds of white youth. For example, the post World War I breakup of the Puritan-Victorian ethic, which has finally presented us with the possibility of exploring our total humanity; the Nuremberg trials after World War II, which established the primacy of the law of conscience over the law of the state; the resistance to the war in Vietnam, which illustrates the implementation of this principle; and the closeness of death, in the form of the nuclear bomb, which has sharpened the urgency for leading an examined life stripped of illusions.

On the philosophical level, existentialism, dramatized in the plays and novels of Sartre and Camus, showed up in university classrooms in the fifties. The emphasis on experiential knowledge and individual responsibility in making choices concurred with the mood of the day. This outlook was subsequently popularized in the early sixties, when existentialism went TV on such shows as "Route 66" and "Run for Your Life." But before existentialism sold products on TV, a little before it entered the universities, it was the property of a small alienated group in San Francisco called the "beat generation." Time Magazine once referred to the fifties as the "silent generation," but Time had overlooked this small but vocal and, subsequently, influential minority, with its three most outspoken members: Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Corso.

The "beat" generation of the fifties signified a rebirth of the spirit after the War, and during the cold war and especially the era of McCarthyism. It was not simply alienated from the society. It was looking for something: "'Beat' means beatitude," said Jack Kerouac. "The Beat Generation is basically a religious generation." And the new religion turned out to be experiential knowledge and values derived from that knowledge, and the desire to end, once and for all, the traditional western alienation between body and mind.

The gap between the generations, evidenced in the fifties, deepened in the middle sixties with the emergence of the hippie culture, dedicated to exploring other modes of existence. But political radicalization of white youth started at the lunch counters in the South in the early sixties when young blacks—and then whites—moved to action by conscience, sought to destroy the "bitter reality of what America practiced." The progressive radicalization of white youth, both student and non-student, is the process unfolding at the present time.

The most obvious result of this growing deviation from the middle class code is that white youth is eliciting a response from the society that heretofore had been experienced only by blacks. Continual harassment by the police, ostracism and discrimination from the rest of the Establishment, including parents and teachers, have never before been perpetrated on white youth on such a wide scale. The black vision of America is indeed becoming a white vision, too.

The black vision is not a contemporary creation, however, thought up by Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, Huey P. Newton, or Eldridge Cleaver. Black literature from its very beginnings in the eighteenth century has revealed American society as a caste society, that is, at its best, hypocritical, and, at its worst, inhumanly cruel.

The shades of the prison-house closed round about us all: walls straight and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in resignation….

writes W. E. B. DuBois in The Souls of Black Folk, 1903. It is not surprising then that the issues of national hypocrisy, justice, and the key elements that comprise personal and political self-determination—manhood, freedom, self-defense, self-knowledge, and power—to be found in Soul on Ice have a historical context. We shall look at each of these topics in this paper.

When Cleaver writes about our national hypocrisy, we are reminded of the famous Fourth of July speech by Frederick Douglass, given in 1852, in which he says:

What to the American slave is your Fourth of July? I answer, a day that reveals to him more than all other days of the year the gross injustice and cruelly to which he is constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity;… your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality hollow mockery …; There is not a nation of the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of these United States at this very hour.

But lest we dismiss this example as invalid because it comes from the period before the Civil War, we should observe that any freedom the black masses gained was so severely limited that as late as 1968, the authors of Black Rage, Doctors Cobbs and Grier, remind us:

For white America to understand the life of the black man, it must recognize that so much time has passed and so little has changed.

This vision is present in most of black literature, whether explicit, as in the example noted above, or implicit in the symbolism of fiction and drama. For example, towards the beginning of Native Son, Bigger is standing on a ghetto street corner, looking up at an airplane, a symbol of power. For him, it is unattainable. At the close of the novel, he is standing in a jail cell; however, his jail sentence had already started there on the street corner. The nature of his life is also symbolized by the white snow: there is no escape from the "natural fact" of the oppressive white society. In William Demby's Beetlecreek (1950) the leitmotiv is spiritual stagnation. The main character's movements towards freedom consists of motion away from the small town. But towards what? No alternative is offered. Freedom is small, desperate physical acts between stretches of spiritual suffocation.

Two other interesting antecedents of Soul on Ice, in this respect, are Of Love and Dust by Ernest J. Gaines (1967) and Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953). The story of Of Love and Dust takes place on a southern plantation in the nineteen sixties. The white owner bails black men out of jail in exchange for work on the land. A new kind of serfdom is created—not too far removed from the system of slavery. Go Tell It on the Mountain is centered around a storefront church in Harlem. The extent of the main character's freedom of choice lies in deciding between the streets and the church. The drama of conversion is cancelled out by the ragged emotions of the family as they walk home together. The Christian choice does nothing to extend temporal freedom.

The view of the slave under slavery, the view of the Free Negro before and after the Civil War looking out from his segregated corner of isolation, the view of the sharecropper in the Reconstruction era, the view of the modern-day prisoner who has been bailed out of jail to work a modern plantation, the view of the urban ghetto dweller, is still dramatized by the quotation from DuBois with which we began this section. The prison-house of America is "the bitter reality." The gap between ideals and practice, that gap which one, in the back of his mind, could at one time accept as "the way of the world," takes on an ugly aspect. And, consequently, Cleaver observes that for many young whites:

The foundations of authority have been blasted to bits in America because the whole society has been indicted, tried, and convicted of injustice. ("The White Race and Its Heroes")

Now, what about the mechanism of justice in such a society? In the essay "Initial Reactions on the Assassination of Malcolm X," Cleaver writes that "the prison system, which will be injected into the consciousness of our society, goes to the very heart of America's system of justice." Black prisoners see themselves as "prisoners of war, the victims of a vicious dog-eat-dog social system that is so heinous as to cancel out their own malefactions: In the jungle there is no right or wrong." Furthermore, he says that Negro prisoners feel "their imprisonment is simply another form of oppression which they have known all their lives." The system of justice then is an extension of the system of white racist oppression. But had not DuBois observed something similar in 1903:

… the police system of the South was originally designed to keep track of all Negroes, not simply of criminals; and when the Negroes were freed and the whole South was convinced of the impossibility of free Negro labor, the first and almost universal device was to use the courts as a means of re-enslaving blacks. It was not then a question of crime, but rather one of color, that settled a man's conviction on almost any charge. Thus Negroes came to look upon courts as instruments of injustice and oppression, and upon those convicted in them as martyrs and victims. (The Souls of Black Folk)

Cleaver and the Black Panther Party politicized this black vision of American justice in Point 9 of the Black Panther Party Platform:

We want all Black people when brought to trial, to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group or people from the Black communities, as defined by the Constitution of the United States.

This question of justice in relationship to blacks has thrown open the question of justice as it is administered to others as well. For example, how do we conceive of the duties of the police? Are they to be roving judges and juries? How can we be sure that the citizens—all the citizens—have control over such a potentially autonomous group? How do they treat social deviants? Do policemen come from the kinds of backgrounds which make them judge harshly those who have different sexual mores? different ways of cutting or not cutting their hair? different modes of dress and speech? How about juries? Whom do they represent? Do they condemn certain people a priori? Camus in The Stranger has suggested an answer: Meursault is not convicted for killing an Arab (a mere "native"), but for outraging the conventions of the middle class jury. What has been called into question here is that institution which is at the heart of societal life. The question of justice in general has now been pointedly raised and must be discussed.

Not only, however, is a society made up of institutions. It is also made up of the cement which holds those institutions together, and one of the ingredients in that cement is the myths that justify a culture. In order to justify slavery, and after the Civil War, serfdom, myths or stereotypes about the black man were required. These myths were constructed by Puritan divines, novelists of the Virginia school, Presidents, and others. Certain Negro types emerged: before the Civil War—the happy and dutiful servant; after the Civil War—the good Negro who returns to help his old master now in distress, and the bad Negro who doesn't; the Negro as criminal; the Negro as entertainer; and now the Negro as militant. But the stereotype which obscures all of the others and which gets at the heart of what is meant by the term dehumanization is the stereotype which presents black people as not quite human, but situated somewhere on the great chain of being between man and the lower animals.

This stereotype has many uses. It justifies the attitude that the black man has no right to the usual prerogatives of manhood: freedom of choice and action; the right to self-defense; self-knowledge which includes a positive historical image grounded in past heroisms, an image which will ensure a sense of cultural continuity; and, of course, access to the sources of power. It is this stereotype which denies people of color their humanity and which also denies them the very core of the democratic process—self-determination.

A pre-Civil War example of this stereotype can be found in a medical book published in 1863 in New York by Dr. J. H. Van Evrie, entitled: Negroes and Negro Slavery: The First and Inferior Race; The Latter Its Normal Condition. In pseudo-scientific jargon and a detached "scientific" tone of voice, the author makes such observations as "the obtuse sensibility of the brain and the nervous system generally would enable him [the Negro] … to bear hanging well." But we need not refer to a stereotype, which, although not so blatantly expressed nowadays, is still felt in its effects in almost every phase of American life; for example in our school systems whose destruction of the minds of children is magnified a millionfold in the case of black children. Certainly the marks of this abuse carry over into adult life.

It is not surprising then that Cleaver speaks unequivocally about the humanity of black people:

We shall have our manhood. We shall have it or the earth will be leveled by our attempts to gain it. ("Initial Reactions on the Assassination of Malcolm X")

Nor is it surprising that the leader of the insurrection in William Wells Brown's novel Clotel (1854) talks about his freedom and his rebellion in terms of his manhood:

My liberty is of as much consequence to me as Mr. Wilson's is to him. I am as sensitive to feeling as he…. I am free to say that, could I live my life over again, I would use all the energies which God has given me to get up an insurrection.

Just as the concepts of manhood and freedom are intertwined, so are they both bound up with the idea of self-defense. The right of self-defense is the antithesis of submission to slavery, because it keeps alive the sense of self. In his Autobiography, Frederick Douglass makes explicit reference to his sharpened sense of manhood after he has thoroughly beaten up his white owner, Mr. Covey, who has used him unmercifully. Manhood, self-defense, and freedom: we see this trinity expressed throughout Cleaver's essays, and set forth in the stance of the Black Panther Party, which, at its inception, was called the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense.

It becomes clear then that what is at issue here beyond housing, fair employment, education, etc., but intertwined throughout all of the practical matters of daily life is the issue of manhood and womanhood—the full humanity of the people of color. To exercise one's full humanity is to assert oneself on both the political and personal levels. This, in fact, is the content of the principle of self-determination which simply means that people have a right to control their environment: that is, their communities and the institutions that serve them. As applied to black people, in particular, the principle is critical because, as Malcolm X observed, black people have been separated out of America, while hostile control has been maintained over them. Consequently, as a caste they have been powerless and alienated. Within a self-determined community, personal self-determination can flourish. The movement towards political self-determination alone creates self-determined people. The political and the personal intertwine. It is, therefore, on accident that self-determination or Black Power or community control has been accepted by blacks as their main tool of liberation.

The issue of the humanity of blacks has thrown open the question of the humanity of the rest of us. Young whites know that they cannot become full-sized human beings when there are crippling restrictions imposed on their moral and emotional development. Frederick Douglass, in his Autobiography, provides a vivid moral lesson when he illustrates how Sophia Auld, who had never owned a slave, changed from a person who treated Douglass "as she supposed one human being ought to treat another," into one who was mean and suspicious, who treated Douglass as one was supposed to treat a slave—as a commodity. Although the specific conditions may have changed, young whites and blacks know that the master and slave mentalities persist in our society, and it is those dehumanizing attitudes that are now being thrown off:

… the initiative, and the future, rest with those whites and blacks who have liberated themselves from the master/slave syndrome. And these are to he found mainly among the youth. ("The White Race and Its Heroes")

Furthermore, a society which dehumanizes in one way will do so in other ways. It is here that the struggle for black self-determination converges with the movement for campus autonomy and the anti-war movement, and the point of convergence is centered on the principle of self-determination. This principle simply states that human beings have the right to create their own environments, thus restoring power to those who had previously been managed by others. Black self-determination or black power has given birth to a desire for white power or student power on predominantly white campuses and this power is defined in terms of campus autonomy and student-faculty coalitions. Both domestic movements reflect and support the worldwide movements for national self-determination. There is also a keen awareness that at its heart, this struggle is the struggle for a redistribution of power. Therefore, many of the initial steps will be actively thwarted by an official attitude which has made people into interchangeable items to be manipulated according to the interests of the managers and owners of the System.

A dramatic example of such manipulation can be found in a quotation from a Selective Service document issued in July of 1965—and speedily withdrawn—entitled "Channeling":

Throughout his career as a student, the pressure—the threat of loss of deferment—continues. It continues with equal intensity after graduation. His local board requires periodic reports to find out what he is up to. He is impelled to pursue his skill rather than embark upon some less important enterprise and is encouraged to apply his skill in an essential activity in the national interest.

Dehumanization always begins with an attitude towards human beings as objects or commodities.

But self-determination which involves the concepts of manhood, freedom, and self-defense, also involves the idea of self-knowledge. In The Souls of Black Folk, DuBois notes that America yields to the black man no knowledge of the self; that is, no true understanding of his own relationship to the world at large. The black man's consciousness is split in two, says DuBois: he sees himself as a Negro, and since white mind dominates the society, he sees the "Negro" part of himself through white eyes, and the image is a negative one; and he sees himself as an American, but in an ambiguous relationship with that nation, since as a "Negro" he has been separated out of its life:

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self.

This "better and truer self," it seems to me, is emerging today in what is called "black consciousness," and it is the result of a political and social analysis of the black man's position in American society and the world. This analysis, made by Malcolm X, with its antecedents in Garvey and others, and its successors in Carmichael, Cleaver, and others, will be discussed later on in this [essay.]

In view of the above, it is fitting that Eldridge Cleaver opens his book with a chapter entitled "On Becoming." In this chapter, Cleaver traces his own struggle towards "self-conscious manhood." His path of self-knowledge contains the stations of alienation; rebellion in "insurrectionary acts of rape," which proclaimed an impossible absolute freedom; and then an understanding that at the source of these insurrectionary acts was self-hate; and finally a re-birth, aided by the ordering of thoughts on paper, based on an understanding that at the seat of human wisdom and compassion is love of the self. This chapter is a parable for our times because it is a parable of re-birth from the dehumanizing effects of a racist society.

For young whites it has pertinence because they too are experiencing the pain of re-birth and a sudden deepening of self-knowledge:

It is among the white youth of the world that the greatest change is taking place. It is they who are experiencing the great psychic pain of waking into consciousness to find their inherited heroes turned by events into villains. ("The White Race and Its Heroes")

Young whites feel an alienation based upon a split between the moral imagination and the social reality. This split, common in the process of growth, is usually modified by some kind of compromise with the prevailing reality. But the times are such and consciousness is such that the split can no longer be accommodated. Young whites are pressing for Third World courses; these courses are vehicles for their self-knowledge, too. They are pressing hard against the university system because trustees are often business men who have actively perpetuated economic and social oppression on minority groups. They are pressing hard on college administrators because these same administrators are slow to wake up to the fact of institutional racism, and often provide obstacles to the establishment of ethnic studies, a step which many feel is a minimal move to right centuries of injustices. And they are pressing hard on professors and teachers in general because these are the people who have, in the past, controlled the textbook writing and the classroom discussion. Malcolm X was describing these young people when he observed that to effect any changes, whites must be willing to break with the status quo, to engage in a struggle which will not be endorsed by the power structure; furthermore, that they must start to work "right where they are," that is, within their own white communities. In a comment directed at white students (January 18, 1965), Malcolm X notes that if students could research the problem of racism for themselves, independent of what they have been told by those in power, "then some of their findings would be shocking." Young whites have done the research, have made the connections, and they are shocked.

Malcolm X saw the potential for change in white youth. It was he, who, in our times, was in large measure responsible for the awakening of both the black man and the young white man. He set forth the basic political analysis of the colony-mother country relationship between blacks and whites. He made the connection between the black vision of America and its international implications. (Others such as W. E. B. DuBois had explored this territory before him.) He reiterated the basic principle of political democracy, this time as it applied to black people—self-determination. And he noted the role which white youth could play in social change.

Malcolm X started out in prison as a Black Muslim and an advocate of a separate black nation. In the months before his assassination, he denounced all forms of racism and advocated black self-determination in black communities. While he was a Black Muslim, he referred to himself as a black nationalist; by the end of May of 1964, he had stopped referring to himself as a black nationalist although he did not know what term would best describe his position. On January 18, 1965, when asked if he still believed in a separate black state, he replied no, that he believed "in a society in which people can live like human beings" on the basis of equality (Interview, Young Socialist, March-April, 1965). The basis of equality as stated in the OAAU Basic Unity Program is self-determination.

In the speech "The Ballot or the Bullet" (April 3, 1964), Malcolm X develops the idea behind DuBois' image of America as a prison-house. He observes that racism, is not a segregationist conspiracy, but rather a governmental conspiracy. The distinction is important. A segregationist conspiracy connotes either an individual action or the action of a section of the country. A governmental conspiracy, on the other hand, refers to the entire structure of the country. It says that this structure perpetuates the caste system. He supports this observation by noting that northern Democrats are white liberals who are in the same party with Dixiecrats, those same men who perpetuate black disenfranchisement in their home states and who also control key Congressional committees. In the North, blacks are disenfranchised through gerrymandering. Thus the government itself is criminal and violates its own laws and pretended principles.

By November of 1964, after his first trip to Africa (April 13-May 21, 1964), Malcolm X extends the black vision of American to the world. He talks about American imperialism—the extension of U.S. domestic oppression to people of color around the world.

Furthermore, his perusal of the varying systems of socialism in Africa, as well as his observation that capitalism and imperialism and racism were thoroughly intertwined led him to the conclusion that only indigenous non-capitalistic solutions could deal with Afro-American problems here at home. During his second trip to Africa (July 9-November 24), he notes in a Cairo interview, that the American black man has only made advances in America as the result of international pressures such as World War II and the Cold War. It is not surprising then to find him speculating about the fact that capitalism, which has so hurt Afro-America, will not survive the international movements towards self-determination of colonial nations. The black struggle in America then, Malcolm X shows, is very intimately bound up with the worldwide struggle for self-determination, for these movements will end imperialism and thus capitalism as we know it today (Young Socialist, January 18, 1965).

But even earlier, in his speech "The Ballot or the Bullet," he is talking about internationalizing the struggle, seeing the domestic issue within a world framework. In that speech, he talks, for the first time, of the need to replace the civil rights orientation with the struggle for human rights. The source of strength of this new approach is twofold: first, black people see themselves as a minority only when they accept the white man's definition of the problem as limited to the confines of the United States. When they free themselves from this psychological shackle, they are able to view their struggle as part of the worldwide movement of the oppressed for self-determination. Secondly, this approach makes the United Nations the natural legal vehicle for the resolution of grievances and points up the absurdity of the century-old attempts of taking one's grievances to one's oppressor. Malcolm X did indeed bring the problem before the United Nations, but his proposal was not acted upon because of an interminable discussion of dues. Various African states did see fit, however, to attack the U.S. racist policies at home and abroad.

(It is interesting to see that, following this new orientation, the Black Panther Party in the summer of 1968 sent a delegation, headed by Bobby Seale and Eldridge Cleaver, to the United Nations to voice a demand for a black community plebiscite in the United States, and asking for UN observer teams. This proposal found support from sixteen nations of the Third World but has not yet been acted upon.)

Once the connection between the Black Revolution in America and the Third World Revolution had been made, the colonial condition of black people in America became self-evident. Malcolm, in his speech "The Harlem Hate-Gang Scare" (May 29, 1964), refers to the police as an occupying army in Harlem, there to protect white non-resident business interests. It is not surprising then that self-determination becomes the first basic aim of the newly formed Organization of Afro-American Unity (June 28, 1964). For Malcolm had observed in Africa that self-determination did in fact restore power to colonized people, and gave them control over their own destinies.

He understood, furthermore, that political moves are paralleled by psychological changes in individuals; that the key elements discussed earlier emerge on the personal level: a sharpened sense of manhood, the taking of freedom, self-defense, self-knowledge, and, of course, power. And so his concern reached out to human beings and, in particular, to the "brother on the street." He notes in an interview with the Village Voice (February 1965) that the black man must be awakened to his own humanity, and, furthermore, that once the brother on the street is awakened, both positive and negative energies will be released, and that these energies must be "channeled constructively." Furthermore, that the brother can only be organized by those totally unacceptable to the white Establishment. The relationship between manhood and freedom follows: "Nobody can give you freedom. If you're a man, you take it" (December 20, 1964). And you also defend yourself.

Malcolm said once that to remain non-violent in a violent situation was masochistic. As is noted in the statement of objectives of the OAAU: tactics based on moral suasion can only work within a moral system.

As for self-knowledge, Malcolm observed that once the street brother was awakened, he would be filled with rage, and that release of rage would ultimately be constructive for it will be a main technique for releasing oneself from self-hate, and gaining a sense of personal power.

It was the hope of Malcolm X to channel black energies into the OAAU. He did not live long enough to carry out this plan.

The OAAU, created by Malcolm X in June of 1964, never got off the ground after his death. Eldridge Cleaver, who describes in Soul on Ice, the importance of Malcolm X to his own life, came out of prison in 1966 with plans to revive that organization. The plans were never put into effect. But it was at that time, however, that Cleaver was introduced to the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, now called simply, the Black Panther Party. He subsequently became its Minister of Information, effected a coalition with the Peace and Freedom Party, spoke all over the country, was almost railroaded back into prison, and is now, as every one knows, in political exile in the black underground.

In Soul on Ice, we sec the logical extension and consolidation of the ideas of Malcolm X. Cleaver, however, has a somewhat different focus: he sees the impulse towards unity between human beings, in particular male and female, thwarted by the American social structure. The thwarting of the impulse towards unity is one of the prime foci of Cleaver's vision, and is at the heart of the denial of the black man's humanity. (The lynching of a black man was usually accompanied by his castration. See Calvin Hernton's Sex and Racism in America.) To deal with this problem, which is inter-connected with all of the others, Cleaver proposes that self-determination must be gained, not only on the social and political levels, but on the personal level as well.

And he speaks to all people. Whereas Malcolm X had hesitatingly suggested that perhaps white radicals could help black liberation, if they severed their connection with the System, Cleaver addresses himself to the fact that many whites, especially the young, are oppressed by that same System. As Jerry Rubin, head of the Youth International Party and Cleaver's choice for a running mate on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket, observed in a recent article in the New York Review of Books (February 13, 1969):

The police, district attorney, and judges use arrests freely: to get activists off the street, to tie us up in endless judicial and legal procedures, and to serve as a warning to others. Arrests become a form of punishment and detention.

Cleaver observes that domestic oppression has its international counterpart, when he relates the struggle of young white Americans for self-determination to the worldwide struggle of mother country radicals for self-determination. He speaks then in the terms of the oppressor versus the oppressed, rather than white against black. Why? Because the system of oppression is a world system, affecting all people.

Elaborating this argument, he sees armed might abroad as an extension of police power at home. And both the domestic and the foreign arms of Law and Order have as their purpose the control of the people in behalf of the few, and, consequently, "Nowhere are the people consulted; their daily problems are never solved" ("Domestic Law and International Order").

Society is controlled by a jungle ethic where the weak are the natural prey of the strong and the ethic is "every man for himself." But, says Cleaver in "The Blood Lust," we do not admit to this as the ethic which governs our society. When we are confronted with it and its corollary that cooperation, the law of civilization, rather than competition, the law of the judge, should govern our actions, we react with anger. We will not admit that behind the brutality of the police lies the brutality of a social and political system which sets up stop-gap poverty programs which only "hide bread from the hungry" ("Domestic Law and International Order"). We do not want to face the fact that fundamental changes in our social order may be necessary in order to reconstruct society.

But it is possible that the beginnings of this reconstruction are here now, spreading across the country, in preparation for the taking of power by those who are currently powerless. As Cleaver observes, on both the national and international levels:

What is involved here, what is being decided right now, is the shape of power in the world tomorrow. ("The Black Man's Stake in Vietnam")

The new radical knows this. He knows that self-determination is the principle, therefore, on which he must focus. For from this principle flow diversity, autonomy, personal creativity, a sharpened feeling of brotherhood, and, therefore, a lessening of destructive competitiveness, and a possible end to the exploitation of one group by another. At the heart of the principle of self-determination then lie fundamental structural changes which must take place in our society if there is to be a re-birth of freedom. All of this the new white radical has learned from the black liberation struggle and from at least two of its most eloquent spokesmen—Malcolm X and, more recently, Eldridge Cleaver.