White liberals must help blacks fight racism - Harvard activist

White liberals must help blacks fight racism — Harvard activist

By Owen Eshenroder

STAFF REPORTER

YPSILANTI - Blacks in America are being threatened by a renewed tide of racism, according to noted psychiatrist and social activist Alvin Poussaint.

He told an audience at Eastern Michigan University Tuesday night that a return to black militancy may be necessary to counter that tide.

“Nothing can come from apathy,” he said. “We sit back now and we wallow...and we feel impotent, and we do nothing...As long as good white people, liberal white people, are silent, they are giving reassurance to the new racist activists.”

As evidence of a rise in racism, Poussaint pointed to an increase in Ku Klux Klan activities, the recent murders of a dozen black children in Atlanta and a number of court verdicts in which whites have been acquitted of killing blacks.

HE SAID THE BELIEF that demonstrations and protests have become passe and will not change America’s social order is false.

“The only thing that seems to make a difference in this country is the exercise of power,” either political, economic or through mass demonstrations, he said.

The 46-year-old, Harlem-born Poussaint lives in Boston and is an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard University. In the 1960s, he provided medical care to civil rights workers and aided in the desegregation of health facilities throughout the South. He has become a popular lecturer and author on racism and race relations.

He spoke here as part of EMU’s week-long observation of “Humanitarian Days.” a series of events revolving around the birthday Thursday of slain civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Poussaint’s topic was “Turmoil in America: A Humanitarian Response,” but his remarks focused more on the turmoil than the response.

He said, for instance, that Americans turned inward after King’s death, away from the “we-ism” of the 60s to the “me-ism” of the 70s. That reaction continues today, he said, and has produced a nationwide condition of what he termed “malignant individualism.”

POUSSAINT SAID HARD economic times ahead will force Americans to share more with each other, perhaps even sharing households, but claimed most people are psychologically ill-equipped for that kind of “reaching out.”

A basic problem in American society, he said, is that “We don’t care enough for each other.”

Poussaint made several provocative points during his speech. Among them was the contention that the federal government, beginning with Richard Nixon’s election in 1968, partially “programmed” the loss of spirit in the civil-rights movement. He also claimed that the FBI may have been aware of plans to kill King before his assassination, but did nothing.

He praised King for having “united this nation like no other man in our history, except those who occupy the office of the President of the United States,” and said the things he stood for - love, non-violence and brotherhood - are what America is most lacking today.

“We were all there when they crucified the Lord,” he said at one point, referring to King’s murder.

NEWS PHOTO BY JANE HALE

Alvin Poussaint: Silent white liberals reassure racists